Movie Review: 'Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool'

I fell in love with Gloria Grahame, as so many movie fans did, in her pitch perfect performance in In a Lonely Place, one of my all-time favorite films. Grahame plays one of those self-possessed, take-no-crap dames that always seemed to play opposite Bogart. He loved strong women, breaking down their defenses was what made him a screen icon, and them the envy of women everywhere. Grahame stood out, however, as she allowed herself just a little more vulnerability than the others, a note of extra sadness to go with the sass.

Gloria Grahame was rushed out of Hollywood before we truly got to know her. Her crime? Growing older and refusing to play along with Hollywood executives eager to capitalize on her beauty without respecting her talent. Screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce recalled in a piece he wrote about the movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, how Grahame lost the iconic role of a gangster’s moll turned lady in Born Yesterday when she refused to ride alone in a limo with producer Howard Hughes. That’s Gloria Grahame in a nutshell, beautiful and uncompromising.

Annette Bening stars as Gloria Grahame in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool and she nails the beautiful and uncompromising parts of Gloria Grahame while also exploring that vulnerability and sadness that marked the Grahame I remember from In a Lonely Place. Jamie Bell co-stars in the film as Peter Turner, an aspiring Liverpool stage actor who lived in the same rundown tenement building as Grahame while she starred in one of the few stage productions in the world that would have her.

The two met and forged a relationship that might seem icky from the outside, a May-December romance that one might assume was about an older woman’s desire and a young man’s egotistical notion of ladder climbing. That’s not this story. That’s not this couple. In the hands of director Paul McGuigan and writer Matt Greenhalgh, there appears to be little age difference at all, but rather a meeting of twin spirits, genuinely excited to find one another.

Society is where the ickiness comes in. It’s us who attempt to define relationships by our own perceptions of age and beauty. We think we are being intuitive and sensitive as in "of course he’s just trying to take an old lady’s money or gain some kind of ego boost from banging a former movie star" or "she's just wants sex with a younger man." It’s easier for us to assume such things because the truth is so much richer and engenders within many an envy that we too can’t live outside of cultural precepts.

McGuigan and Greenhalgh have crafted a rare sensitive portrayal of a romance between an older woman and a much younger man. By their work and the chemistry of Annette Bening and Jamie Bell, we are forced to confront our limited ways of thinking and examine their relationship as something where our comfort isn’t the point, what we think doesn’t matter, and these two people are genuinely in love. It’s a love as complicated and true as any other love, even the love between people of more traditional ages.

Turning fuller attention to the story as opposed to perceptions of age, beauty, appropriateness, and Hollywood nonsense, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, employs a flashback style to tell the story of Gloria and Peter. We begin in 1981 with Gloria backstage at a play, a place she knows and loves. She is preparing for a performance when she begins to feel weak and collapses. Instead of going to a hospital, Gloria makes the unusual request to be taken to Peter’s parents’ home where he is staying while working as a struggling actor.

It’s been a while since they’re romance ended in an ugly fight filled with hateful banter. Peter remains in love with Gloria despite what happened and welcomes her into the home though it is a significant disruption to the lives of his family, his mother and father, Bella and Joe (Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham), and Peter’s brother, Joe Jr. (Stephen Graham). From here the film will flash back several times to the important moments in Peter and Gloria’s relationship, from their first meeting to their first date, to moving to New York and Los Angeles and finally their terrible ending.

The structure of the film is a tad showy for my taste but I understand how a more traditional narrative approach might have come off stale. McGuigan is a fine director who crafts a lovely work of art in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. At times, however, the flashbacks are a little clumsy and over-pronounced. At one point, it actually seemed as if Peter were having a seizure as he moved from a scene in 1981 through a flash of light into a flashback to his first time seeing Gloria. It’s fair to say that it's a little clumsy at times.

That said, however, when Bening and Bell are allowed to work without the flashbacks gumming the works, the film soars. Bening and Bell are so genuine and tender together that when Gloria turns on Peter, we feel the heartache and anguish as much as he does. Gloria has a reason behind her cruelty that we see in another flashback, one that takes place from her perspective instead of his, where most of flashbacks reside, but the power of the moment that she turns an icy, Gloria Grahame performance against the man she loves, has incredible power.

Bening’s Gloria has that kind of personality that you’ve known in your own life, that person whose mood changes the room you’re both in. Her mood can seem to determine the room temperature. When she’s joyous, the room seems lit from within from her radiance. When she’s unhappy, the room feels darker and chilly. I know a woman in my life with a similar power over a room and from her real life, black-and-white movie performances, you can sense that the real Gloria Grahame likely had a similar power over her environment.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is a powerful Hollywood true story that renders real and human one of our black-and-white goddesses. Sure, age likely did that first for the real Gloria Grahame, but I didn’t know the real Gloria Grahame. I only knew the goddess. Director McGuigan and star Annette Bening have done something remarkable to break through the screen and bring out the woman behind the impossible beauty.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is in limited release as of November 19 and will expand to more theaters in America as the awards season unfolds.