Synopsis:
Jennifer Jason Leigh
offers a bravura (if sometimes stridently mannered) performance as
humorist
Dorothy Parker, who together with such 1920s luminaries as Robert
Benchley,
Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman, was a charter member of the
legendary Algonquin Round Table. The story is related in flashback
form,
as Mrs. Parker, in Hollywood to cowrite the 1937 feature A Star is Born
with her second husband Alan Campbell (Peter Gallagher), recalls her
glory
days as an Algonquinite. A great deal of attention is afforded
Dorothy's
vituperative bon mots, her alcoholism, her self-destructiveness, her
suicide
attempts, and her affairs with such literary contemporaries as Charles
MacArthur (an uncharacteristically unsympathetic Matthew Broderick) and
Robert E. Sherwood (Nick Cassavetes). The one person Dorothy truly
seems
to care about is humorist Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott), who prefers
to keep their friendship platonic. Leigh makes us care deeply about
about
a person who evidently didn't give a tinker's dam about herself.
Director
Alan Rudolph attempts to convey the ambience of the 1920s by having
dozens
of that decade's luminaries appear in fleeting cameos, from Will Rogers
(Keith Carradine) to Harpo Marx. Also featured in Mrs. Parker are Tom
McGowan
as the waspish Alexander Woollcott and Andrew McCarthy as Dorothy's
near-invisible
first husband, Eddie Parker. -- Hal Erickson
Critics' reviews:
Tucson
Weekly review
Memorable lines
Dorothy:
I'm afraid I might lose you.
Robert:
You'd have to wear a pretty large hole in your pocket to lose me, Mrs.
Parker.
