going home
by Douglas Messerli
Chiemi Karasawa (director) Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me / 2014
[documentary]
There’s something about singer-actor Elaine Stritch that doesn’t quite match. The Detroit-born Stritch, whose uncle was the famed American cardinal, is, as Alec Baldwin observes in this new documentary by Chiemi Karasawa, at heart a convent girl. As she made clear in her great one-woman performance, At Liberty—a performance I saw close up in the Carlye Café several years ago—Stritch spent most of her early life as a rather naïve virgin. She raced from Marlon Brando’s apartment when he showed up in pajamas, and threw over boyfriend Ben Gazzara for Rock Hudson, before she discovered he was gay.
Despite this, Stritch has used in her long legs, generally stuffed into
black tights, which she wears in private and public, as a kind of trademark.
And the little-girl innocence and vulnerability she often exudes is covered up
by a kind of boozy (she was an alcoholic, but went 20 years without liquor,
only to begin consuming one drink a day in the past couple of years)
tough-speaking “broad,” greeting friends and enemies alike in what sometimes
seems to be an artillery of personal attacks and profane-laden abuse. Yet, it’s
clear, she is loyal to those she loves and who love her. Her once ringing alto
voice has turned into a gravelly cackle that surely might scare young children.
But then, there is that lovely smile upon her face and a laugh that makes you
want to cry. Stritch, or “Stritchy” as Noel Coward called her, is a mess of
contradictions. Tough as nails, highly vulnerable and insecure, a kind of bawdy
saint, a consummate professional and forever fresh, Stritch is so fascinating,
in part, for the contradictions she has all her life portrayed.
In Karasawa’s documentary she comes off as someone to whom you might
never want to get too close, but at the same time you’d love to hug—if only
she’d let you! But she’d rather have your anonymous applause. She’s a born
performer, even when opening a package of muffins, scolding Karasawa for not
following her with the camera as she moves from kitchen to dining table, even
snapping at the television set for not showing a hug between her and Baldwin on
“30 Rock.” “You look better than you usually do,” she greets an old friend.
Part of the cantankerousness that is featured in Karasawa’s film has do with
the fact that at the ages of 86-89 (during which the film was shot) Stritch was
feeling, frankly, like an old lady. Her diabetes had gotten worse, her thirst
for liquor more pronounced, and, worst of all, she was forgetting the lyrics to
songs by her friend Stephen Sondheim, which, she quips, are difficult to sing
in the best of times. These times, quite obviously, are some of the worst.
Rehearsals with her piano player, the patient Rob Bowman, end in
nightmare situations, one of which sends her to the hospital; an impending
storm seems to trap her in a New England hotel where her performance was
cancelled. Sometimes, as she admits, it’s just not worth it “going on”—meaning,
on one level, simply not continuing with the rehearsal, but suggesting the
larger life and death situation as well. Yet once she does enter the glow of
the stage lights, the audience poised to love her, something remarkable
happens: her performance of “I Feel Pretty,” transforms Sondheim’s “ditty” (a
song which today he declares is one of his worst) into a grittily ironic paean
to survival; the composer’s “Everyone Says Don’t” becomes a mean growl against
bourgeois respectability. Even when she forgets her lyrics, she turns the
problem into something like fun, demanding Bowman himself sing out or
requesting that the audience join in a kind sing-along. Although we know this
documentary is “about” her and not a record of those performances, it is
frustrating when we catch only moments of her wonderful ability to entertain.
Perhaps the saddest moment of all is
when she telephones her nephew back in Detroit to tell him that she wants to
leave New York, that it’s time to “go home.” His clever repartee, “Well you
can’t say you didn’t give New York a try,” says everything. And her “going
home,” we all recognize, is a euphemism of the death she now must face. The
film ends on the upbeat, with a written declaration that Stritch plans to
retire in 2014, or 2015, or 2016….when we all know that she has already
returned to the Midwest to live and, having seriously fallen twice, that she
will never again grace the New York stage.
To say that we might miss “Stritchy,” is
a bit like saying that you now miss all the good and, sometimes even bad times
of your life. You can’t bottle up a person like you might a great wine. All you
can do is toast to the memory of such a refreshingly honest slap in the face.
Los Angeles, April 3, 2014
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (May 2014).
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