The legendary romance of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald is a cautionary tale of Jazz Age indulgence, literary celebrity and New York glamour.
And its horrifying end is perfectly captured in the opening scene of Amazon’s new series, “Z: The Beginning of Everything,” when a fireman pulls one of Zelda’s pastel-colored shoes from the embers of the Asheville, NC sanitorium where she died in a fire in 1948 at the age of 47.
The series, based on the novel “Z: A Life of Zelda Fitzgerald,” makes it plain how easy it was for Fitzgerald to sweep Zelda Sayre (Christina Ricci), a vivacious party girl born into a staid, prominent family in Montgomery, Ala., off her tiny feet. She has no shortage of well-mannered gentlemen callers, but they fail to capture her attention; she’s anxious to escape the stifling South with its “old buildings” for something “shiny and new.”
Enter Fitzgerald (David Hoflin), a dashing redhead with his literary pretentions. Stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan during the first World War, he considers the service his day job. “I’m going to be a famous writer some day,” he declares to his superiors. “You should know that.” When the future icons meet at a country club dance in 1918, the attraction is immediate and intense — and the Sayres are properly scandalized. Zelda’s father, Judge Sayre (David Strathairn), dismisses Fitzgerald as “an Irish Yankee hellraiser” and “a Catholic, no doubt.”
As Zelda, Christina Ricci, 36, has her best role in years.
But Zelda doesn’t run off and join Fitzgerald in New York after the war. She drives a hard bargain, telling him she won’t marry him until he revises his novel, which has the uninspired title “The Romantic Egotist.” Zelda is such an evocative correspondent that Fitzgerald “lifts” phrases from her letters, including the one that becomes the title of his first novel “This Side of Paradise.” When Zelda finally reads the book, after a quickie wedding at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and a bacchanal wedding reception at the Biltmore hotel — and finds her own words popping off the page — she’s not even angry, thinking that F. Scott’s copying somehow strengthens their love. You think: Girl, you’ve been in love too long. In reality, Fitzgerald often dipped into his wife’s diaries, stealing some stellar phrases, including a soliloquy included in his first novel.
As Zelda, Ricci, 36, has her best role in years. She may be a tad too old for the character’s cotillion years, but she fully conveys Zelda’s wanton side as well as her romantic yearning. When she appears, fully naked, at the Fitzgerald reception to drive her husband’s frat-boy cronies out of their honeymoon suite, you appreciate that Zelda understands the term “shock value.”
Swedish-born Hoflin, who had a small role in the first season of ABC’s award winner “American Crime,” cuts a fine supporting figure as the striving Fitzgerald. The production design by Henry Dunn and costumes by Tom Broecker outfit the period beautifully.
Even though we know this is one love story that doesn’t end well, “The Beginning of Everything” delivers an entertaining seduction into a fabulous, bygone world.