Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle - review

We shudder to think what Mrs Parker's own review of this movie about her sordid life would have been like. My guess is the film would have hurt her very much. That's not to say that I disliked the movie: in order to say something relevant about her, it must be truthful to the point of pain. If I base myself on Mrs Parker's prose and poetry and a badly written but factually accurate biography, I would say that the movie did a pretty good job. On the one hand, it shows her talent (as far as this is possible within the context of a movie) by interrupting the storyline repeatedly with recitals of her poems; on the other, it shows that her friends, and she when with them, were shallow and playful to the point of fanaticism. It shows her many disastrous loves and the suicide attempts that sometimes followed them, but it doesn't cover up the truth that deep down, Lady Razor was a sentimentalist of the worst, that is, self-destructive, kind. The burden of portraying Mrs Parker falls on the shoulders of Jennifer Jason Leigh, who does a great job, much to my surprise. Only as an elderly woman does she look far more glamorous than the actual Dotty, who was too ravaged by alcohol to be shown the way she really was. In the end, the film is chaotic, fragmentary and all over the place; which is ok, because so was Mrs Parker. The problem with this or any other movie portrayal of one of the most important women in 20th century America is that it can never top the real thing. So even though I enjoyed this movie pretty much, I still recommend you spend your money for renting this movie on a Dorothy Parker book instead.