Postcards From the Edge
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL

     1990 produced what is, in my estimation, one of the best
Hollywood films by a woman about women in years--very possibly
the best ever. The film is "Postcards From the Edge." It was
written by Carrie Fisher, directed by Mike Nichols and stars
Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine.  I thought that it's just
about as good as Hollywood films get, and if you missed it in the
theaters, it's available on video.

      The film "Postcards From the Edge" is very different from the
novel of the same name, and a significant improvement over it.
The film is essentially about the enormous difficulties inherent
in the mother-daughter relationship, a relationship which was
barely touched on in the novel.  It chronicles how Suzanne Vale
(played by Streep) struggles to get her drug-shattered life
together, to grow up emotionally and take responsibility for
herself, and to change lifelong patterns of relating to her
mother (played by Shirley MacLaine) that have brought them both
enormous grief and pain.  Streep and MacLaine are, in my book,
very near the top of the list of all-time best film actresses,
and Mike Nichols has been able to elicit from them a level of
emotional truth the likes of which has seldom been seen on the
screen.

    But the real star of this film is Carrie Fisher's screenplay.
As you probably all know, Carrie Fisher is the actress/writer
daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.  She is an
enormously talented screenwriter who has performed the prodigious
feat of writing a film of profound substance which is at the same
time warm, funny and life-affirming but ironic enough to keep it
from becoming all gooey and sentimental.

     This is a film that takes women and women's autonomy
seriously.  Most Hollywood films, reflecting as they usually do a
male viewpoint concerning the appropriate placement of women in
the overall scheme of things, end up with the heroine in a
relationship deferential to if not actually controlled by an
appropriate male figure.  In "Postcards from the Edge" that doesn't
happen.  When Suzanne Vale finally sees through the attractive,
sexy, lying sleazebag played by Dennis Quaid she gets so mad she
pulls out the prop gun she happens to have on her and scares him
half to death by shooting the thing at him.  The women in the
preview audience clapped and cheered as she yells at him,
"They're blanks, asshole!" and drives off.  There is a suggestion
at the end of the film that, when she's ready for it and not
before, she might be interested in seeing a doctor (Richard
Dreyfuss) who wants to date her; but that's not what gives the
film its narrative closure; in fact he's not even there in the
wonderful final sequence which shows Suzanne and her mother in a
new and better place with one another, her career moving in a
successful new direction that matches her talents, and her mental
and physical health restored.

     I am heartened on those rare occasions when a major
Hollywood studio makes a film like this that so goes against the
patriarchal values that are its usual stock in trade, because
this film's success at the box office and the video store may
serve to encourage Hollywood producers to venture to make more
films that break with tradition and portray women through the
lens of women's own experiences, rather than through the
distorting lens of what men think women are like.  Go rent
"Postcards from the Edge."  I hope you love it as much as I did.

For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women
and Film.