Her ghost haunts newsrooms all over America to this day. Beautiful and talented but above all fast with a quip -- a key journalistic virtue -- poor Dorothy Parker has suffered an ignominy all real writers wish to avoid and all newsroom wits wish to achieve: What she wrote has been forgotten and what she said has entered legend. It would be enough for many, but it wasn't enough for her.
Yet those who attend Alan Rudolph's "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" in hopes of experiencing a celebration of this difficult but gifted woman will be disappointed, possibly even devastated. Rather than honoring the ghost, Rudolph seems to have declared himself a ghostbuster.
Thus his Dorothy Parker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a sad, disheveled alcoholic, unfulfilled and pickled in self-hatred, who yearned to "write like a man" and whose grim fate it was to have sex with many men she didn't love and never have sex with the one she did. Near the end of her life -- she lasted into a pathetic dotage in the 1960s -- she wasn't dead, but how could they tell? She was dead to the world and all alone.
Likewise, for the circle, that collection of wits and misfits whose wisecracks are treasured but few of whose works are even readable today, Rudolph is hardly a cherisher of a myth. What he shows us is a large, desperate agglomeration of the terminally immature in a frenzied attempt to avoid doing any actual work.
The talk was so much easier. Rudolph, as he chronicles the daily meetings of the quasi-literati in the restaurant of the Algonquin Hotel in the late '20s, isn't running a pick-hits game. In fact, he throws away most of the vaunted "great lines" of the set, burying them in a blur of chatter, laughter and the sound of glasses clinking with ice.
This is amazingly brave: He comes not to praise the circle but to bury it. He doesn't even stop the film to introduce individual members but rather enters the circle in full bloom and lets us gradually pick up on who's who and who's not, testing both our ability to match witticism to face and our stamina to do so.
The circle, then, isn't embalmed, or preserved under glass, via the techniques of an anthropologist: Rather, it's examined as a living thing, untidy and squiggly and sometimes mutating like a paramecium. That's why those who yearn to re-experience and imagine themselves sitting at that table slinging quips may be disappointed. They'll get the impression that things were so chaotic, nobody'll notice them.
Also brave: Rudolph doesn't tell Parker's story in chronological terms but rather in elaborate and frequently confusing flashbacks. It opens with a disgruntled Parker in her 40s in Hollywood, now a highly paid hack scriptwriter, recalling, in a drunken blur, the old days. The blur never leaves the picture, which takes on something of the tone of an alcoholic's memories, a lurching, awkward, sometimes incoherent travel through better times, where the bitterness frequently breaks through the nostalgia.
Occasionally, the film will simply stop, and Leigh will address the camera. In a fair approximation of Parker's voice, raspy with whisky and finishing-school elocution lessons, she will spit out a barb of her now all-but-forgotten verse, such as this bitter contemplation of suicide: Razors pain you;/ Rivers are damp;/ Acids stain you;/ And drugs cause cramp;/ Guns aren't lawful;/ Nooses give;/ Gas smells awful;/ You might as well live.
The movie swims through her relationships -- she was cheated on by the best writers of her time, including Charles MacArthur (Matthew Broderick, never convincing) -- but the prime focus is on Parker and her sad relationship with Robert Benchley. The line is, they were desperately in love, but lousy at timing. When she was available, he wasn't; when he was available, she wasn't.
The Benchley we see isn't the portly, affable, gin-soaked incompetent that some may remember from the (now unwatchable) series of short films he did in the '30s, but a much thinner and more elegant man in the '20s. The actor is Campbell Scott, and the portrait of a writer's psychology is familiar: a man who yearns but cannot touch, a man stultifying his impulses behind a patina of respectability and, of course, regretting it afterward. There's a fabric of poignancy in all these unfulfilled yearnings that's very appealing.
The movie, in the end, is as difficult as the life it chronicles. It never stoops to cheesy nostalgia or conventional worship. It tries to tell a thorny truth and, like Parker herself, it doesn't particularly care if you like it or not. I like that in a movie.
"Mrs. Parker and
the Vicious Circle"
Starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Campbell Scott
Directed by Alan Rudolph
Released by Fine Line
Rated R
***