Mrs. Parker & Vicious Circle

STINKO’D SNIPER

Jennifer Jason Leigh hits every note about wit Dorothy Parker in Alan Rudolph’s Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle with some of the most “actressey” touches since any you-name-it performance by Geraldine Page. Lest you mistake this as severe criticism, let me disabuse: Jennifer puts on quite the verbal concert based on Parker’s own savory affectation. A longtime drunk, Parker was the perpetual caustic showgirl, a social sniper ready at the quick to drop acid on not only her expectant audience—the intelligentsia at the Algonquin Round Table—but equally on the unprepared. Half Jewish—“a bagel with a bite out of it”—she earned early recognition as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic with a switchblade, publicly slashing the sins of offerings everyone else had the decorum to privately condemn. She would be one of the original short-story contributors to, as well as be the Constant Reader book reviewer for, The New Yorker, which published her work until the mid 50s, when the U.S. House on UnAmerican Activities Committee was on its witch-hunt for commies in Hollywood. Her audacity was accentuated by her speech—sounding aristocratically sloshed even when she hadn’t been drinking, which was rare. Her well known contempt for Hollywood didn’t prevent her from accepting the money and writing movies—1937’s A Star is Born the most famous—and it didn’t keep her from helping start the Screen Writers Guild. Lamentable, the movie ignores Parker’s fiction and instead showcases some of her poetry as black & white interludes—with Jennifer, deep in Parker articulation, delivering some strikingly clever readings. My misgivings about them aren’t in Jennifer’s recitations, though they dramatize the trouble: Parker’s verse almost always reeked of measured facetiousness. (Probably why her first collections were surprise bestsellers, reversing reaction to the usual staid poetry.) But her short stories, likewise very deliberate, are often minus the sarcasm. (One of my favorites: You Were Perfectly Fine.) Would have been apropos to have a bit of balance. The impression by movie’s end is Parker felt she was drowning in her own image—she got stinko’d less from alcoholism and more from having to live up to the level of bitchery everyone else expected from her; she was thought to have boozed to keep from having feelings, succumbing to the false denunciation she didn’t have any. (She ended up investing her emotions in dogs.) Rudolph short shrifts Parker’s relationship with her husband Alan Campbell, and there’s regret he doesn’t give her time to express her chosen epitaph asking us to “excuse my dust.” At first, the very idea of Jennifer as Parker seemed a nightmare, yet she disproves, for 126 minutes, one of the wit’s more famous quips: “A dependable part of life is that everything is always worse than you thought it would be.” The supporting cast includes Campbell Scott as Robert Benchley; Matthew Broderick as Charles MacArthur; Peter Gallagher as Alan Campbell; Jennifer Beals as Gertrude Benchley; Andrew McCarthy as Eddie Parker; Wallace Shawn as Horatio Byrd; Martha Plimpton as Jane Grant; Sam Robards as Harold Ross; Lili Taylor as Edna Ferber; Gwyneth Paltrow as Paula Hunt; Nick Cassavetes as Robert Sherwood; David Thornton as George S. Kaufman; Heather Graham as Mary Kennedy; Tom McGowan as Alexander Woollcott; Gary Basaraba as Heywood Broun; Stephen Baldwin as Roger Spalding; David Gow as Donald Ogden Stewart; Leni Parker as Beatrice Kaufman; Jean-Michel Henry as Harpo Marx; Stanley Tucci as Fred Hunter; Keith Carradine as Will Rogers. In 2024, producer Paul Bauman provides the Dorothy Parker chapter to his “Writer Like...” documentary series and, using clips from Mrs. Parker and very satisfactorily filling in its missing gaps, has the added attraction of voice-over artist Melba Sibrel King bringing Dorothy’s drollishness to the fore. You will be charmed by the frequency of laughs.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com