Loving Highsmith

Loving Highsmith (2022) was written and directed by Eva Vitija.

The film is a biography of Patrica Highsmith, who was a successful author and a legendary figure.

Highsmith appears in the movie in archival footage. Many of her friends and lovers give candid interviews. What makes Highsmith different from other successful authors is that she was openly lesbian.

Loving Highsmith reveals that Highsmith was not a lovable woman. She seduced younger women and was a virulent anti-Semite. (She supported Palestinian rights, but this support was overtly linked to her hatred of Jews.)

Highsmith is important because she wrote the first novel about lesbians that had a happy ending. (Novels about lesbians were OK in the 1950's, but they had to have an unhappy ending.) She used a pen name in 1952.

In 1983 the book was republished as Carol, with Highsmith listed as the author. (The book was made into a movie that was highly successful.)

Loving Highsmith was an honest and accurate portrayal of a woman who was hard to like. Maybe Highsmith's story is the reason that the movie has a relatively low IMDb rating of 7.1. I thought it was better than that.

I think that a biopic should be rated on its effective portrayal of its subject--not on whether you like the person portrayed. I rated it 8.

We saw this film as part of Rochester's excellent ImageOut LGBT festival.

Poorly made. Texas theme is used over and over without any artistic or emotional reason as a visual copout. The contemporary shots of New York City were edited in as an easy way out, in a very student film-like manner. The interviews with Highsmith's relatives from Texas, which were not insightful at all and irrelevant, made a film about this great author even more trivial and cheap. The other interviews had the quality of superficiality and talked about Highsmith's profound dilemmas they had no way of knowing anything about. The pseudo-Americana/Texas wanna-be music just adds insult to the wound. It is a very superficial film about a profound, complex person.

This biography was both fascinating and, at times, provoked a bit of personal, age-related anxiety. I was delighted to discover that Patricia Highsmith is the author behind several of my favorite films adapted from her novels, including *Carol*, *The Talented Mr. Ripley*, and *Strangers on a Train*.

Although unfamiliar with her previously, I enjoyed learning about her interesting and often fulfilling life. It was also apparent that she experienced significant hardship, loss, and compromise. I suppose that this is true of many writers - probably lots of non-writers too.

Reading about Ms. Highsmith's life and her often daring decisions inevitably led me to reflect on my own choices, prompting some personal regrets. I flashed back over my own life and several moments of major indecision - "Should I do this or that?" I realized I frequently opted for less challenging, more conventional paths, yet I've always been proud of the brave.

While I wondered why I couldn't have been as bold as she was, my feeling isn't one of personal regret or envy. Instead, I felt admiration, particularly when considering the time and circumstances of her upbringing and the demands of a family that seemed so unlike her own. Something she might have recognized and come to terms with almost from the start.

This film certainly piqued my interest in Patricia Highsmith, so much so that I might watch it again. I've already queued up "Ripley" and "Carol," and I'll definitely look for more information about her. My main criticism concerns the musical score, which I found exceptionally poor. It felt entirely disconnected from the film's subject matter, discordant, and distracting. The jarring music even evoked unpleasant physical sensations, like sharp needles in sensitive areas. In contrast, the brief moments featuring natural ambient sounds were perfect.

At age 75, I found the film's focus on end-of-life issues both deeply contemplative and rather saddening. But it also strengthened my determination to spend my remaining time fulfilling my own desires and free from regrets.

As a Highsmith fan boy, I highly recommend this doc! Wow, she was a messy writer, that's for sure. Brilliant. Loved the fact that she published an edition of The Price of Salt under her real name in her final years. Quite poignant.

It's great that the filmmakers managed to track down former lovers of the author; their stories are really intriguing and shed new light on this often mysterious figure.

The filmmakers also make great use of clips from various films based on Highsmith's works, including Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. I think the film could have used an interview with some of the cast of the latter film to discuss the complexity of playing one of her characters. But that's a minor point.

Really well done.

I love Patricia Highsmith's work so much. It's almost criminal to think that, at least when I was growing up, she wasn't taught at all in school. Always read the Highsmith book before seeing the movie based on it. As highly regarded as Strangers on a Train and Carol are, neither has one-tenth the extraordinary complexity and moral ambiguity of Highsmith's writing (nor, with the exception of Blanchett's Carol, do any of its characters).

Thus any documentary about this magnificent author is going to be of some interest. But by focusing so relentlessly on Highsmith's relationships with women, the film conveys little of why we should care about Highsmith at all. There is little about her professional life -- relationships with editors, failures, sales volumes, etc., let alone any serious examination of her work.

So for the devoted Highsmith fan the movie is worth watching but nevertheless a disappointment.