Movie odd, rather like Spector
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 highest-profile 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-the-scenes machinations and manoeuverings 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 actress and former fashion model Lana Clarkson.
Pacino prowls 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-saythat-on-pay-TV language.
Oddly, though, Phil Spector is not as much about Spector as it is his lawyer, Linda Kenney-Baden, a former federal prosecutor-turned-private trial-attorney, 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.
It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the film’s underlying problem, though. It opens with a title card that tells the audience that they’re about to see a work fiction that’s not “based on a true story” but rather “inspired by actual persons in a trial … neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor to comment upon the trial or its outcome.”
If it’s not based on a true story, then, and it isn’t an attempt to depict actual persons, what is it?
A reasonably entertaining courtroom drama is the answer, with one terrific performance — Mirren’s — and a couple of showy moments from Pacino. (Sunday, HBO) ■ The family drama Merlin calls it a day with a two-hour series finale that’s somewhat less than epic, but will nonetheless satisfy fans of a medieval fantasy that lasted five full seasons before Saturday’s final chapter.
The character Merlin was conceived as a feckless teenager, as played by the charisma- Colin Morgan.
Merlin’s finale — no spoilers here — features a quest, a showdown between mortal enemies, a glimpse of the fabled Isle of Avalon and much grunting and groaning from Saxon armies. There are morals to be drawn about the true meaning of magic, and when to use it. (Saturday, Space)