Mike Nichols (1990)
Carrie Fisher’s ‘semi-autobiographical’ account of a film starlet’s desperately comic fight to free herself from drug dependency, rotten men and the shadow of her famous mother was published in 1987 but, as a movie, it has elements of an old-time ‘woman’s picture’, modernised by its sexually permissive ambience, by Fisher’s one-liners (she also wrote the screenplay), and especially by the shrewd shallowness of Mike Nichols’s direction, which makes Postcards from the Edge easy to watch and easier to forget. At its centre is the relationship of Suzanne Vale (Meryl Streep), a wan, drug-addicted actress, and her mother Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine), a tough, brazenly egocentric musical comedy trouper. It’s hard to summon the energy to root for the hapless Suzanne but you mildly hope and assume that things will improve for her. In the event, she gets rid of her louse boyfriend, a sexually voracious film producer (Dennis Quaid), makes up with her mother and ‘finds herself’. You don’t believe in the happy ending; you merely accept that it’s time for the film to end happily. There are a few moments when Suzanne’s insecurity is touching, particularly her big scene with the kindly, paternal director of films-within-the-film (Gene Hackman). But the real director’s frivolity is mostly impregnable. Nichols bursts the emotional balloon even of Suzanne and Doris’s reconciliation – when the latter, hospitalised after a car accident, is suddenly, vulnerably old. The scene shrinks to a small bubble of sentimental wisecracks. Nichols’s irony is virtually self-protecting: it’s as if nothing in the movie can be seriously criticised because nothing is seriously meant.
Mike Nichols made Postcards from the Edge immediately after Working Girl, one of his most successful films (in every way). Nichols seemed amused by the moral dubiety of a Cinderella story set in 1980s Wall Street, engaged with it wholeheartedly and made his audience follow suit. There are moments in Postcards, however, when the artificiality of the piece seems on the verge of becoming its subject. At the start of the picture, the coked-up Suzanne freaks out on set; a few hours later, she’s having her stomach pumped and Doris has her put in a detox clinic. Gene Hackman is hard to beat as a barometer of emotional truth but, as the director of the film Suzanne is making when she collapses, even he is a little forced – perhaps ill at ease with the falsity of the set-up. (Nichols sometimes seems to be on the same wavelength as the Dennis Quaid character, who at one point says to Suzanne, ‘You’re the realest person I ever met – in the abstract’.) When Suzanne returns later in the film to do looping on the scene she flunked before she went into rehab, Hackman illuminates the exchange between them and his paternal benignity is entirely convincing. But Mike Nichols doesn’t have the appetite for the heartwarming back-from-the-brink aspect of the material: he seems more interested in the next technical challenge he’s going to set Meryl Streep. (It’s no coincidence that the most successful collaboration between Nichols and Streep was Angels in America, in which she played four different parts.)
There’s a moment when Suzanne tells Doris, ‘I’m middle-aged, Mom’. This is an expression of Suzanne’s feeling that she’s wasted her life rather than a statement of fact but a basic problem for Meryl Streep here is that she looks too old for the part. (She was was 40 when the film was made – Carrie Fisher was only 31 when the novel was published.) It’s effective enough, given the relationship between Suzanne and Doris, that the daughter seems the mother’s spiritual senior – she’s certainly the more world-weary – but Streep’s aura of capability makes her mature in the wrong way. Even so, she does many clever and charming things and the glazed remoteness she brings to the role is very right for what was the picture’s tagline: ‘Having a wonderful time, wish I were here’. Shirley MacLaine was 55 when she did this film (and is two years younger than Carrie Fisher’s mother, Debbie Reynolds). You get the sense that MacLaine basically despises what she’s being asked to do; her presence and flair mean that she does it well – but she’s somehow uncomfortable. She may be too naturally empathetic an actress to play a monster mother without strain and too truthful as a performer to believe in the moment when Doris, in hospital and deprived of her wig and the other accoutrements of mutton dressed as lamb, briefly stops performing.
One element of the material that Nichols really does engage with is the musical numbers, all three of which work very well. (As with Heartburn and Working Girl, the score is by Carly Simon but her contribution is a minor one on this occasion.) At a welcome home party for Suzanne, Streep sings the Ray Charles song ‘You Don’t Know Me’ with a plaintive tentativeness that is very appealing – and which derives from Suzanne’s certainty that Doris is going to follow her onstage and completely obliterate her performance: Shirley MacLaine duly delivers the Sondheim song ‘I’m Still Here’ with a crude panache that’s exhilarating and repellent at the same time. In the finale – a piece of stomping country-and-western self-assertion called ‘I’m Checkin’ Out’ (written for the picture by Shel Silverstein) – Meryl Streep is tremendous. She’s not only in great voice but she pitches the number perfectly, shaking off the faltering confidence of Suzanne’s earlier number but holding back from her mother’s vulgarian verve. This is the one moment when the I-will-survivalism of the piece registers with some emotional force. (Streep is even freer as she continues the number over the closing credits – it’s quite a curtain call.)
The supporting cast, although most of them haven’t got much to do, is a remarkable line-up. As well as Hackman and Quaid, there’s Annette Bening (incredibly vivid in the bit part of a bit part actress whom the Quaid character beds on the same day he beds Suzanne), Richard Dreyfuss (as the doctor who pumps Suzanne’s stomach and later asks her out on a date), Gary Morton (as Doris’s predictably unscrupulous manager), Mary Wickes (as Doris’s mother), Rob Reiner, Simon Callow and Michael Ontkean. A dark-haired actress called Robin Bartlett, who I don’t remember seeing since[1], has a witty, straightforward incisiveness as Suzanne’s roommate in rehab.
23 May 2009
[1] Postscript: Until Shutter Island (2010) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), that is …
