Mrs Parker And The Vicious Circle

Alan Rudolph with his regular collaborator, composer Mark Isham, is back in the 1920s the time frame of his excellent thematically-related movie The Moderns. This time however it’s not Paris and the American literary expatriate movement that is his subject but Dorothy Parker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the famed Algonquin Round Table, a circle of columnists and writers such as Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott who gathered daily for lunch at the Manhattan hotel.  Mrs Parker, is to her credit, today the best known of the lot, largely for her  dryly epigrammatic poetry and this is the side of her that Rudolph focuses on, dividing the film into two parts: the glory days of the Algonquin, filmed in colour, which constitute the bulk of the film, and Parker’s rather more pedestrian later years (filmed in black and white).

The film works best as a portrait of Parker, the showcasing of the various Round Table members being too self-consciously handled as they obligingly toss off their bon mots for us, overseen by an attentive maitre de (Wallace Shawn). Although Ms. Leigh’s clipped diction can be very hard to understand at times, her portrayal of Mrs P. and her various unhappy relationships including an unrequited love affair with Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott) and an unhappy requited one with  Charles MacArthur (an ill-cast Matthew Broderick) brings home the angst and loneliness of a woman who not only had to deal with her personal demons but hold her own amongst such glittering company.

 

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