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BETWEEN QUEENS In HBO’s 1983 Between Friends, there are two remarkable firsts: Elizabeth Taylor finally gets to have a close friendship with another woman on screen, and Carol Burnett breaks through with her first real adult portrayal. They play divorcees hitting the big 50, trying to cope in the battleground their disappointing marriages and the Women’s Movement left them in. Liz is a boozing, self-deprecating Jewish princess who’s never learned to do anything more than “walk down the stairs with panache” and find a rich non-fat nonyentzer to take care of her. To stay independent long enough to find one, she contacts a real estate company to discuss selling her “Tara,” which is right out of last month’s edition of Plush Digs. Arriving for the appointment, with snow everywhere, she smacks her car into the car of Burnett, the very agent with whom she’s to meet. Each miffed for a few seconds until Liz breaks the tension by conceding she’s a flakehead and not to worry—she keeps a mechanic on retainer for just such annoyances. Being on retainer is how Carol feels: an angry “nobody makes me cry” recovering Catholic, she’s determined to duplicate the freedoms men have, to regain the freedoms the nuns robbed her of by their incessant moralizing. As an agent, she has plenty of chances to spread her inviting avenue to the “ineligibles.” (She’s a little like a female George in Shampoo.) Deep down she knows “all the wedding rings hanging from her scalp belt” is bad girl stuff meant to shock. Some funny bits for those who love Taylor as a zippy vulgarian—the earth mother-vagina syndrome exhibited in Virginia Woolf, which went softy porn in X, Y and Zee, is now an extra-spicy Silhouette Romance fixation: she makes jokes of words like uterus and vulva. Mocking her own image, she pretends to be quite the cook and looks incredulous not only in a kitchen but, later, at a computerized cash register too. She’s disarming when taking out a Want-A-Mate ad—her respondent is a hypochondriac-psycho with rape fantasies—and there’s a clever surprise when, drunk, she wails a Walt Whitman poem into the ear of a person disparaging him: just as you’re preparing for some of the famous Liz invective, she blurts out something Silhouetty. In her big dramatic scenes, she’s sometimes good and too often bad, showing the limits of her whorey movie training, where technique is basically for dialogue effect and little sustainment. Pulling off the light and whirly dialogue, she’s hopelessly lockjawed when words get weighty, over-talky. It takes a bully director to control Taylor, to keep her steady and fresh, but bully is not Lou Antonio’s method here; as with most of her post-Martha performances, she’s repeating herself and doing a lot of irritating lip-smacking. Yet even on the tube, smothered in flab-hiding coats and terrific ponchos, she’s compulsively watchable. To Antonio’s credit, the performance Burnett gives is her most receptive. Not an ounce of her sickening vouchsafing marring her work in Pete and Tillie, Friendly Fire, The Tenth Month and Life of the Party: The Story of Beatrice. She’s startlingly natural—the slummy things she does and foul language she uses are thoroughly convincing. (The disarming starts at the very beginning when she’s on to the phone to the plumber complaining about the septic tank backing up again.) Benefiting from the experience of working with one of the true generous creatures of the screen, Burnett’s confidence, loveliness and sexiness are joy. The queen of our trash culture and the queen of comedy apply what they’ve discovered in each other to make a cordial appeal for a renewal of meaningful import springing from the shared travails of sistership.
Text COPYRIGHT © 1997 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
