Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
FILM STARS DON’T DIE IN LIVERPOOL, drama, rated R, Violet Crown, 2.5 chiles
“She was a big name in black-and-white films,” a character in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool remarks of the fallen Hollywood star Gloria Grahame (Annette Bening). “Not doing so well in color, though.”
Grahame was an Oscar winner in happier days (she won Best Supporting Actress in 1953 for The Bad and the Beautiful, and in a wonderful vintage clip, we see her simply accept the statuette, say thank you, and walk off). This movie picks up with her in 1981, the last year of her short life. Her stardom is a fading memory, and she’s trying to keep the sputtering spark alive with stage work in England. But she’s sick, and she collapses backstage. She reaches out for help to her young lover, an actor named Peter Turner ( Jamie Bell). His Liverpool family (mum Julie Walters, dad Kenneth Cranham) takes her in, providing care and comfort while the film spins back two years earlier to show us how Gloria and Peter met.
We know how good an actress Bening is, and it’s still a mystery how Oscar overlooked her in 20th Century Women (2016). The revelation of this movie is Jamie Bell, who first came to notice in Billy Elliot (in which Walters also appeared) in 2000. He danced to stardom there, and he dances with the star in the meeting scene here, when Grahame and Turner are living in a London boarding house, and the actress asks her young neighbor up to her room to show her some dance moves. She’s got nearly 30 years on him, but she’s still Gloria Grahame, still hot, and sparks fly.
The film is based on the memoir Turner wrote a few years after Grahame’s death. Director Paul McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin) and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh (Nowhere Boy) have assembled a choppy story that loses its way in shuttling back and forth between its two time frames. It never sustains a hold on its audience, leaving too much unexplained or unexplored, and yet it offers a number of affecting scenes.
Grahame, who specialized in playing bad girls, seems to have had some of that quality in real life. She’d already had a little experience with younger men. During her marriage to the director Nicholas Ray, she is said to have slept with his thirteen-year-old son (whom she later married). This dark family secret is alluded to in a good scene with Vanessa Redgrave as Grahame’s mother and an acid-tongued Frances Barber as her sister. But the film doesn’t spend much time exploring the actress’s past.
What it does deliver is another superb performance by Bening, who allows herself to look old and worn as she battles cancer, then pulls herself together with movie star élan to dazzle her young man, and us.
— Jonathan Richards