Love to hate Harriet the harridan

AGED, her eyes like glittering lasers in wrinkled papery skin, Shirley MacLaine can still stop traffic with a glare and a shrug.

She is Harriet, a retired entrepreneuse, bitter about everything and preparing her suicide. But — as a benefactor of the local paper — she wants to supervise her obituary.

It needs tributes from friends (she has none, even the local priest hates her) colleagues (ditto) and family — ex-husband and estranged daughter. She tasks a terrified young journalist (Amanda Seyfried) with researching it, but ‘She puts the bitch in obituary’ moans the shocked girl.

To make a better obit line, the old bat decides in her last weeks to be a ‘mentor’ to some attractive, fashionably minority kid.

The encounter between the tough old MacLaine and some ‘kids at risk’ in a day centre is priceless, wicked. But she finds a ‘hooligan’ to her taste in the equally priceless and very stroppy nine-year-old Brenda (AnnJewel Lee Dixon).

Ever more invigorated, Harriet then storms the radio station with Brenda in tow (‘she’s my intern’) and demands to be a dawn DJ (‘I’m old, I wake up early’).

The three proceed to further adventures, a dramatic commercial vandalism, and an unmissable encounter with the glacial, therapy-mad daughter. Which, in a cackling laugh, hilariously undermines the soppy ‘American Moment’ of reunion that you’re expecting.

The end is moving, but there’s acid fun on the way.