DEATH BECOMES HER 1992 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2016/12/death-becomes-her-1992.html
In today’s digitized, high-definition world—in which real-life, flesh and blood humans from the most mundane walks of life willingly subject themselves to near-medieval levels of torture in an effort to achieve the burnished, robo-mannequin sheen of Photoshopped magazine covers—I don’t think it’s possible to lampoon our culture’s extreme youth-addiction and obsession with physical perfection. Happily, in1992 (ten years before Botox, and back when Cher and Michael Jackson were the reigning poster kids for plastic surgery excess) director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forest Gump) made this demented and dark comedy which broadly burlesques contemporary society’s two most dominant religions: the worship of beauty and the fear of aging.
"Wrinkled, wrinkled little star...hope they never see the scars." In the original screenplay the line was "Wrinkle, wrinkle, go away, come again on Doris Day" a lament uttered by Elizabeth Taylor in 1980's The Mirror Crack'd
In this self-professed nod to Tales from the Crypt (the comic-book-based HBO anthology series for whom Zemeckis co-produced and occasionally directed) Death Becomes Her is a 1/14
comedy-of-the-grotesque cartoon which posits the dream of eternal youth as a upscale zombie nightmare. Set in a baroque, just-barely exaggerated vision of Beverly Hills where the thunderclaps and lightning flashes all hit their marks and know their cues; Death Becomes Her spans 51-years (1978 to 2029) in chronicling the ceaseless competition between two college frenemies. A bitter rivalry every bit as combative and twice as deadly as Batman vs Superman‌only with better dialogue and smaller busts.
Meryl Streep as Madeline Ashton
Bruce Willis as Dr. Ernest Menville
Goldie Hawn as Helen Sharp 2/14
Isabella Rossellini as Lisle Von Rhuman
Former Radcliffe classmates Madeline Ashton (Mad for short) and Helen Sharp (Hel for keeps) are the kind of friends that only a shared alma mater could produce. Though we ultimately come to learn that they are but two antagonistic sides of the same counterfeit coin, when first glimpsed, the artificial Madeline and the apprehensive Helen couldn’t be more dissimilar, appearing to be friends in name only. Plain-Jane Helen, an aspiring author of diffident, soft-spoken character, unconcerned with appearance, has a history of having her boyfriends stolen by the ostentatiously glamorous Madeline. Madeline, an obscenely shallow, superhumanly self-enchanted actress of questionable talent, is all surface charm and charisma, but otherwise appears totally devoid of a single redeeming character trait. She concerns herself with looks and appearances to the exclusion of all else.
"Tell me, doctor...do you think I'm starting to NEED you?"
The women's heated rivalry temporarily assumes the guise of a romantic triangle when beginning-to-show-her-age Madeline sets her sights upon (and effortlessly steals) Helen’s fiancé, the bland-but-gifted Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Ernest Menville. Of course, there’s no romance to this romantic triangle at all, what with Madeline’s interest in the colorless dolt being solely of the self-serving variety (she gets to assert her desirability superiority over Helen while 3/14
simultaneously securing a lifetime of free nip/tuck services); but this last-straw betrayal by both fiancé and friend proves enough to send poor milquetoast Helen right over the edge.
What's The Matter With Helen?
Cue the passage of fourteen years. Everybody is miserable and nobody winds up with what they thought they wanted. Madeline, career and looks in decline, is blatantly unfaithful to husband Ernest, and goes to Norma Desmond extremes in an effort to stay young. Meanwhile, emasculated Ernest has succumbed to alcoholism and is reduced to plying his surgical skills on corpses. But it's Helen who rises like an Avenging Angel from the doughnut crumbed, canned-frosting ruins of her nervous breakdown. Magnificently svelte, newly glamorized, channeling her inner Madeline, and, after several years of therapy, imbued with a Dolly Levi-esque sense of purpose (“For I’ve got a goal again! I’ve got a drive again! I’m gonna feel my heart coming alive again!”). Naturally, Helen's goals aren't anywhere near as lofty or honorable as those of that musical matchmaker's: Helen's newfound purpose is to reclaim her life through the eradication of Madeline’s.
Hel Goes Mad and Dedicates Her Life To Making Mad's Life Hell
Alas, Helen’s strength of resolve is all well and good, but homicidally speaking, the best laid plans of mice and men are doomed to failure when the man in question (Ernest) is an indisputable mouse. By the same token, it's perhaps not the best idea to wage a to-the-death 4/14
battle when both combatants, thanks to the supernatural intervention of a raven-haired sorceress and her immortality potion, can’t really die.
