Directed by Alan Rudolph
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Campbell Scott
Dorothy Parker: You don't want to turn into the town drunk, Eddie. Not in Manhattan.
The Algonquin Round Table, that collection of hard-drinking talents who met for lunch daily at the Algonquin Hotel, offers plenty of material for a film. Sex, infidelity, comedy, tragedy, success, and self destruction, it’s all there, and best exemplified by Dorothy Parker, a sharp-tongued beauty whose name became almost a synonym for “wit.” As played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, she’s a girl determined to be a sophisticated, hard-drinking woman of the 1920s, but too brittle to quite pull it off. The men in her life don’t help. One husband is a World War I vet who descends quickly into drug addiction, then alcoholism, another the unfaithful Charles MacArthur, who catches her heart and breaks it. Her true love is her friend and confidante Robert Benchley, a kind, funny and, sadly, already married man. Campbell Scott’s performance as Benchley hits all the right notes, injecting just the right level of good-natured sanity into a story about the hazards of celebrity. “It was fifteen years before I realized I was no good as a writer,” Benchley says at one point, “but by then I was too famous to stop.” Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is not just about a woman who kept choosing the wrong men. It’s a comic and poignant story about the extent to which talent can be derailed by fame.
CinemaLit Films
