21 January 2009
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994)
I can’t get over the praise for Jennifer Jason Leigh in this movie. She is AWFUL. Just because she drawls on in an unintelligible speakeasy drag doesn’t make a performance compelling. It distracts, in fact, until Dot is so drunk that its irrelevant.
I love the Dorothy Parker quote printed on one of the flaps of the Penguin portable library — something to the line of, “I’ll tell you what, the earth’s housed millions of lives and not a single one has had a happy ending.” She is exuberantly unhappy because she sees discontentedness as a necessary pathway toward real creativity. She was renown for dismissing her contemporaries (the women in particular) as laughable because they were not unhappy and wrote happy things.
And as Parker becomes increasingly isolated, even from Robert Benchley and the rest of the Algonquin Circle, she finds her success. The story focuses mostly on the Algonquin period, with an epilogue where there are touchstones of her communism, pregnancy and fellowship amongst many dogs. But it puts a little too much stock in the circle and her magazine writing (the circle was vicious in the sense of being among catty friends).
It is a shame the film takes such a visceral stab at Dot Parker, because she is a fascinating conundrum (who, it must be said, probably sounded a lot like Jennifer Jason Leigh in this, but it’s such a put-on performance that it’s completely distracting on a scene-to-scene basis. Dorothy Parker might’ve been so outrageous, but here you have a performance of Dorothy Parker, rather than an honest rendition of her, in a way that reminds me of Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman).
Alexander Woollcott said of Dorothy that she only sings when she’s profoundly unhappy, but the singing she did – while as bleak as one can imagine, is remarkably witty and as such, Dorothy Parker is really the only Algonquin rounder still read.
The ending of the film, where Dorothy sits in a bar among admirers, drinking herself into her grave is pretty fantastic (along with the congratulatory speech upon receiving further recognition). These are all pretty stagnant writer-cliches, in terms of how writer-characters are perceived as larger-than-life figures towering among their neighbors, but with this film there is a profound disconnect between the plot and Parker’s muse. Where a film about Bukowski uses his alienation and depression brought on by alcoholism as a lynchpin in the plot, here you have Dorothy Parker plummeting into despair almost parallel to any happenings that drive the narrative. I suppose that firmly entrenches this as a “character study” more than anything else (there’s a lot of witty dialogue that paints the Algonquin scenes that further distance Dorothy – who is also quite the wit – from the rest of them), and in that regard it’s worth watching.
It is unfortunate that the film is another in the long line of artistic films that glorifies alcoholism as (a/the) path toward success (and/or recognition). It tries to address the inherent distance between the inchoate drunk and success as a (perceived) intellectual, but it loses sight of Parker as she plummets deeper into depression (and attains more and more success, which the film elides by showing her in her Faulknerized Hollywood mode). But it also glorifies her alcoholism as an alternate state in which her work and ambition reside. It makes me almost think you have to practically turn to the sorrow and mayhem of the Coen Bros.’ W.P. Mayhew to find any pathos.