Zelda doesn’t know quite what she wants yet but she knows she wants more than what sleepy time in the old South can offer.
All the local boys go all Andy Hardy when she and her girlfriends are sashaying around the promenade, but they’re such provincial bores, these country-club swells, barely a thought in their brilliantined heads. A rebellious of Flaming Youth, a fast girl in a slow town, Zelda, when not subjecting herself to the rigors of ballet, drinks, smokes, kisses boys, skinny dips, and probably dances the hoochie-koo. As Zelda, Christina Ricci is nearly twice as old as the debutante who shocks the locals of Montgomery, Alabama and perturbs her strait-laced, pillar-of-the-community father ( David Strathairn, who reads the newspaper as if it were a civic duty, holding it flat and folding it just so) with her reveling ways, but Ricci’s oval opalescence effaces any age difference. I didn’t fear anything as gauchely hambone as that Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn debacle better left forgotten, but it seemed unlikely that any fresh fragrances would arise from cracking open this old hope chest again.īut I was wrong, oh me of little faith, and Z: The Beginning of Everything (its title taken from Fitzgerald's ardent declaration “I love her and it is the beginning of everything”) is an origin story with an emerald glow. So when I saw that Amazon Prime was unveiling its original pilot for Z, a biographical series based on Therese Anne Fowler’s novel about Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, I raised a wary eyebrow, something I’ve been practicing for awhile just in case that look ever comes back into style.
Scott, Zelda, Hem-I loved them all once, and still do, but enough already. This enshrined cautionary tale of the Golden Boy and the Southern Belle whose fateful, doomed romance was drenched in fame, glamour, diamonds, Mediterranean spray, alcohol, and reckless extravagance is as overfamiliar in its incidents and trajectory as Hemingway’s great hulking fall from grace from Paris apprenticeship to bearded-papa pontification. Like many a literary itinerant whose early enthusiasms have staled and browned over the years, I reached my sizable fill long ago with the whole sorry Scott-and-Zelda saga, which had worn threadbare after so many retellings, taking much of the Jazz Age mythos with it.
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