Bait and switch
By: Jorge Mourinha
Tags: Natalie Wood, Documentary, Hollywood, HBO, Film Reviews

The bait and switch is doubly disappointing because it’s clear that the archival material was there to do justice to Wood’s 30-year career, a studio-system honors student who became an incredibly talented serious actress and a bona fide film star while also playing the fame game.

It’s difficult to think of another actress who’s been in so many outstanding films that has been all but forgotten in the time since past. She starred opposite Steve McQueen in Love with the Proper Stranger; James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause; Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass; Tony Curtis, Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda in Sex and the Single Girl; Curtis and Jack Lemmon in The Great Race; Robert Redford in Inside Daisy Clover and This Property Is Condemned — the first three films in this list also saw her nominated for Academy Awards.

Wood was in West Side Story — the first project she chose to do, after fighting mogul Jack Warner for the right to have a say in the films she was cast in. She was in the era-defining sex comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. And she had no qualms about pivoting to television in an era when that was still seen as the beginning of the end — she won the Golden Globe for the 1979 remake of From Here to Eternity and was also in the well-received true-story The Cracker Factory. And she had no qualms either about abandoning her career for long stretches for the sake of her family.

This is what What Remains Behind’s first hour does: Wood as an undervalued, underestimated talent that wanted things her way and, to an extent, got them. No mean feat in a Hollywood that, for all its changes, was still very patriarchal in outlook. She could very well have been a less political yet equally powerful Jane Fonda — she certainly had the talent — and if you’ve seen the (heartily recommended) Fonda HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts, you will find many similarities between their trajectories.

Credit: HBO

The film tiptoes carefully around the much-vaunted issue of Wood’s alleged sexual abuse by Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray, which the actress herself denied openly in television interviews that are part of the superb archival research structuring the film (the director is Laurent Bouzereau, Spielberg’s go-to archivist). All the more shame, then, that it does not extend the same courtesy to Wood’s tragic death in November 1981, drowned off her family yacht, after a boozy and apparently rancorous night involving the actress, her husband, and actor Christopher Walken, her co-star in Douglas Trumbull’s ill-fated sci-fi thriller Brainstorm, which they were then shooting.

With half an hour yet to run, What Remains Behind becomes a rose-tinted portrait of a happy extended family with a wilful determination to exonerate Wagner from any guilt in Wood’s tragic death — a defense the family is perfectly in their right to make, but which has little to no place in a documentary meant to celebrate the career of the deceased.

What we hear from Wood herself, presented in archival footage throughout, and from those who knew her and worked with her, was more than enough to fill 90 minutes and make us lament what was lost with her untimely passing. But by giving a third of the running time to a passionate defense of Wagner’s innocence in a death he was never formally charged with, Gregson Wagner and Bouzereau do a great disservice to Wood.

She is no longer the star of the piece, and the film is no longer about her talent and her life; it becomes an examination of her death that, in its own way, is as salacious and intrusive as those they accuse of hounding the family in the media (some of which, to be sure, are also family members, like Wood’s sister Lana).

In so doing, What Remains Behind undoes its lively, lovely first hour. And the last word, the one that Gregson Wagner and Bouzereau should have ended the film on, comes from Christopher Walken, who did not wish to be interviewed for the film and is quoted from a television segment: Natalie Wood was a great actress.

40 years after her death, that’s what matters, more than why or how.