The Wood ‘Mystery’: revisiting a star long gone

“The Mystery of Natalie Wood,” airing tonight on ABC, purports to tell the story of the American actress, who died in 1981 at the age of 43, drowned just off Catalina Island. It does something of the sort.

In the long history of the movies, there have been relatively few great biographical films, and even fewer made for TV, and barely any, if any, of these have been about actors. But the economic attraction is obvious: A film about Natalie Wood can use Natalie Wood to sell a movie that doesn’t actually have Natalie Wood in it -- British actress Justine Waddell plays grown-up Natalie -- or any star bigger than Alice Krige, in fact, unless one counts “name” director Peter Bogdanovich, who long, long ago made “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon.”

Though I bow to none in my respect for her work, from “Miracle on 34th Street” to “The Great Race” and beyond -- and am old enough to remember her as a working sex symbol -- I can’t but wonder whether a three-hour dramatization of Wood’s life will be of interest to anyone not old enough to have seen her pictures in their original release. (And I don’t mean “Meteor.”) She was a big but not a massive star, who played almost all her notable roles before the age of 30, when she more or less quit the business for motherhood. When she died, she was in the midst of what looked like a comeback.

It is not an unflattering portrait -- and there’s no good reason to pillory a person who did no more harm to the world than make “Sex and the Single Girl.” Bogdanovich -- who had a taste of being fictionally portrayed in movies about the death of his girlfriend, Dorothy Stratten -- has said that his goal here was to humanize rather than sensationalize. But no matter how scrupulous, sensitive or flattering, all such films ultimately insult the real people they claim to reveal, if only because they reduce complicated lives to bite-sized narrative beats -- stations of the celebrity cross. Screenwriters, directors and actors practice armchair analysis, warp reality to fit a through-line. This was indeed the argument to be made against “The Reagans” -- written, as it happens, by the writer of “The Mystery of Natalie Wood,” Elizabeth Egloff -- and it was the same argument to be made against every movie of its kind.

The bulk of the film is devoted to Wood’s relationship with her hectoring, exploitative, film-struck and possibly crazy mother, played by Krige -- a woman not above pulling the wings off a butterfly to get her daughter to cry on camera, and who filled Wood up with superstitions and neuroses, including a deathly fear of drowning, which does prove handy to the filmmakers. Despite a few nibbles at the scenery, Krige does a fine job, but the overbearing stage mother is an old familiar type, and Krige’s dark Russian variations on the theme don’t add much especially new.

Wood’s twice-wed husband Robert Wagner (Michael Weatherly, of “Navy NCIS”) comes off as something of a petulant pretty boy, jealous of his wife’s greater success. Weatherly catches Wagner’s voice and manner without resorting to impersonation. It’s a truism of Hollywood biopics that the actors playing the stars have less star quality than the stars they’re portraying; Bogdanovich’s solution is to have everyone underplay, to act more like Just Folks. Nick Carpenter’s James Dean, Matthew Settle’s Warren Beatty and Malcolm Kennard’s almost too-normal Christopher Walken (with Wagner, one of the last people to see Wood alive) benefit greatly from this approach.

Waddell’s performance has its own dramatic merits without ever really reminding one of the actress she’s playing. Her Natalie seems slightly narcotized, beset by a waifish breathiness that’s at odds at least with the actress’s public image.

Elizabeth Rice as teenage Natalie is spunkier, and starrier, and she does good things with her eyebrows.

Australia is less than convincing as Southern California.

A few people who knew Wood are interviewed -- some old school chums, sister Lana (who gets a co-producer credit), a couple of steady dates, though significantly it is Robert Vaughn and Henry Jaglom and not Beatty or Dennis Hopper who appear here. If nothing else, these interpolations, while not really enlightening, remind you that the subject at hand is bigger and more complex than this film can make her. There are also photos and clips of the real Wood, but while this combination of elements may seem novel, it is of course exactly the stuff of “America’s Most Wanted.”

The length -- three hours, minus commercials -- gives the script a little room to breathe: Not every line of dialogue plays as exposition.

The film’s climax, and its centerpiece, is the re-creation, or rather the imagination, of Wood’s drowning -- it follows what might be called the official supposition. Bogdanovich takes his time with it, and it is extremely well-staged: gripping enough to make you forget how it ends. You hope for Wood to survive, even as you know she won’t.