Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

Towards the end of her career, Dorothy Parker remembers the past days when she was part of the Algoquin Round Table, a group of friends who shared interests in the arts, drink and witty barbs at each others' expense. However behind the wit she has a lot of hurt and the story follows her through broken relationships and lost happiness.

I have seen this film several times but am only writing a review of it now. It always strikes me as being a very worthy film that is `good' and should be appreciated. But, this doesn't make it an easy film to access or watch. On the surface the overlapping dialogue and quick wit makes for a film hat could be accepted several ways. I was stuck in the middle. At once I felt that these people were pompous and condescending but then also felt that they were witty people and clever! The same with Parker herself – at times she was a good character but then at others she was mysterious and very hard to understand.

I suppose this is to the film's credit that it never paints it's subjects in one colour – there is room for interpretation. The one thing that struck me (me who uses a lot of sarcasm) is how much hurt was often put behind the barbs. As one character says, she never talks deeply with any of her friends and never gets beyond the next barbed remark. The fact that her life slides the way it does shows the danger in this. However the film does still allow the brighter side of her life to come out as well so that it isn't al gloom. This still doesn't make it easy watching – there is no one central narrative other than Parker herself. This made it feel a little free floating and aimless and it occasionally felt as hollow and pointless as the quick wit shared by unhappy people around the table.

The cast is pretty good. Leigh does occasionally come over as a woman giving an impression rather than a performance but she does manage to seem more natural when talking rather than quoting. The support cast is made up of quite a few B-grade stars (of quality and some not) and they all give good account of themselves. Broderick, Gallagher, McCarthy, Taylor and Tucci are among the cast but really it is Leigh's film to win or lose.

Overall this is a classy film. The direction and sets really get the period right and film feels good. However at times it seems aimless and much of the film is actually pretty depressing stuff. I took the warning from it of opening up rather than trying to be a smarta*se all the time, but I'm not sure if that was what it was saying. The cast do well and Leigh makes a good Mrs Parker despite just stopping short of out and out impersonation.

I think that this film was meant to be realist and naturalistic. However,there is the reality that this is an entertainment, and the audience has to hear and understand the lines. Supervigilance is required to do this in this movie. Not only does JJL's imitation of Dorothy Parker's speech affectations make the speech and musing of the main character difficult to understand, but the inclusion of background noise, overlapping dialog, and frequent muttering and mumbling of the performers make every character difficult to even hear, much less understand.

Since so much of this movie is about legendary people mouthing famous aphorisms, it is frustrating to only hear snippets of their lines. I suppose the idea was to toss these famous lines away to add naturalism. However, without spotlighting the conversations of the legendary characters, however contrived this might be performed, this is just a very sad movie about a bitter, unhappy, self-destructive, unproductive writer. Not very easy to watch nor very interesting.

While watching this film last night on IFC, I found myself appreciating the social, historical and artistic subject matter. Despite Mrs. Parker's obvious and overwhelming psychological dysfunctions, I felt this was a genuine "true to life" expression of one participant's subjective experiences. This was a unique, if not quite legendary, circle of literary talent -- certainly deserving of serious cinematic treatment such as this.

BUT....

There was another side to the story -- a healthier, less appalling, less depressing side. To discover "the rest of the story", I highly recommend Harpo Marx' autobiography "Harpo Speaks". Although Harpo also recalls the scathing insults and practical jokes that were a central part of the story of this Round Table group, his book relates a number of hugely funny and sometimes heart-warming scenes that indicate that at least some of these people truly cared for each other and expressed strong positive feelings in many different settings. In short, Harpo's stories (e.g. several "croquet fanatic" episodes) offer a telling comedic counterpoint to Mrs. Parker's almost continually cynical and self-pitying pathos. Read Harpo's book to balance out the negative. You'll be glad you did.

The movie is episodic and depends too much on the viewer's having prior knowledge of the life of Dorothy Parker and her literary friends. Its saving grace is Jennifer Jason Leigh as Mrs. Parker. Her only flaw is that, in trying to look and sound like Parker, her dialog is often hard to understand. Still, one of the greatest and most under-rated performances by an actress in an American film in the 1990s.

1920s poet and satirist Dorothy Parker, married to a morphine-addicted ex-soldier and recently fired as a writer for Vanity Fair, goes through a succession of men and magazine-published "doo-dads" before gaining a reputation as one of the greatest wits to come out of Depression-era New York City. "Mrs. Parker" is as rich an evocation of '20s Manhattan as we're likely to get today, and yet one wishes co-screenwriter and director Alan Rudolph would offer us more--or, at least, spring some surprises on us. There are morsels of splendorous chatter amongst the haves and have-nots of the literary world, but not enough to make a satisfying meal. Hollywood beckoned Dorothy Parker, but the experience left her depressed, as did life in general, which may be why she talked in a world-weary, dry-arch style which gave the impression of a woman with many disappointments in her closet. This is fascinating subject matter for the movies, but Rudolph barely dramatizes the material at all; he's so closed off from what's happening on the screen, many sequences plod by without any directorial nourishment. Certainly the large and interestingly cast group of actors on display are worth watching, though there are possibly too many real-life personalities rushing by us, everyone nonchalantly vying for time. Parker's "goodbye cruel war" attitude did not back her up in the end and, living until the year 1967, she survived most of her Algonquin Round Table cohorts. The film does not sentimentalize her or put her up on a pedestal, but neither does it help us to understand the tragedienne living beyond the wincing prose and words of woe. Jennifer Jason Leigh's portrayal divided the critics in 1994, yet she's definitely on to something special here. With a more incisive treatment, she may have delivered a true triumph. **1/2 from ****