Old Movie Review: "Postcards From The Edge"

The deaths last week of Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds (see http://grandstander.blogspot.com/2016/12/two-absent-friends-carrie-fisher-and.html ), prompted us to seek out and watch the 1990 movie, "Postcards From the Edge", screenplay by Carrie Fisher, based on her novel of the same name.

Directed by the great Mike Nichols, the movie stars Meryl Streep as  young actress Suzanne Vale and Shirley MacLaine as her mother, Doris Mann, a one time star of movies and cabarets.  Suzanne has never quite been able to escape the shadow of her famous mother and this has led to a life filled with "mother issues", and, oh, yeah, drug addiction.  The movie opens with Suzanne screwing up on a movie set because of her drug issues and ending up on a rehab center.  In order to get work in a shlocky movie, the producers insist that she live at home with her mother for the duration of the filming.  This opens the entire can of worms that Suzanne has struggled with her entire life.

It was no secret at the time that Fisher's novel was published that this story was autobiographical in nature.  I didn't read the book, but the movie pulls no punches in describing the rocky nature of the Mann-Vale/Reynolds-Fisher relationship.  It is biting and at times quite uncomfortable to watch the two fight and struggle to come to terms with each other, even when the daughter is now a middle-aged adult.  (Funny bit of dialog:  When Streep tells MacLaine that she, Streep, is now middle-aged, Shirley responds by saying that "you are young; I'M middle-aged", to which Streep replies "How many 120 year olds do you know?")  Turns out that Mann/MacLaine, now a past her prime star, has some mother issues of her own, and a fairly serious drinking problem, which, of course, she denies while castigating her daughter for her drug issues.

Smaller parts in the movie are played by Annette Bening, Richard Dreyfuss, and Gene Hackman.  Hackman's part is pretty key, actually.  He plays a movie director who threatens  to see that Suzanne never works again because of her drug issues, but who turns out to play a key role in helping her out, not only in her career, but in her relationship with her mother with this particular exchange of dialog:

Lowell: You know, you're not going to get a lot of sympathy. Do you know how many people would give their right arm to live your life? 

Suzanne: But that's the problem. I can't feel my life. I look around me and I know so much of it is good. But it's like this stuff with my mother. I know that she does these things because she loves me... but I just can't believe it. 

Lowell: Maybe she'll stop mothering you when you stop needing mothering. 

Suzanne: You don't know my mother. 

Lowell: I don't know your mother, but I'll tell you something. She did it to you and her mother did it to her and back and back and back all the way to Eve and at some point you just say, "Fuck it, I start with me." 

Suzanne: Did you just make that up? 

Lowell: Yeah, well, I was working on it when you came in. If you'd shown up a half hour later like you were supposed to, it would have been better. 

Suzanne: It's pretty good as it is. 

Lowell: Yeah, you just like it because it sounds a little like movie dialogue. 

Suzanne: That's right, I don't want life to imitate art, I want life to be art.

The very best scene in the movie may well be the final scene wherein Suzanne, acting an a new movie, sings a slow country ballad called "I'm Checking Out".  The entire movie crew is taken by the performance, including Doris (MacLaine), who is on set watching her daughter during filming. It is a triumphant performance, and it ends the movie "Postcards From The Edge", but without breaking stride, and seemingly in one take, Streep performs the song again, this time in a rocking up-tempo manner as the film's closing credits roll.  It is absolutely terrific!

As one might expect, given the people involved, Fisher's script, and Nichols' direction, the acting is terrific in this one, and, yes, Streep did receive one of her twenty (or is it twenty-one?) Oscar nominations for her performance in this one.  This movie is now twenty-seven years old, long enough ago that Streep was able to play the daughter  in it.  Given the nature of Hollywood, and the attention surrounding both Reynolds and Fisher due to their deaths, I can just picture someone in some studio boardroom pitching this one...."Hey, let's strike while it's hot and do a remake of "Postcards From the Edge", only this time, Streep will play the mother."  Would that surprise anyone?

