MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAYPlot in a Nutshell
Bharat Nalluri’s 2008 period comedy about a frumpy, down-on-her-luck governess (Frances McDormand) in Depression-era London who finagles her way into a job as the social secretary for a flighty, man-crazy American singer (Amy Adams).
Thoughts
Is simply being irresistibly adorable a legitimate acting talent?
That question occurred to me as I watched Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, as it does whenever I watch Amy Adams lately. It’s hard to think of another contemporary actress who has thrived on unfiltered adorability the way Adams has. I don’t detect a backlash forming just yet, but I suspect that if she gives one more performance as a wide-eyed naif whose unworldly innocence, rather than being annoying, comes across more as a stage of grace, that critics might start to turn on her. Critics don’t like feeling fooled, and what struck the critical community as such an inspired, out-of-nowhere acting turn as the pregnant Ashley Johnsten, her starmaking, Oscar-nominated turn in Junebug, could start to look like a predictable bit of shtick now that we’ve seen it couple more times in Enchanted and now Miss Pettigrew.
Then again, there’s something about Adams as a performer that inspires a feeling of protectiveness in the viewer—you’d have to be a pretty cold-hearted critic to scold Amy Adams. Her lip would start to tremble, and she’d probably burst into tears right there in front of you. We’re going to need someone heartless to do the job—is John Simon available?
Adams’ appeal is encapsulated in a nice little scene from Miss Pettigrew. Her character—a bright-eyed, hip-wiggling starlet with the wonderful name “Delysia Lafosse”—is emerging from her luxuriously enormous bathtub, and director Bharat Nalluri poses her in front of the giant seashell painted on the tiles so that she resembles Botticelli’s Venus. Miss Pettigrew is gently scolding her for the way she’s juggling three boyfriends at once. “Haven’t you ever been torn between more than one person at the same time?” Delysia asks.
“No,” says Miss Pettigrew, the old maid, her expression hardening a little. “I can’t say I’ve ever had that particular problem.”
And then, there’s a strange little moment: Miss Pettigrew turns around, and sees Delysia standing there, all pink and young and curvy and covered with bubbles, her nakedness barely concealed by a fluffy white towel. “You are beautiful, Delysia,” she says, to which Delysia responds with a pleased, childlike smile. “Well,” she says with a giggle, “it’s not a bad figure if I do say so myself!”
The line might sound obnoxiously self-satisfied if it were spoken by almost any other actress, but Adams gives it an undercurrent of uncertainty, a need to be reassured, that suggests Delysia, for all her flighty superficiality, realizes how much her good fortune depends on her ability to charm everyone around her, and how little time she has before she gets older and her streak of good fortune comes to a crashing halt.
Delysia isn’t the only one who realizes that the good times won’t last forever; Nalluri, the director, artfully weaves in enough reminders of the coming war to keep the movie from being merely a frothy exercise in nostalgia. There’s a particularly lovely scene where a cocktail party is interrupted by the sound of bombers flying overhead, and it becomes obvious that Miss Pettigrew and a sombre-faced lingerie designer played by Ciarán Hinds are the only two characters old enough to remember the previous war.
It seems appropriate that Delysia leaves England at the end of the movie to set sail for America. It’s hard to picture her (or Amy Adams) suffering through the Blitz. The Pettigrews of the world can withstand hardship, but you can’t help thinking, sentimentally, that the Delysias should be spared. I like to picture her finding a place stateside in the USO instead, wearing a cute soldier’s uniform and singing Irving Berlin songs for the troops in front of a gigantic American flag. Or dancing with GIs about to ship out overseas. I don’t think even Miss Pettigrew would begrudge her that happiness.
RATING: 3.5/5
LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBARPlot in a Nutshell
Diane Keaton plays a single woman whose habit of picking up men for evenings of casual sex proves fatal in writer/director Richard Brooks’ 1977 film version of Judith Rossner’s novel.
