Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool

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Directed by: Paul McGuigan
Written by: Matt Greenhalgh - Based on the memoir by Peter Turner
Starring: Jamie Bell, Annette Bening, Julie Walters, Stephen Graham, Kenneth Cranham, Vanessa Redgrave, Frances Barber, Leanne Best, Tom Brittney
Biography/Drama/Romance - 105 min          Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 15 Jan 2018
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The current generation never knows what famous names of the here and now will remain famous in the future.  Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were the King and Queen of Hollywood, but I have a hunch not too many folks under 30 have ever heard their names before.  Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock achieved immortality, but Michael Curtiz did not.  Which of today’s superstars will live forever?  Will Tom Cruise stick around like Clark Gable?  Will anyone with the last name of Kardashian be more than a punchline 30 years from now?  Staying power and remembrance are fickle.  Consider the subject of Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, Gloria Grahame.  She won an Oscar in the early ‘50s.  She played opposite Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place and was featured in Oklahoma!, both films I’ve seen, but I had no idea who she was.  

Until this adaptation of Peter Turner’s memoir, Gloria Grahame was a forgotten celebrity, at least outside of cinephile circles and those old enough to remember the years her name was featured on the marquee.  Apparently, Gloria was a femme fatale mostly known as a woman with an aura of danger in film noir; it makes me think of a lower tier Barbara Stanwyck.  But Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is not a biography nor an attempt to reintroduce a faded famous figure, it’s a love story.  It’s an intense love story.  It’s the kind of love that changes the person’s life and ensures they will never be the same.  It begins as a nonchalant, flippant fling and ends up with the painful inevitability that one day, every single one of us will have to say goodbye to those who came into our lives and changed us.
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Peter Turner (Jamie Bell, Jane Eyre) forms a fierce attachment to Gloria Grahame not because she used to be a famous actress; in fact, he had no idea who she was.  He didn’t care who she was.  He had no idea she won an Oscar.  He was a late-20s struggling actor who fell head over heels into a love affair, and instead of treading water, or enjoying his time and moving on, sank deeper and deeper until he was completely consumed by it.  There was an almost 30 year age gap between Peter and Gloria when they met in 1979 and it is feels so pronounced and in our faces because rare is the story which switches the routine age gap gender.  It is commonplace to watch the refined gentleman shack up with the naive ingenue.  Here, however, it is the veteran Los Angeles mom times four who sweeps up the wet behind the ears Liverpudlian.
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Annette Bening (Girl Most Likely) plays Gloria Grahame as a Marilyn Monroe type who didn’t die young.  She tries to talk in that delicate Monroe whisper but habitually loses it when someone in the room accidentally mentions her age and or the “o” word…old.  Gloria is not aging well.  In her late ‘50s, she still thinks she can play Juliet.  Forget for a second that Juliet was supposed to be something like 15 years-old, Gloria embarrasses herself when she turns hostile on Peter who believes she made a mistake and meant to say she wants to play Juliet’s nurse rather than the teenager.  It is these all too frequent shouting matches between Peter and Gloria which made their passionate, but somewhat brief, time together not work too well on screen.  The May-December couple probably fought like cats and dogs - doesn’t mean I want to watch Annette Bening pout and storm out of the room every time she slips up and realizes she is 50-some years old.
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Their real life connection may have been hot, heavy, and spellbinding.  But the way director Paul McGuigan places their relationship on the sine wave rollercoaster of endless ups and downs does not translate to the audience as an all-encompassing, life-changing love.  Peter Turner was still young enough that no matter what happened, this was going to alter his life; Gloria probably was his first love.  Gloria’s motivations, on the other hand, are more suspect.  Married four times and even confronted with sticky family secrets like marrying one of her step-sons years after being discovered with the 13 year-old boy in bed, Gloria chose to spend the last moments of her life in a cramped Liverpool townhouse of her young paramour and his salt of the Earth parents.
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Peter’s folks (Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham) were much closer to Gloria’s age and remember when she was silver screen hot stuff.  They never pester Peter with nudges and winks about his relationship with Gloria, but are far enough removed to realize she requires more than they can provide.  Peter is in an awkward position wanting to do right by Gloria and respect her wishes of no doctors and no family.  The real Peter Turner gathered all of these experiences from the mountaintops of love to the valleys of heartbreak and sickness and put them in a memoir.  He’s wasn’t bragging about bedding a famous actress nor scoring with an older woman, their relationship seemed just as real as any other, but not so much in this film.  Bell and Bening both play intense and the fluid editing transitions between present and past and fun to watch, but their dynamic is stunted and stale.  It’s not because Gloria Grahame is more or less the answer to a very hard trivia question nowadays, but McGuigan’s take on the material is too much at arms length.  The audience is not going to walk away withe feelings we should with such heavy material.
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