Just as shapeless, morbid, and spurious as many another bio-pic – but I liked it. Alan Rudolph’s gossamer, Altman-esque texturing helps: the unforced perspectives, the refusal to childishly indict personalities, the feel for time and place, the smart screenplay and mise-en-scene that catch the widest possible amount of the wit and character of Mrs Parker herself and her fellow unruly smart-arses. Some of it’s possessed with a tender heart-ache (especially in Campbell Scott’s surprising turn as Robert Benchley), others with a loosely flapping comic spirit, and it comprehensively sketches the hows and whys of these people’s place in a window in social and artistic history.
Rudolph cleverly uses Dorothy Parker’s mordant poetry as a refrain, bemoaning the impossibility of living up to expectations of life, whilst she drifts semi-wittingly between hopeless situations and screwed-up romances, refusing finally to change herself for the sake of some vaguely promised fulfilment. She’s one of those people who alternates between being the life of the party and the drag on it (reminds me of…me!) and for reasons that defy even her understanding.
Perhaps it’s just Jennifer Jason Leigh, at the height of both her winsomeness, and also her refusal to kiss and cuddle the audience. Her Parker is an expert series of odd alternations, her sandpaper tongue working in a flat-vowel nasal drawl, her self-loathing and razor-edged critiquing humour working on each-other like a hacksaw on bone, and probably should have gained the ’94 Oscar.