I saw Death Becomes Her for the first time on cable TV in the mid-‘90s, and I immediately regretted never having seen it in a theater. I thought it was outrageously funny and I imagined seeing it with an audience would have been an experience similar to my first time seeing What’s Up, Doc?: the laughter being so loud and continuous, you have to see the film twice in order to pick up all the lost dialogue. I’ve no idea if public response to Death Becomes Her was anywhere near as vociferous (it’s a weird little film), but I found it to be one of the most consistently funny comedies I’d seen since the ‘70s heyday of Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, & Madeline Kahn. Incorporating comic book sensibilities and B-horror movie tropes into a dark satire of those frozen-in-time animatronic waxworks endemic to the environs of Beverly Hills, Death Becomes Her provides director Robert Zemeckis an ideal vehicle to indulge his fondness for absurdist special effects. The screenplay, a best-of-both-worlds/Frankenstein collaboration between TV sitcom writer Martin Donovan (That Girl, The MTM Show) and action/adventure writer Martin Koepp- (Jurassic Park, Mission impossible), deftly maintains a balance of broad action (think Tex Avery cartoons or Bugs vs Daffy Looney Tunes) and oversized characterizations.
Late-director Sydney Pollack (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) contributes a hilarious unbilled cameo
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Which brings me to Death Becomes Her’s strongest attribute: its cast. Streep, Hawn, and Willis—talented professionals all—had, at this stage in their careers, fallen into that movie star rut of delivering exactly what was expected of them, nothing more. Recent releases had shown each actor contributing reliable-but-unexceptional performances in so-so films. Professional, journeyman-like performances devoid of either spark or surprise. But Death Becomes Her—in casting against type—taps into something fresh in each of them. With abandon they lose themselves in the outlandish, outsized characters they’re called upon to play, blowing away the cobwebs of predictability from their individual screen personas. Together they form an unholy trinity of bad behavior while treating us to the liveliest, most unexpected, enjoyably over-the-top emoting of their careers. WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM When television broadcasts changed from analog to digital, and I purchased my first HDTV, one of my strongest recollections is of how dazzlingly crisp and clear it was, and simultaneously how clinically unforgiving it was to human beings. TV shows I had grown up watching in their natural fuzzy state were so clear! Images were so sharp I could make out the weave knit twill fibers in Fred Mertz’s jacket. But my lord, the havoc it played with people’s faces. It was like you were looking at everyone through a dermatologist’s magnifying glass— bringing to mind that line from Cukor’s The Women “Good grief! I hate to tell you dear, but your skin makes the Rocky Mountains look like chiffon velvet!”
Madder 'n Hell (Mad, Ern, & Hel)
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Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep- two longtime favorites of mine, really come alive as zombies
I don’t know what it was like elsewhere, but the cumulative effect HDTV had on local Los Angeles newscasters and even minor TV personalities was to have men and women scrambling to the plastic surgeons in a mad rush reminiscent of the final reel to The Day of the Locust. Over the last decade or so, the already youth and looks-obsessed entertainment industry has seen a normalization of the kind of rampant surgical restructuring that once caused Mickey Rourke and Cher so much tabloid grief. The artificially enhanced appearance has now grown so common, it has become its own aesthetic.
What Price Beauty? 7/14
And while everybody seems fine with health-related elective surgeries like dental and Lasik, people still harbor strong opposing opinions about those who turn to medical science in order to turn back the clock, retard the aging process, or sculpt and reconfigure themselves to fit a particular beauty standard. Death Becomes Her is no serious treatise on our culture’s preoccupation with youth and slavish devotion to beauty, but by addressing these hotpoint issues in a comical, larger-thanlife framework—it manages to be one of the sharpest and to-the-point commentaries committed to film.
PERFORMANCES Broad, farcical comedy of the sort employed in Death Becomes Her is awfully hard to pull off (1991’s Soapdish comes to mind…unfavorably). In fact, the main reason I didn’t see Death Becomes Her when it was released was because the trailer so turned me off. Not only did it look far too exaggerated and silly (it recalled Streep’s She-Devil, a film I absolutely hated), but in addition: I never much cared for Bruce Willis; Goldie Hawn’s post-Private Benjamin output had grown increasingly derivative, and the continued forays into comedy by Streep-the-Serious (Postcards from the Edge, Defending Your Life) had the effect of subduing her talent, not showcasing it.
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It surprises me a bit to glance over Bruce Willis' long list of credits on IMDB and come to the conclusion thatMortal Thoughts (1991) and Death Becomes Her is the only films of his I like. He's so good here. Funny and touching, and providing the grounded emotional contrast to his co-stars' magnificent maliciousness
But what always brings me back to rewatching Death Becomes Her is how all the elements gel so smoothly. Everyone from composer Alan Silvestri to the film’s vast army of FX wizards are all on the same comic book page. Best of all, the actors and their pitch-perfect performances are never dwarfed by the dated but still-impressive special effects. The comedy is perhaps too dark to be everyone’s taste, likewise the tone of exaggerated nonreality. But for me, all these disparate elements coalesce to create a howlingly funny film that feels like a major studio version of those reveling-in-bad-taste underground/counterculture comedies like Andy Warhol’s BAD or John Waters’ Female Trouble (which could serve as Death Becomes Her’s subtitle).
