This is a beautiful film. Its story so bizarre it
must be true, which of course it is. And it is slight: older film star falls in love with a younger man. It’s
Sunset Boulevard without the melodrama. But it’s much more than that: it’s about one of the most precious but painful moments Life can give us- the chance to say goodbye before a loved one finally slips away…
The opening credits show Gloria Grahame putting on her make-up backstage, and while she's doing so she puts on a tape of her favourite tracks using her portable cassette player. Elton John’s (mostly) instrumental
Song For Guy plays, but we never get to hear its only lyric-
Life isn’t everything. And I’m not sure if it’s because we’re being told that Life really
is everything, or whether something else is. Finding true Love perhaps…?
She seems to find true love after four wrecked marriages, moving from Hollywood to Primrose Hill of all places, where she meets Peter Turner, a young actor who’s currently taking whatever roles he is offered. And from here we watch their brief romance played out in scenes, sometimes in flashback, and out of sequence. We move into these through doorways and windows- a verandah door opens onto a beach right on the Pacific, another opens from a Manhattan hotel room onto a balcony facing the Chrysler building, and doors off a dimly lit corridor in a modest Liverpool terrace open into a sanctuary, a bedroom in the Turner home where Gloria will try to die. When she is lifted through the taxi door towards the end of the film, we know it will be the last doorway we’ll see… The pivotal scene is played twice over in fairly quick succession, but from two different viewpoints, Gloria’s and Peter’s. There really are two sides to the story, and we see them both.
Annette Bening is completely believable as the coyly flirtatious star, inviting Jamie Bell to dance (yes, we see him dance again!) and to drink with her. She’s desperate to act with the RSC. (
How do you get to do it? she asks.
Well, I think there’s more to it than filling out a form, he replies.
Then I’ll get my agent to call them, she responds.
In fact, I’m going off to the Aldwych Theatre now to see them. They’re doing The Merchant of Venice. If she had made it she would have seen Tom Wilkinson, Sinead Cusack and David Suchet. But she never does.) Instead she’s playing in W Somerset Maugham’s
Rain at the Watford Palace Theatre. She’s a fighter is Gloria, but she’s running out of time. She’s stood up to her illness, kind of, and she's managed to twinkle for a while. But now she’s fading.
Jamie Bell shines as her young lover, kept out of her secret for his protection. He’s swept along by genuine feelings of love, barely able to concentrate on his own career. He’s bewitched by her, initially unaware of who she is and what she’s achieved in her past. But he’s also bothered and bewildered by her behaviour. He’s reunited here with Julie Walters, this time playing his mother and unlikely friend to her son’s once glamorous older girlfriend. But as an older mother, she needs to say goodbye too, to another son in Australia, but it doesn’t stop her putting Gloria first as she resolves to cancel her trip to nurse her. She will happily comb out a Hollywood star’s hair in the family kitchen.
There’s a host of big names here, happy with the smallest of roles- Stephen Graham, Kenneth Cranham, Vanessa Redgrave and Frances Barber. I can see why they wanted to be involved. It’s a mini-masterpiece. But it’s Julie Walters who is given the words which crystalise the message of the film.
It’s time to let her go…
Theatres and cinemas abound, and location lovers will have a field day. The most touching scene of the whole movie takes place on the stage of the Liverpool Playhouse, a stunning building unknown to me, where we hear familiar words barely audible, against a backdrop of the auditorium. This is no regular performance. And everything captures the period between 1979-1981: clothes, songs, avocado kitchen units, candlewick bedspreads…
We know how the story will end before we are told, which is a bit like Life really. But those who have experienced it will know that this doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to deal with.
***** from me
