The Nicolsons are the kind of TV couple who could make Dan Quayle drop to his knees and pray for more Murphy Browns. When Harold (David Haig) confesses to Vita that he may have contracted a venereal disease during a homosexual encounter, she says, “It doesn’t matter.” Since this is 1918, and open-mindedness hasn’t been invented yet, he is left wondering why. The answer is quick in coming: the wife he professes to love deeply despite his “diversions” (and who continues to express love for him) is on the verge of a wild, obsessive affair-with another woman. Violet Keppel (Catherine Harrison), the object of Vita’s desire, was the daughter of Edward VII’s mistress, a girlhood friend who blossomed into a brazen, needy and exceedingly sexual being. Once she awakens Vita’s lesbian longings, both women, as well as their husbands and the Nicolsons’ two children, find themselves caught up in the exciting, destructive cyclone that often accompanies addictive behavior. By the end, Sackville-West, who has taken to wearing mannish clothes, is so haggard with lust she looks like Rolling Stone Keith Richards before he swore off heroin.
If “Portrait of a Marriage” were a movie, it would be rated R. There are glimpses of bare breasts and buttocks, and shots of Vita and Violet caught up in quivering foreplay. Some local PBS stations, already angry about too much nudity on the network, will be editing out such scenes. Still, a sexual tension permeates the enterprise–and that may be its main problem. Screenwriter Penelope Mortimer and director Stephen Whittaker work so hard at re-creating Vita and Violet’s passion that they don’t have time for anything else-not Vita’s subsequent affairs with writers Geoffrey Scott and Virginia Woolf, and not, most important, the human beings Harold and Vita were when not in some state of arousal or abandonment. Alistair Cooke, ever the amiable, erudite host, feels compelled to say that viewers could get the impression that “all the Nicolson’s did was make love, and not make love.” What makes their story important, after all, is that the marriage endured and may have been, as Nigel Nicolson wrote, “the strangest and most successful union that two gifted people have ever enjoyed.” Why that was so is still a mystery after three and a half hours. This isn’t a " Portrait of a Marriage"-Only the garish frame that goes around it.