The arresting Isabella Rossellini is a special effect all unto herself. Alluring and dangerous, she is a dynamic, indelible force in her brief scenes
THE STUFF OF FANTASY 9/14
A major highlight of Death Becomes Her is getting to see the great Madeline Ashton in full diva-fabulous mode appearing onstage in a misguided musical version of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth. A play, appropriately enough, about an aging star making a comeback. The time is 1978, and, as described in the screenplay, our first glimpse of 40-ish Madeline is of her “Singin’ and dancin’ up a storm seemingly without benefit of training in singin’ or dancin’.”
The song she’s singing is a riotously vainglorious paean to self, titled “Me,” and the production number is a compendium of every star-gets-hoisted-about-by-chorus-boys Broadway musical cliché in the book. The number is terrible—from the song itself, to the costuming, choreography (they break into “The Hustle” at one uproarious point), and the over-emphasized “stereotypically gay” voices of the chorus boys—and therefore, it's also absolutely brilliant.
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What's great about the number is that without benefit of inserting any intentionally comedic elements (save for a ceaselessly shedding feather boa) it manages to be side-splittingly funny and cheesy as all get-out merely by channeling any number of '70s variety shows. As a quick glance at YouTube will attest, nothing about Madeline's dance routine would be out of place on an episode of The Hollywood Palace, The Ed Sullivan Show, or take-your-pick Mitzi Gaynor TV special.
Although Madeline is supposed to be awful, Streep is actually quite marvelous. Her musicality and phrasing is spot on. Her movements are sharp, she never misses a beat with any of her gestures, and there's an effortlessness to the number of small bits of comic business she's able to insert into the performance without ever losing her stride. What really makes the number so hysterically funny is the level of Las Vegas showroom self-satisfaction her Madeline radiates. No one could tell Madeline she's not stopping the show and bringing down the house with this ridiculous number, and her genuine obliviousness to the silliness surrounding her makes for a priceless moment in wince-inducing musical cinema.
The first time I saw Streep perform "Me," what immediately popped into mind was the 1986 Academy Awards telecast. That was the year Teri Garr opened the show with a truly cringeworthy production number around the song Flying Down To Rio that was every bit as atrocious as Madeline's First Act closer (even down to the same tearaway skirt and hyperactive chorus boys). Further cementing the recollection: Meryl Streep, who was nominated that year for Out of Africa, when interviewed about the show afterward, expressed her enjoyment of Garr's performance and her wish to someday be invited to sing and dance in a production number 11/14
like it. She got her wish.
Late-actress Alaina Reed (Sesame Street, 227) as the psychologist who inadvertently sets Helen on her murderous course
THE STUFF OF DREAMS Like Sweet Charity, Fatal Attraction, and the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors, Death Becomes Her is a film whose original ending was jettisoned due to unfavorable preview response.
Grotesquely disfigured and unable to maintain themselves with any level of precision, Madeline & Helen attend Ernest's funeral in the year 2029
In the original version, after escaping from Lisle's, Ernest fakes his death and runs off with Toni (Tracey Ullman, the entirety of whose footage ended up on the cutting room floor), a sympathetic owner of a local bar he frequented. Jump ahead 27-years, Madeline and Helen, still beautiful and perfect, are in the Swiss Alps, bored with life and bored with each other's company. In the distance they glimpse an old, hunched over, toddling married couple. Madeline comments on how pathetic they are, Helen, as she watches them walk away, hand in liver-spotted hand, is not so sure. We learn that the couple is Ernest and Toni, now very old, but very much in love. Fade Out.
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I absolutely adore that ending! Test audiences claimed the more poignant conclusion didn't fit the more cartoonish flavor of the rest of the film, so rewrites and reshoots resulted in the very good, very funny ending the film currently has. It's not a bad ending at all, and based on the success of the film, is perhaps more in keeping with the tone established at the start; but honestly, I just love the idea of the jettisoned ending. I think it would have provided the perfect coda for a wonderful film.
Helen and Madeline, talons sharpened, have become living gargoyles
BONUS MATERIAL Goldie Hawn discusses her preference for the film's original ending HERE You can read the original screenplay in PDF form with all the deleted material HERE The original theatrical trailer features many scenes that never made it into the final film.HERE
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Copyright © Ken Anderson
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