MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1995 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Campbell Scott, Matthew Broderick. Screenplay: Alan Rudolph and Randy Sue Coburn. Director: Alan Rudolph.
The collection of authors, journalists and performers who gathered for lunches at New York's Hotel Algonquin in the 1920s are among those peculiarly American individuals who are perhaps more famous for being famous than for anything they actually said or did. There is a great historical disagreement as to who was there at any given time, to whom certain famous quotes should be attributed, and even whether those quotes were actually spoken. More than anything, they became symbolic of the kind of dissolute Jazz Age bon vivants immortalized by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But who were they, really? At least part of that question is answered by MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE, an uneven but still quite intriguing examination of the Algonquin Round Table's most famous member.
That individual was Dorothy Parker (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an author and freelance critic who was renowned for her often caustic theatrical reviews. The film opens with Dorothy as a screenwriter in 1930s Hollywood, then flashes back to 1920s New York. There Dorothy is working for Vanity Fair with Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott), her editor and close friend. Her husband Edward (Andrew McCarthy) has a war wound and a serious morphine addiction, and the marriage is far from a happy one. After Dorothy is fired from Vanity Fair and Benchley quits in sympathy, they begin meeting with other journalists and writers at the Algonquin. Among those who join their company is reporter Charles MacArthur (Matthew Broderick), with whom Dorothy has an ill-fated affair which comes to define the tragedies of her life.
Director and co-scripter Alan Rudolph is a disciple of Robert Altman, and the mentor's style is as evident in MRS. PARKER as it has ever been in Rudolph's work. Altman's trademark overlapping dialogue is particularly noteworthy, and it is one of Rudolph's most questionable decisions. The Round Table was defined by the volleys of bon mots exchanged by its members, and while many clever lines come through, nearly as many are drowned out by other conversation. I often caught uproarious laughter in response to a joke I hadn't heard.
Now with the same breath that I knock Rudolph on practical grounds, I must acknowledge that as an artistic choice, it is largely successful. Rudolph uses the interactions of these individuals to demonstrate a superficiality which defined Dorothy Parker's world: everyone at the table was too busy trying to be clever to pay much attention to anything anyone else had to say. "I write doo-dads," Parker comments in one scene, "because it's a doo-dad kind of town," and that remark speaks volumes about the Round Table regulars, and perhaps even the Jazz Age as a whole. As we watch Parker slip deeper and deeper into depression, it becomes astonishing that none of her so-called friends, with the exception of Benchley, ever seem to notice or care.
That relationship between Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley is the backbone of MRS. PARKER, and it is captured in dead-on performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Campbell Scott. Scott has played mostly pretty-boy roles to date, but his Benchley is a complicated character, a teetotaling homebody who is pulled to his eventual destruction by the people around him. Leigh's performance is stunning, though she does affect a speech pattern that sounds like a gin-soaked variation on her Stanwyck/Hepburn bit from THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, and she seemed to swallow many of her lines. It's a piece of work made all the more challenging by the odd structure of the script, which has Leigh playing Parker at several different phases of her life, as well as reading selections from Parker's poetry directly to the camera. She manages to capture the soul of an extremely troubled survivor whose final line in the film ("I can't believe I made it") is both comic and touching. Her performance *is* MRS. PARKER, and through all of Rudolph's fits and starts I found that I actually felt I had met Dorothy Parker.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Round Tables: 7.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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