Product: Postcards from the Edge [VHS] (1990)
Rating: 4.0
Mother-Daughter Tensions Overshadow the Drugs in Carrie Fisher's Sharp-Tongued Hollywood Tale
Carrie Fisher's bracingly candid and acerbically amusing commentary is definitely worth a listen when you watch this scabrous 1990 comedy, especially since she wrote the screenplay based onher first novel, which is turn, was based on her life as a drug-addicted movie actress who happens to be the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. With the self-assured Mike Nichols at the helm, the picture is glossy and often smug in its insider's look of Hollywood, but it also has an emotionally resonant quality thanks mainly to the shrewdly observant interplay between Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine as mother and daughter. Streep plays Suzanne Vale, an actress successful enough to star in a cheesy action flick but spiraling out of control with her drug habit. In fact, she barely finishes a film for veteran director Lowell Korshack (an initially snappish Gene Hackman) who reads her the riot act on the set about her budget-escalating addiction.In the midst of a bleary-eyed one-night-stand, Suzanne becomes comatose from an overdose and is taken to the hospital where she gets her stomach pumped by a smitten doctor (a puppyish Richard Dreyfuss). She recovers and can work on her next picture only if she will live with her movie star mother Doris Mann to appease the insurance company. While the rest of the movie focuses on Suzanne's bumpy road toward recovery, the story really takes flight when it zeroes in on the prickly, dysfunctional relationship she has with Doris, a larger-than-life personality who means well as a mother but can't help being judgmental and competitive. Whether showing off her gams on a piano belting out Sondheim's "I'm Still Here" or revealing her pathetically shorn head after an auto collision, MacLaine is spot-on in the role, probably the best among her latter-day performances after Aurora Greenway inTerms of Endearment.Liberated from her parade of accents and period costumes, Streep seems at first too accomplished to be playing a second-rate actress, but she makes the bedraggled Suzanne likeably flawed. She also shows off an impressive singing voice with a couple of country-western numbers. Beyond Hackman and Dreyfuss, Dennis Quaid effectively plays an errant lover with smarmy panache, and there are nice near-cameos from Annette Bening as a flaky actress, Gary Morton as Suzanne's agent, Robin Bartlett as Suzanne's sardonic rehab roommate, CCH Pounder as an unctuous rehab counselor and Simon Callow as a two-faced director. In the studio scenes, Rob Reiner, Oliver Platt, Michael Ontkean and J.D. Souther provide even smaller bits. I just wish Fisher could have explored Suzanne's recovery beyond the fatherly pep talk from Korshack and the final moment of vulnerability from Doris. Beyond Fisher's commentary, the 2001 DVD contains partial filmographies for the principal players and several unrelated trailers.