MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Mrs. Parker’ Praises and Puts Her Down

The Algonquin crowd in “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle”--the film should be called “Smart and Smarter”--are a nattery bunch of smarty-pants cynics, mostly men. The only woman who holds her own with them is Dorothy Parker (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

As a Jazz Age wit in a roomful of overweening fellow wits, Dorothy is a sodden sprite. Her zingers take the form of funky aphorisms, but her line delivery is deliberately wan. It’s as if she’s bored by her own genius for barbs.

Directed by Alan Rudolph and co-scripted by him with Randy Sue Coburn, “Mrs. Parker” is a real odd duck of a movie. It seems to have been made both as tribute and put-down. The sporty conviviality of the Algonquin Round Table--the playwrights, critics, poets, actors, artists and hangers-on who regularly convened for lunch at New York’s Algonquin Hotel for more than a decade--is celebrated, and yet there’s a hollowness to the confabs.

Rudolph doesn’t really want to skewer the likes of George S. Kaufman (David Thornton), Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott), Charles MacArthur (Matthew Broderick), New Yorker magazine founder Harold Ross (Sam Robards), Robert Sherwood (Nick Cassavetes) or Alexander Woollcott (Tom McGowan). He doesn’t want to spoil the party but he doesn’t want to make these people the life of the party either. Their can-you-top-this banter is full of bon mots that aren’t all that bon .

Since the Algonquin Round Table has faded into American literary mythology, Rudolph’s attempt to revive it seems musty and coy. It’s not just a matter of “Who cares?” We are given no compelling reason to care. Parker, and her extended and deep friendship with Benchley, are the movie’s centerpiece, but most of the time we seem to be floating high above the proceedings. The movie is basically about writers as jawboners, as drinkers, with Parker as Queen of the Hill.

Since most of their achievements--on Broadway, in Hollywood, in the magazines--are skimped or glossed over, we’re unfortunately left with their personalities. And Rudolph, as usual, puts brackets around his people: Like the Paris expatriates in “The Moderns,” the Algonquin gabbers are conceits first and human beings second. They congregate in a mellifluous, boozy haze. The inauthenticity is carefully wrought--even the furniture seems to be play-acting.

Parker starts out hung over with cynicism and, by the time the film finishes up with her death in 1967, she’s essentially the same way. In between she slashes her wrists, puts up with a series of disdainful husbands and lovers, goes to Hollywood and retreats to semi-anonymity in Manhattan--she’s a pixie Garbo who still goes out.

Leigh manages the 30-plus year trajectory with ease and yet her performance seems like a deeply felt stunt. Her clipped archness is apparently a dead-ringer for Parker’s but, as with Leigh’s Katharine Hepburn-ish accent in “Hudsucker Proxy,” the exaggerated intonations distract from the woman underneath. Leigh manages to work up a fair amount of feeling for Parker without stooping to easy pathos, and that’s an achievement. At times she fulfills Alexander Woollcott’s famous description of Parker as a cross between Little Nell and Lady Macbeth. But the Dorothy of this movie doesn’t really live on in our imaginations. None of the characters do.

The irony of Parker’s life is that, although her lifelong theme was the seductive closeness of death, she managed to outlive just about everybody in the Round Table. She squandered her considerable gifts as a poet and short-story writer and then sat in silent witness to the wreckage. Some of this material comes through in the movie, but not enough--perhaps because Parker’s talents on the page are never really given their due. Instead Parker is memorialized as a misery-wracked quipster. It’s too limiting a conception. Her mausoleum could use a few more rooms.

* MPAA rating: R, for sexuality and language. Times guidelines: It includes a wrist-cutting scene and much boozing.

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‘Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle’

Jennifer Jason Leigh: Dorothy Parker Campbell Scott: Robert Benchley Matthew Broderick: Charles MacArthur Andrew McCarthy: Eddie Parker A Fine Line Features release. Director Alan Rudolph. Producer Robert Altman. Executive producer Scott Bushnell. Screenplay by Alan Rudolph and Randy Sue Coburn. Cinematographer Jan Kiesser. Editor Suzy Elmiger. Costumes John Hay and Rene April. Music Mark Isham. Production design Francois Seguin. Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.