Jamie Bell and Annette Bening in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

FILM STARS DON’T DIE IN LIVERPOOL
Directed by Paul McGuigan
Certificate 15
☆☆☆☆

BASED on the memoirs of actor Peter Turner, this gentle, funny and moving film tells the story of how Peter, a young actor trying to forge a way in show business, met and fell for an ageing Hollywood star.

Gloria Grahame was a black and white screen star, scooping an Oscar for her work and performing with some of the greats of the 1940s.

Peter met her in the late 1970s. They are both lodging in a fuggy, dusty old boarding house in Primrose Hill and while she works in British theatre, he is waiting tables between gigs.

He has no idea who she is, but the young man, lonely and far from home, finds something deeply attractive about this fascinating, glamorous American who has buckets of charm, and oodles of thespian stories to share.

As he is drinking in a pub – which suspiciously looks like the famous The Washington in Englands Lane – the barman nods at him and asks if she is the Gloria Grahame…

They fall for each other but things do not go smoothly when they head to live in New York, for reasons that become clear as the story unfolds.

McGuigan uses chronological tricks to stitch together the tale. He tries to show a conflict between a run-down working-class Liverpudlian home that is full of warmth, and a posh high-end New York apartment that lacks it. It is rather clumsy, but Annette Bening’s performance, ably supported by Jamie Bell, Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham, is superb. She captures the dazzle of a true Hollywood great – she starred in films such as The Big Heat with Lee Marvin – now living in a world where the light has faded.

And there is a hidden, and bigger point, made by McGuigan. Away from it being a story that you can imagine Turner has rightly dined out on, Grahame is shown to be deeply affected by the way the film industry treats women.

In the light of the sadly unsurprising recent revelations about sexual abuse in the film industry, it is worth considering the long-term and continuing abuse and oppression through the on-screen portrayal of women. This is what Naomi Klein called the male industrial complex – women should look and act a certain way, a film studio ideal. This unenlightened and rotten edifice is what this film’s premise sits upon. Gloria, an A-list actress who carries around a powder puff box with a thank you inscribed from Humphrey Bogart, has been told time and again her worth is solely judged by her looks. A damning indictment of how the industry works.