Three stars on this one from The Grandstander.

Two Absent Friends - Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds

In an almost unbelievable turn of events, death claimed two show biz luminaries from the same family on two consecutive days this past week in the persons of Debbie Reynolds and her daughter, Carrie Fisher. 

Carrie Fisher

1956-2016

Over the weekend it was learned that Carrie Fisher had suffered a "cardiac incident" while on an airplane.  Upon landing, she was hospitalized and her condition was listed as "stable", which does not necessarily mean "good", and she died on Tuesday at the age of sixty.  To most of the general public, Miss Fisher will forever be remembered  as Princess Leia in the many Star Wars films in which she appeared.  To me, I will remember her many movies and episodic television shows in which she was usually cast as the "best friend".  Two of these that immediately spring to mind are "When Harry Met Sally" wherein she played the best friend to Meg Ryan, and "Hannah and Her Sisters" wherein she was the best friend of Dianne Wiest.  IMDB lists 90 acting credits for her, as well and credits as a writer and producer. 

Fisher was the child of a famous Hollywood marriage between Miss Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher.  Her life was not always easy.  She suffered from addiction issues and depression, but she seemed to emerge from those years in decent shape, enough so as to have had a solid show biz career of her own.  Her novel, "Postcards From the Edge", was a best seller that depicted the problems of growing up with prominent parents, and was loosely based on her own life.  It became a hit movie that starred Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine.  Fisher wrote the screenplay.

Debbie Reynolds

1932-2016

The day after Fisher's death, the news came that Fisher's mother, Debbie Reynolds, had suffered a severe stroke, and she died later that same day.  It is perhaps the oldest cliche in the book to say in such circumstance that someone died from a broken heart, but what else can one conclude in this instance?  Her son and Fisher's brother, Todd Fisher, was quoted as saying that "She said she wanted to be with Carrie, and she was gone."

Reynolds had a solid career as a leading lady in the movies, and she was an Academy Award nominee.  She also appeared on TV, Broadway, and a touring performer in night clubs and Las Vegas.  She pretty much worked up until the very end of her life.  IMDB lists 82 acting credits for her, which were actually fewer credits than her daughter had (and, yes, I'd have lost if you had bet me on that).  After few bit parts in one or two movies, she was plucked from obscurity when studio boss Louis B. Mayer cast her in the lead of the 1952 movie, "Singin' In The Rain".  She would be paired with two of the most seasoned and best dancers in all of show business, Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, and she was only nineteen years old.  The movie is now considered the best movie musical ever made, and many critics and historians consider it among the Top Ten American movies of all time.

For all her on screen success, though, she was, as often happens, unlucky in love.  Eddie Fisher left her and their children to take up with and marry Elizabeth Taylor.  It was one of the great scandals of Hollywood back in the 1950's.  Two subsequent marriages ended when both of those husbands bilked Reynolds of all of her money.  She was forced to hit the road with her night club act in order to pay off creditors and debts rolled up by those two guys.

The Associated Press obituary for Reynolds makes some fascinating reading and it concludes with a delightful story about her and Elizabeth Taylor.  At some point in time long after the Fisher-Taylor scandal (Taylor herself had long since been divorced from Fisher), the two actress found out that they were coincidentally sailing together on the ship, Queen Elizabeth. The two actresses exchanged notes and agreed to meet for dinner on the ship.  As Reynolds then told it, "She was married to Richard Burton by then.  I had remarried at that point, and we just said 'Let's just call it a day', and we got smashed and had a great evening and stayed friends ever since."   In fact, both Reynolds and Taylor appeared together in a 2001 TV movie called "These Old Broads".  One of the co-writers of the script for that movie was....Carrie Fisher!

That's a great story!

I can think of no better way to end this post than by including this terrific clip from "Singin' in the Rain".  

RIP Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher.