Spector bio disorienting
Anyone who turns to Phil Spector expecting a tell-all biography about the infamous music producer, or a tell-all account of one of Hollywood’s highestprofile murders in recent memory, is bound to be disappointed.
Phil Spector plays instead like an eccentric, expanded episode of Law & Order, with the emphasis on over-the-top courtroom exchanges and behind-thescenes machinations and manoeuvring of a case tried as much in the court of public opinion as a court of law.
The result is a strangely odd, disorienting experience. It’s hard to know what to make of the finished film. It’s neither documentary nor particularly satisfying drama. Instead, it falls somewhere in between — fictionalized reality, inspired by real-life events but not necessarily based on them.
Phil Spector certainly comes with a rich pedigree. Al Pacino chews the scenery with typically Pacino-esque relish as the 73-year-old record producer and songwriter on trial for the murder of occasional actress and former fashion model Lana Clarkson. Pacino prowls the screen like a force of nature, buried under a fright wig and obscured behind tinted glasses as he rails away at the injustice of it all, in pithy you-can-only-say-that-on-payTV language.
Playwright David Mamet’s script has come under fire from victims’ rights groups for paying short shrift to Clarkson’s life, and for implying that justice was somehow not served when Spector was convicted of Clarkson’s murder. It took two trials in real life. The first trial, which forms the focus of Mamet’s story, ended with the jury deadlocked at 10-2 for conviction, resulting in a mistrial. Spector was convicted after a second trial, a year later in 2008.
Spector’s defence team always insisted Clarkson’s death was accidental, or suicide. Mamet’s script — the celebrated playwright also directed — suggests Spector was convicted because he was actively disliked, because he was peculiar and affected, and resented for his success.
Oddly, though, Phil Spector is not as much about Spector as it is his lawyer, Linda Kenney-Baden, a former federal prosecutor-turned-private trialattorney, played in the film by Helen Mirren.
And it’s Mirren who steals the show.
Pacino has the bigger, showier scenes, but it’s Mirren who the camera follows and lingers on, as she furrows her brow in exasperation and tries to counter her client’s irrational outbursts with calm reason.
Mirren is unafraid to appear without makeup or be seen as unglamorous. In some scenes she looks like hell — which is roughly what, as a client, Pacino-as-Spector puts her through. Mirren is that rare performer who can play thoughtfulness and intelligence, yet also be entertaining. Pacino is the star, but Mirren is the pure actor. (HBO Canada – 9 p.m.)