Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
Crit
I have always gravitated toward people who wear their hearts on their sleeves. That goes double if it's a woman who also doesn't wear pants, including the 87-year-old performer Elaine Stritch as revealed in a new documentary filmed as she prepared for an all-Sondheim concert. Elaine is a stitch, starting with an impromptu two-step as she walks down the street past a booming boom box, moving along to her delighted acceptance speech for the 2004 Emmy (when she pointed at other nominees like Billy Crystal and Ellen DeGeneres and beamed, "I'm so glad they didn't win!"), and concluding with her eagerness to share a relative's summation of her 65 years in New York City as she prepares to return to her native Michigan ("You can't say you didn't give it a chance").This documentary is not all laughter and music, though there is plenty of both. At 87 (two years ago), she shows signs of physical fragility--she is hospitalized twice during filming because of complications from an ongoing battle with diabetes--emotional insecurity, and a fresh battle with encroaching memory loss. But Stritch's irrepressible spirit surmounts all obstacles and doubts. In concert, she turns an elusive lyric into an even more delightful rendition of "I Feel Pretty" than it might have been decades earlier.
Stritch has a wise approach to pushing forward despite her increasing infirmity. She wants to wring every bit of joy, learning, and sharing she can from life, and by embracing the adventure of aging she does not give in to sadness. A consummate entertainer in her prime on Broadway, film, television, cabarets, and everywhere else, she's the kind of performer often said to possess "joie de vivre." In this occasionally poignant but always inspiring documentary, that "joy of living" is more palpable and more literally true than ever for the one and only Elaine Stritch.
1 comment:
Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me is an interesting, autobiographical memorial to its subject and star. Towards the end of the film, after her second and more severe hospitalization due to complications from diabetes, Stritch remembers her mother's prompting to think about "what kind of picture you're going to leave in the world." This legend of a performer has already established herself in 20th century American theatrical history: a bulldog of a performer who has been singing and dancing and acting on Broadway, to great popular and critical acclaim, for 75 years. But I wonder if this will be the film that will act as her "picture in the world," a portrait of someone persistently alive, especially for those members of the audience who are far too young to remember her as the star of Company or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I see this film as a testament to how honesty keeps you young, alcohol keeps you under the illusion of safety, and ferocity keeps you alive. And I guess vulnerability, let alone mortality, is what keeps you human.
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