Main Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Matthew Broderick, Campbell Scott, Peter Gallagher, Jennifer Beals
Release Year: 1994
Country: US
Run Time: 123 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Jennifer Jason Leigh offers an acclaimed 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 Parker'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 Parker truly seems to care about is humorist Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott), who prefers to keep their friendship platonic. 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, All Movie Guide
Review
Jennifer Jason Leigh turns in a fascinatingly odd performance in this depressing but lovingly crafted film about the acerbic Dorothy Parker. Tracing her life in flashbacks, the film wisely focuses on the halcyon days of the Algonquin Round Table, where New York's top writers drank, laughed, and traded virulently witty put-downs. In these sequences, director Alan Rudolph presents a keenly observed look at the incestuous and ultimately destructive nature of the tightly-knit group, as the fun times soon turn to betrayal, alcoholism, and attempted suicide. The cast is wonderful, with surprisingly good turns from Matthew Broderick and Andrew McCarthy, among others, but some of the film's artistic conceits and its downbeat tone may turn off potential viewers. Its effect depends primarily on whether you buy Leigh's interpretation of her role, which is unusual to say the least. If you do, you'll find this quirky, offbeat picture to be richly rewarding despite its uneven pace. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
Andrew McCarthy - Eddie Parker; Wallace Shawn - Horatio Byrd; Martha Plimpton - Jane Grant; Sam Robards - Harold Ross; Lili Taylor - Edna Ferber; James LeGros - Deems Taylor; Gwyneth Paltrow - Paula Hunt; Nick Cassavetes - Robert Sherwood; David Thornton - George S. Kaufman; Heather Graham - Mary Kennedy Taylor; Tom McGowan - Alexander Woollcott; Chip Zien - Franklin P. Adams; Gary Basaraba - Heywood Broun; Stephen Baldwin - Roger Spalding; Matt Malloy - Marc Connelly; Rebecca Miller - Neysa McMein; Jake Johannsen - John Peter Toohey; Amelia Campbell - Mary Brandon Sherwood; David Gow - Donald Ogden Stewart; Leni Parker - Beatrice Kaufman; J.M. Henry - Harpo Marx; Stanley Tucci - Fred Hunter; Mina Badie - Joanie Gerard; Randy Lowell - Alvan Barach; Keith Carradine - Will Rogers; Peter Benchley - Frank Crowninshield; John Cusack; Jon Favreau - Elmer Rice; Leonard Parker; Gabriel Gascon - Georges Attends; Jane Adams - Ruth Hale
Credit
James Fox - Art Director, James Mclindon - Associate Producer, Renee April - Costume Designer, John Hay - Costume Designer, Allan Nicholls - First Assistant Director, Alan Rudolph - Director, Suzy Elmiger - Editor, Scott Bushnell - Executive Producer, Ira Deutchman - Executive Producer, Mark Isham - Composer (Music Score), Richard Nichol - Musical Direction/Supervision, Micheline Trepanier - Makeup, François Séguin - Production Designer, Jan Kiesser - Cinematographer, Robert Altman - Producer, Frances Calder - Set Designer, Jacques Godbout - Special Effects, Richard Nichol - Sound/Sound Designer, Alan Rudolph - Screenwriter, Randy Sue Coburn - Screenwriter
Mrs. Parker was an original member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, actors and critics that met almost daily from 1919-1929 at Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel.
Many respected actors appear in very brief roles in the film. Actress Jennifer Beals discussed this in her appearance on the Jon Favreau documentary program Dinner for Five; she stated that much dialogue was improvised in the style of the real-life characters actors were playing, but that many of those characters were not integral to the plot. As such many of the actors had much larger parts that were edited down to nearly nothing.
The film was a critical but not a commercial success. Leigh duplicated Parker's clipped, ironic, boozy tone, but some of her lines were redubbed after complaints at the Cannes Film Festival premiere that the dialogue was difficult to follow.[citation needed]
