POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE
Directed by Mike Nichols
Screenplay by Carrie Fisher
Let's get the dish over with quickly. Suzanne Vale (Meryl Streep) is a drug- addicted actress whose mother, Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine), was a big musical comedy star with a drinking problem and whose singer-father walked out when Suzanne was a child. Actress Carrie Fisher, author of the novel and screenplay Postcards from the Edge, is the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. But it shouldn't matter whether this wonderful comedy is really about famous people who make life tough for themselves and the ones they love most. It's like worrying whether a historical Hamlet really lusted after his mother. Postcards is no Debbie Dearest, no venomous settling of scores. For Carrie Fisher, the play's the thing -- the play of words on a stage of mixed emotions as big as a Hollywood back lot.
And what words! In this era of postverbal cinema, Postcards proves that movie dialogue can still carry the sting, heft and meaning of the finest old romantic comedy. Suzanne is ever crouching, like a stubborn, frightened child, behind the wall of her ironizing humor. As a coke-carrying member of the sensation generation, for whom "instant gratification takes too long," she is impatient with her wit; too easily she can turn a kind thought against itself. Just as easily, she has turned her life into a sad joke, blowing lines on the set and nearly dying from an overdose. To get a new movie job, Suzanne must agree to live with her mother, who has her own abuse problems. Doris needs a drink the way a crooner needs a mike, though she claims she is no longer an alcoholic. "Now," she says, "I just drink like an Irish person."
The novel, written in epistolary form, concentrated more on the dark laughter of the rehab clinic. The movie, which drops the postcards but keeps the edge, is a show-biz mother-daughter film par excellence -- Terms of Endearment out of Gypsy. Suzanne has her poignant wrangles with movie types (nice turns by Dennis Quaid and Rob Reiner as producers, Gene Hackman and Simon Callow as directors), but Postcards is bound by family ties. MacLaine gives a wonderfully excessive rendition of the Sondheim song I'm Still Here: "First you're another sloe-eyed vamp,/ Then someone's mother, then you're camp." In Postcards she is all of these, and better still she finds an aging woman's tenacious grimace under decades of gamine makeup.
& The final triumph is Streep's. Forget the globe-trotting tragic-heroine roles that made her famous. Under the sorcerer's wand of director Nichols she proves again she is our finest comedienne; like the late Irene Dunne, she adds spin and sizzle to every bon mot. By sinking ever so slightly into world- weariness, Streep can locate the desperation in Suzanne's banter while keeping her delivery featherlight. And she can sing too, bringing her uniquely precise passion to ballads and down-home rave-ups. "I don't want life to imitate art," Suzanne says with her usual blithe exasperation. "I want life to be art." This comedy is art, as exhilarating as the first autumn breeze after a summer of movie bloat. R.C.