I have often wondered, given his more recent movies, what happened to director Robert Zemeckis. This is the man behind Forrest Gump, the Back to the Future trilogy, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. At some point he started making motion capture CGI movies that, in many cases, I honestly wondered why they didn’t just make them live action. Since then, he’s made a lot of fairly forgettable movies in that I can’t quite remember any of them. True, I saw his Welcome to Marwen, but that movie was really, really disappointing. I got up to take a phone call in the middle of it. I never do that when I’m in the multiplex otherwise.
So, with that in mind, I thought I’d check out one of his older movies that I had somehow not seen before: 1992’s Death Becomes Her.
In 1978, aspiring writer Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) takes in a Broadway show featuring her former high school classmate Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) with her fiance Dr. Ernest Menvill (Bruce Willis). Ernest is an up-and-coming plastic surgeon and a big fan of Madeline. Madeline has stolen every boyfriend Helen has ever had (Helen thinks it’s deliberate). And, sure enough, Ernest marries Madeline instead. Time passes, Helen gains a lot of weight as she becomes a crazy cat lady, completely obsessed with Madeline. And then, something off happens. Madeline and Ernest are invited to a book debut party. Helen has a new novel, she’s lost a lot of weight, and she looks younger than she has in years.
It doesn’t take long before Madeline finds out the reason. A mysterious woman named Lisle (Isabella Rossellini) is selling a potion that grants the drinker eternal life and youth. Now, there is one small catch to all this: both Helen and Madeline can’t die because, as a terrified Ernest finds out, they’re both already dead. They can blast shotgun holes through each other or snap heads all the way around all they want: neither can die, but both can take damage. About all they have left is a mutual fight over Ernest, especially since he’s talented enough to keep the pair looking like they’re still among the breathing.
This was fun. The comedy is pitch dark, and there’s more going on than the initial glance might suggest. Despite coming across as the victim, later reveals show Helen was just as terrible to Madeline when the two were in high school as Madeline was to Helen. It also helps that Hawn and Streep are both rather attractive women, Hawn in particular being singled out as someone who doesn’t seem to age much. Heck, the two still look pretty good today for their respective ages, and both have great comedic timing.
That said, the real standout is probably Willis, These days, Willis seems to phone in most performances as the laconic tough guy. There’s nothing of the tough guy in Ernest, and it’s easy to forget Willis got his start in comedy. Ernest is an absolute wimp, but he’s also perhaps the smartest of the three main characters. Completely uninterested in vanity like the women are, when offered the chance to have eternal life and youth of his own, he asks the smartest possible question imaginable in such a situation. Faced with the horror of being stuck with Helen and Madeline for all eternity, he makes the best possible decisions for how to live the rest of his life in mere moments, perhaps the only truly dynamic character in the movie. It’s a welcome change of pace for Willis and was probably just as much a surprise then as now.
As for Zemeckis, the movie is well-paced and has a lot of great visual gags. He’s always been a director interested in special effects, and while Death Becomes Her may not pull out the CGI of, say, Forrest Gump, some of the ways the two women abuse their respective bodies are still largely well done, though a sequence where Streep’s Madeline is walking around with her head on backwards hasn’t aged quite so well as some of the other moments. Still, it was a fun movie with an expectedly ironic ending for two horrible women. It’s not quite in the field of Zemeckis’s best work, but it’s a far cry from just about anything he’s put out lately.
Grade: B+
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