Thoughts
I’ve wanted to see this movie for a few years now, ever since reading Joe Bob Briggs’ appreciation of it in his book Profoundly Erotic, a terrific collection of essays about 10 “sexy movies that changed history.” He’s not a fan of the film—he calls it an anti-feminist adaptation of a feminist novel—but at the same time, he argues that the film’s thematic incoherence kind of makes it even more fascinating than a more faithful adaptation of Judith Rossner’s book would have been. In the film, the main character (schoolteacher Terry Dunn, played by Diane Keaton) is both a tragic heroine and “a speck on the cosmic landscape, swatted by God, like a fly”; she’s both a goofy, Annie Hall-like searcher and a woman in love with danger; her tale is a celebration of female sexual freedom and a puritanical horror story. You could argue about this movie for hours precisely because the movie itself hasn’t come to any conclusions either. It’s a classic example of an “incoherent text.”
Briggs’ essay helps set the film it its proper context—both in relation to the times, as well as to the real-life case of Roseann Quinn, which inspired Rossner’s book. As it turns out, a lot of the darker details in the film that don’t really mesh with Keaton’s characterization—the dirty dishes piling up in Terry’s sink (evidence of her clinical depression), the scoliosis scar on her back (which Terry takes as a visible manifestation of her own contaminated soul), the scenes with her black drug dealer—were in fact drawn from Quinn’s case history... lumps of truth that haven't quite been smoothed out beneath fiction's carpet.
But seen completely out of context—on a washed-out bootleg copy by a male viewer in 2008—the moments in the film that stand out are the lighter ones. I’m thinking of the many scenes in which Terry experiences genuine sexual pleasure—seriously, Diane Keaton does some world-class orgasm acting in this movie. I love the scene where she finds herself alone in her apartment after she’s just spent the night with a dangerous but good-looking stud (played by Richard Gere); thrilled by the great sex, by the surge of freedom, by the sheer fact that she’s gotten away with something her stern Catholic father would completely disapprove of, she joyfully hops around her bed, punching the air. I’ve never seen the exultation of sex dramatized in a movie before—not the thrill of the physical act, but the excitement that comes after the act, knowing that you pulled off the complicated feat of attracting a stranger, bringing them home, and having the time of your life with them.
Keaton has spoken warmly of working with writer/director Richard Brooks on this project, but the movie feels like a tug of war between their two sensibilities. Brooks insists on seeing Terry as a woman with a light side and a dark side—the woman who teaches deaf children and the woman who haunts the singles bars—competing for supremacy, a point he hammers home by filming Terry’s murder by strobe light: light/dark, on/off.
But Keaton’s performance keeps undermining Brooks’ dualistic conception of the role. Terry doesn’t turn into a different woman when she’s prowling the bars; she’s the same cheerful, teasing charmer she is during the daytime. And I like that aspect of the film—as someone who’s fairly shy about asking girls out on dates, I found myself really rooting for Terry to succeed in her sexual odyssey, and ignoring all the moralistic tsk-tsking Brooks does from the sidelines. (I was already ignoring all of his arty flashbacks and the proto-Ally McBeal fantasy sequences, so ignoring a few more of his annoying habits wasn’t too difficult.) I was even willing to overlook the thematic implications of Terry’s murder; I guess Brooks wants us to regard her death as an inevitable consequence of her dangerous lifestyle, but it’s presented as such a random occurrence—just a “wrong place at the wrong time” kind of accident—that I find it hard to go along with Brooks’ “blame the victim” take on the material.
That said, I was surprised at how much I liked the film. I was expecting it to focus pretty much exclusively on Terry in the singles bars, but at 135 minutes, it winds up going into a surprising amount of detail on the other areas of her life—I couldn’t believe, for instance, how much time it spends on the deaf classroom, even cooking up a whole subplot about a little black girl, her skeptical older brother (LeVar Burton!), and Terry’s efforts to get her the money for a hearing aid.
I wish I could find a YouTube clip of the opening credits—a series of evocative, grainy black-and-white images of Keaton wandering through various bars and nightclubs that immediately creates a mood of sleazy dread—but instead, you’ll have to make do with this little scene, in which Keaton first encounters Richard Gere’s on-the-make Tony. I like the coked-up way Gere keeps drumming his hands on the bar—he’d use a similar tic a few years later in the thriller Power, in which his character liked to unwind by listening to old Benny Goodman tapes and drumming along with Gene Krupa.
RATING: 3.5/5
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