Eleanor and Frank Perry's film is not an easy watch as poor Carrie Snodgrass (Oscar nominated) is verbally abused by her horrible husband Richard Benjamin (good) only to take up with equally horrible lover Frank Langella. Her husband is just awful - he gives her lists of tasks to do, denigrates her appearance and behaviour and treats her like a skivvy - and her children are also horrible - it's amazing that she hasn't lost her sanity (or killed her husband).
She manages to survive the affair, but then when Benjamin confesses he's lost all their money and has had an affair himself, she forgives him. The sting in the tale is a brief end scene in which she's in a therapy group (Featuring Peter Boyle briefly) where all the other members accuse her of having had an easy life and betraying her husband. Damned in every single direction, in other words. In a subsequent interview Eleanor said "I'd write the ending differently. I'd show Tina liberating herself, but not through a man. She'd get a job, or go back to school or whatever."
So the Perrys (from a novel by Sue Kaufman) are shining a painfully bright light on what it is to be a certain woman in a supposedly enlightened age. (They made The Swimmer and Last Summer together.)
A dreadful dinner party is I suppose the highlight.
I thought I probably wouldn't watch it again but now I'm not so sure.
In a sad footnote, Frank ditched Eleanor the next year and she found it hard to work solo in Hollywood, writing a novel 'Blue Pages' about it.
And as a fascinating aside, it seems that the Neil Young song 'A Man Needs a Maid' was written following a screening of this film, and he and Carrie became an item for a while. 'Harvest' is supposedly a record of their romance, and the follow-up 'Homegrown' (not released until 2020) is about their break-up. (Thanks to the Indicator Blu-Ray booklet for this info.)
No comments:
Post a Comment