Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

“She was a big name in black-and-white films, not doing too well in colour,” we’re told near the start of Film Stars Don’t Die in Liv­er­pool. ​“Always played the tart.” Of course, there was a lot more to Glo­ria Gra­hame than that, but film biopics have an unfor­tu­nate habit of flat­ten­ing out the com­plex­i­ties and incon­sis­ten­cies of a person’s life to fit a famil­iar, sim­plis­tic template.

In the 1940s and ​’50s, Glo­ria Gra­hame was involved in some of the great­est films of the stu­dio era, win­ning an Oscar for The Bad and the Beau­ti­ful and being nom­i­nat­ed for Cross­fire. She had four mar­riages (includ­ing a noto­ri­ous­ly tumul­tuous one with Nicholas Ray), and her inse­cu­ri­ty about her looks led her to under­go a series of dam­ag­ing plas­tic surgery pro­ce­dures. Paul McGuigan’s film, how­ev­er, is inter­est­ed in just two things: her late-in-life romance with a much younger man, and her sad decline as she final­ly suc­cumbed to cancer.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liv­er­pool is adapt­ed from the mem­oir by Peter Turn­er, who fell in love with ​“Glo” in 1979 and then cared for her through her ill­ness in 1981. If the prospect of view­ing a female Hol­ly­wood icon through the lovestruck eyes of a young Eng­lish­man pro­vokes queasy mem­o­ries of My Week with Mar­i­lyn, you can relax a lit­tle, because this one at least boasts two lead actors who share a gen­uine chem­istry. While Annette Ben­ing might not look much like Glo­ria Gra­hame, there’s some­thing irre­sistibly spir­it­ed and beguil­ing about the per­for­mance she deliv­ers. She rel­ish­es the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play an unapolo­get­i­cal­ly sex­u­al 55-year-old, and her flir­ta­tious exchanges with Jamie Bell (who game­ly keeps pace with her) make the film’s open­ing scenes glide by smoothly.

The prob­lem is the rest of the movie. McGuigan han­dles the tran­si­tions between time peri­ods in imag­i­na­tive ways, but the trips to 1981 are so much less engag­ing and reward­ing than those ini­tial encoun­ters. Glo­ria and Peter’s vis­its to the US are plagued by hor­ri­ble rear-pro­ject­ed back­drops (per­haps inten­tion­al­ly to cre­ate a dream­like atmos­phere, but they just look cheap and tacky), and by the time every­one has gath­ered togeth­er in the Turn­er fam­i­ly home, with Julie Wal­ters dust­ing off a rote ​“Scouse Mum” turn from her reper­toire, the unex­pect­ed sense of vital­i­ty and inti­ma­cy that we enjoyed ear­li­er in the film has long since dis­ap­peared. There’s noth­ing left to do but watch as Glo­ria grad­u­al­ly dete­ri­o­rates, and while the film­mak­ers work hard to con­struct a tear­jerk­ing cli­max, it has no weight because it just feels like we’re going through the biopic motions.

It has become stan­dard prac­tice for biopics to end with real images of the peo­ple involved and Film Stars Don’t Die in Liv­er­pool shows us Glo­ria col­lect­ing her Best Sup­port­ing Actress Oscar before the cred­its roll. But the film’s most strik­ing use of archive footage occurs much ear­li­er, when we’re treat­ed to a clip of her singing ​‘Ace in the Hole’ from the 1954 noir Naked Ali­bi. It’s only a brief glimpse, but it might be enough to make you won­der why you’re not spend­ing this time just watch­ing a Glo­ria Gra­hame pic­ture instead.