The unsinkable Shirley MacLaine

Film review: The Last Word

MANILA, Philippines - It’s been a while since one saw a Shirley MacLaine starrer (one’s last was probably her award-winning performance in Terms of Endearment).

With her latest one, The Last Word, it was easy to see that she remains unsinkable in the acting department.

She’s now 82 and in the film, she plays the role of the 81-year-old retired businesswoman Harriet Lauler who is obsessed with reading a good obituary — about herself.

The story and screenplay of Stuart Ross Fink — ably directed by Mark Pellington — allow us to see an amazing transformation of the main character. In the beginning, her own gardener and cook abhor her, and as she drives to a newspaper that is a recipient of past kindness, you deduce she gets what she wants and will not take no for an answer.

Unable to stand a radio show which she finds pedestrian (at least according to her taste), she drives to the radio station, announces she wants to take over a radio program with better music selections and the station manager is convinced she has a good taste.

Poor lady jobless announcer leaves in a huff and grumbles about an unbelievable “100-year-old woman” who has taken over her job.

As the story unfolds from one scene to another, you can see that clearly, MacLaine’s character is made of the impossible stuff: A nightmare as a boss, an unthinkable one as a wife and an even more unbearable mother — at least according to the daughter.

But later in the story, you are at once convinced she has a point in everything she does. It’s not mere whim or caprice. She has an uncanny common sense and she can raise hell if she thinks it was the only way to make people see her point.

A welcome foil to her feistiness is Amanda Seyfried who plays the newspaper writer tasked with writing her obituary. Of course, she finds it strange and quite morbid that someone would commission a writer to write her own obituary to make her look good in the public eye.

But that is just the beginning of the story. The magic of the screenplay is that after focusing on the character’s impossible ways, you gradually absorb her redeeming points and why she acts the way she does.

MacLaine’s exchange with assorted characters elicits guffaws from the audience and here you see that the magic of her acting has not waned a bit.

Seyfried as the newspaper writer is able to muster good ensemble acting with the lead actor and to her credit, she delivers enormously.

There is a kid in the film that manages to hold her own against MacLaine’s brilliance and her name is Ann Jewel Lee Dixon, a nine-year-old city urchin with Rasta braids who can drop f-letter words like it was her normal dialogue.

Lee joins MacLaine in the great unfolding of the story and you begin to see the other side of her complex personality.

Her reunion with her daughter (Anne Heche) she has not seen in 20 years allows her to unleash a devilish laughter that unsettles poor daughter.

Poor mother thought she was too harsh on her daughter and when she found out how she coped with her own life’s trials, she realizes she didn’t do too badly after all.

One agrees with what another film enthusiast wrote about her latest film outing thus: “MacLaine has worked with a lot of great directors in her career —Vincente Minnelli, Billy Wilder, Mike Nichols, Hal Ashby and Richard Linklater, just to name a handful — but she’s maybe never had a director who’s understood and celebrated her talents the way that Mark Pellington does in The Last Word. Pellington explores and builds upon MacLaine’s persona the way that John Ford did with John Wayne in The Searchers, or Clint Eastwood did with himself in Gran Torino. Her work in The Last Word recalls and comments upon films like The Apartment, Terms of Endearment and Postcards from the Edge — then goes deeper.”

Released by Star Cinema, The Last Word is now showing in cinemas.