A fine romance at the fag end of a fast-burning life
Dir: Paul Mcguigan. Starring: Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, Kenneth Cranham, Stephen Graham, Vanessa Redgrave, Frances Barber
While preparing to shoot Stephen Frears’s frisky neo-noir The Grifters (1990), Annette Bening was given a piece of homework. To get in character as the mischievous gold digger, Myra, Frears told her to watch Gloria Grahame in Sudden Fear, the 1952 thriller in which Grahame’s character schemes with Jack Palance to do away with Joan Crawford.
Myra was a breakthrough role for Bening, and one which styled her very much in the Grahame mould, as a squeaky-voiced blonde bombshell leading with her ample physical charms. Now, in the faded-legend biopic Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, Bening has been able to re-access that legacy and flesh it out with three subsequent decades of dwindling, smouldering stardom. Having paid homage to Grahame in her prime, she plays her at the fag end here of a fast-burning life. The film opens with Grahame collapsing in a Lancaster theatre’s dressing room, as a 1981 performance of The Glass Menagerie was about to start.
We get the bric-a-brac of a displaced thesp, far from her heyday, treading the boards: mementoes are strewn about her table, including a lighter Bogart gave her after her finest performance, in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). She leaves a cigarette half-burning in an ashtray, heads to the stage, and never makes it.
Meanwhile, in Liverpool, a young guy called Peter Turner (Jamie Bell) is striding home that night, and flicks his own cig against a wall, striking sparks. Compared with Gloria’s elaborate make-up routine, hiding an obvious illness under her falsies, he’s the very image of an artless, youthful vigour.
Two years before, he met Gloria, when they were sharing the same boarding house in Primrose Hill, and it became the last important relationship of her life, after four marriages, each spawning a child, had already crumbled around her.
Derived from Turner’s own memoir, the film delves into their two-year history with a lot of foregrounded artifice. Opening a door on to the past here is often literally a matter of opening a door, or rounding a corridor, stepping into a happier time. The film’s gauzy approximation of Los Angeles and New York in those days feels threadbare, intentionally tacky: behold the Manhattan skyline from a hotel balcony, just a bright, immobile projection through some net curtains. Like Gloria, the film’s on a budget, showing its seams, and the illusions it conjures with smoke and mirrors have a beguiling pathos.
It’s a dreamy comeback for Paul Mcguigan, the Scottish director who showed such dangerous promise back in the Gangster No. 1 (2000) days. He does very well with Peter’s family life, thanks in part to Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham as welcoming, worrying Scousers who let Gloria move into their spare room and bicker around the kitchen table. But the film truly lights up when its leads are circling each other.
Their age gap is unspoken until the second it isn’t – and it’s smart of Matt Greenhalgh’s script to turn this moment into an implied insult to Gloria, then a cue for Peter, apologetically, to go in for the first kiss. Their first few dates – a Saturday Night Fever-style dance-off in Gloria’s lounge, a trip to see Alien – are as tentative and disarming as the ones in Brooklyn.
It’s no surprise that Bening is in her element here, following a run of performances whose tiny flickers of wit and detail have taken her – dare we suggest – beyond even Meryl Streep in layered understanding of the women she’s given to play. There’s a structural twist in the script’s second act which lets her project Gloria in two different ways, and we get to see her turning her own life into a tragic performance – a dumb-show with a hidden agenda. It’s virtuosic stuff, with a range of effects always registering on her face at once, some of them communicated not to Peter, only to us.
Had the film simply been The Annette Bening Show, we’d certainly have coped. But she’s matched every step of the way by Bell, in a flat-out career-best performance, achieved so naturally it’s a marvel. He’s not just sweet, doting, and sprightly, with that boyish charm turned up to 11, but profoundly vulnerable, in a year when male vulnerability at the cinema (consider God’s Own Country, Dunkirk, The Big Sick, to name but a few) has been so often a merciful respite from the real-world horrors men have inflicted.
Bell’s close-ups, his slightly wobbling chin and ability to go from jaunty to crestfallen in a beat, are the film’s secret weapons, triggers for more emotional release than you ever thought possible from just this ordinary Liverpudlian boy-toy. The few lines he reads from Romeo and Juliet would convince you, frankly, to give him either part.
The film isn’t exactly a curtain call for its Oscar-winning title character – it’s more like a touchingly shabby long goodbye. And it’s Bell’s Peter doing all the waving.