Based on a long-forgotten Tennessee Williams screenplay, “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond,” is the directorial feature-length debut by actress Jodie Markell (“Big Love”) and the picture stars Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Evans, Will Patton, Ann-Margret and Ellen Burstyn.
‘Teardrop’ tells he story of Fisher Willow (Howard), the disliked 1920s Memphis debutante daughter of a plantation owner with a distaste for narrow-minded people and a penchant for shocking and insulting those around her. After returning from studies overseas, Fisher falls in love with Jimmy (Evans), the down-and-out son of an alcoholic father (Patton) and an insane mother who works at a store on her family’s plantation. She tries to pass him off as an upper-class suitor to appease the spinster aunt (Ann-Margret) who controls her family’s fortune, but when she loses a diamond it places their tenuous relationship in further jeopardy.
Lindsay Lohan was actually supposed to play the lead, but that was at the height of her alcohol and media trouble and Howard stepped in around March 2007 to save the project and we can assume she’s about 10,000 times better than Lohan could have ever been. We missed this at the Toronto Int Film Festival in September, but honestly we never heard a word – g00d or bad about it. It seemed to go under everyone’s radar. There’s no release date for this one yet, other than the vague notion of a 2008 release (the trailer ends with “coming soon”).
To be honest this thing look pretty terrible and we’re not sure who the hell the audience for this thing will be. Howard’s Southern twang seems so 101 and obvious.
