THE CAT'S MEOW --------------
The death of pioneering Hollywood producer Thomas Ince (Cary Elwes, "Shadow of the Vampire") has become the stuff of tabloid legend with its odor of cover up and factual disconnects within a celebrity circle. Director Peter Bogdanovich ("The Last Picture Show"), who first heard the story from good friend Orson Welles as a "Citizen Kane" anecdote, gathers a glittering cast to perform Steven Peros' play adaptation, where the action occurs on the yacht of William Randolph Hearst, in "The Cat's Meow."
"The Cat's Meow" resembles "The Last of Sheila" crossed with the period of "Murder on the Orient Express." While this lively whodunit doesn't herald a major comeback for Bogdanovich, it does showcase nineteen year old Kirsten Dunst ("Spider-Man") in one of the best female performances of the year.
Ex-pat English novelist Elinor Glyn (Joanna Lumley, TV's "AbFab") acts as our tour guide and witheringly witty commentator. She's the first to arrive for the weekend cruise, but advises her driver that she is not here, not wanting to be unfashionably early. She'll depart with the same declaration for very different reasons.
Starlet Marion Davies (Dunst) watches the arrivals from her lush stateroom - she's like a bird in a gilded cage. She has some intense eye contact with Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard, "Shadow of the Vampire"), before telling off 'Pops' for spying on his guests, which W. R. Hearst (Edward Herrman, "Reds") does with elaborate shipboard eavesdropping and spyhole devices. W.R. acquiesces to his mistress, graces her with a new diamond brooch, and begins to host the weekend cruise in honor of Ince's birthday.
Everyone on board has an agenda. First and foremost, Hearst is keeping an eye on Marion and Chaplin, especially after his assistant Joseph (Ronan Vibert, "Shadow of the Vampire") delivers a rival paper's gossip column which pairs the duo at a nightclub. Ince is desperate to make a filmmaking deal with Hearst as a comeback gambit and is quick to spot and use Hearst's weakness. Ince's business manager George (Victor Slezak, "Lost Souls") is acting as a beard for Ince's mistress Margaret Livingston (Claudia Harrison), an aspiring actress hoping for a career push. Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilly, "Bullets Over Broadway"), a NY Hearst film reviewer, is looking for syndication. Chaplin wants Davies, who's fighting the temptation in favor of keeping Pops' peace. When Ince provides Hearst with a discarded love letter from Chaplin to Marion, his gesture backfires spectacularly.
Peros' script is most successful in seeding future facts known about the 1924 shipboard revelers in later years. Hearst's puritanical insistence on limiting guests to one alcoholic drink (they make up for prohibition later below decks) is sure to provoke thoughts of Davies' later alcoholism. Chaplin keeps asking if his starvation ideas are funny, until Marion acknowledges the idea of eating a boot, but only if it's boiled first. Chaplin insists that Hearst is keeping Davies down in historical dramas when her talent lies in comedy (he's proven right when Hearst bores guests with Marion's latest dailies and the audience only comes alive at her between takes tomfoolery). An underlying theme about the curse of success, exemplified by many of the characters here, is summed up by Glyn equating Hollywood with a beastly wizard.
With the exception of Dunst, the cast has been assembled from tried and true period performers, yet she outshines them all. With maturity and depth, Dunst makes us ache for the young woman who denies her own passions to stay loyal to her benefactor. She displays confidence in shepherding the activities of a boatload of luminaries while steering Hearst clear of boring business prattle and both vulnerability and strength when faced with romantic desire. Herrmann is directed too far towards the doddering fool (he wears a jester's cap while being cuckolded at a costume party) to be completely convincing as the media magnate, but surprisingly he looks just right paired with Dunst. Izzard is good as the amoral ladies' man, but paints a blurry impressionistic picture compared to the razor sharp performance Downey Jr. gave in "Chaplin." Elwes gives us a self-centered, manipulative Ince in an unsympathetic, uninvolving turn. Tilly is shrilly gauche as Louella, but shows the shark once she's dealt the trump card. Lumley is yummy tossing off caustic lines like the group's own Dorothy Parker.
Bogdanovich makes his film small, rather than grand, with close, dark interiors which feel dank, while the overall tone is too broad. The film is given a historical documentary air with black and white bookending scenes of journalistic frenzy at the celebrity funeral that segue to Chaplin gazing at the opposing points of his lovers' triangle through portholes at film's beginning and end.
Bogdanovich's surest stroke with "The Cat's Meow" is in giving Dunst her best role yet.
B
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