Might as well live

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

(1994)

Golly! Saw this when it first came out (a literal lifetime ago: at a movie theater that's no longer there, with a wife who's no longer here), but I'd forgotten what a lighthearted, madcap laughfest it is. Jennifer Jason Leigh, wonderful as always, is the eternally mopey wit whose typewriter ribbons are marinated in acid and whiskey, and Campbell Scott, whom I believe I'd not seen before, is Peter Benchley, and why the two, grotesquely in love, keep their carnal distance remains a mystery. Maybe she was afraid it might make her happy, or he that it wouldn't.

Alan Rudolph directed--some of his earliest work was as an assistant on The Brady Bunch, then he worked second unit three times for Robert Altman, who produced this. Two other highlights in a mostly forgettable career: Choose Me (1983) and (with Scott again) The Secret Lives of Dentists (2003), but he has completed nothing since the latter. Which may explain why the story of a brilliant talent unable to actually produce much in the way of brilliance attracted him.