ANNA NICOLE (2013)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
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| Agnes Bruckner as Anna |
Anna Nicole Smith always struck me as a blonde Marilyn Monroe-type who never took herself too seriously. She seemed to always be acting, playing it up as an ex-Playboy bunny/wannabe actress who made it in Hollywood because of the size of her breasts. In the Lifetime movie, she is shown as nothing more a pill-popping boorish drunk who desired fame and fortune by sleeping her way to the top. I miss the effervescent smile, the act of
pretending that all this glamour meant so much. This TV-movie (the second one since 2009) may respect her as an individual technically, but it is only fleetingly the portrait of the Anna Nicole we saw in the media.
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| The real Anna Nicole Smith |
Agnes Bruckner plays the Southern Anna Nicole, from her days of having a child at a young age and ignored by her mother (played by an unrecognizable Virginia Madsen), to her days as a stripper who got boob enhancements to get bigger tips (36DD to be precise), to her short relationship and marriage to 80-year-old oil business mogul J. Howard Marshall II (Martin Landau, always excellent) who never judged her and found her "photogenic," to her Playboy days (which are given short-shrift), to being a model and semi-actress in movies like "Skyscraper," etc.
The movie, written by Joe Bateer and John Rice, races past many events in Anna Nicole's life without focusing on any of them in any intimate manner. Anna drinks and pops pills and vomits while her son, Daniel, tries to make her change her ways (and her lesbian love affairs in elevators to boot). Some of the scenes between Anna and her son are powerful (and I liked the cliche of her future self and her child-like self reflected in mirrors, one offering a future of glitz, and the other being more disapproving of where she ended up). Other times, there is a little too much focus on her drinking incessantly - I understand showing the negative with the positive but there is precious little shown that is positive.
Most of the cast does the best they can with thin, marginalized material. Martin Landau elevates his role with cherished moments of subtle grace and humor ("You make me feel like 75 all over again") but when his greedy son (Cary Elwes, who is an expertly bad actor) appears, he drags the movie down with a mannered, emotionless performance. Same with Adam Goldberg as Howard K. Stern, an eerie resemblance to be sure, but his character exists as some sort of impotent chum who hung on to Anna but we never quite figure out why (Blink and you'll miss the crucial character of Daniel Birkhead, who does nothing more than have sex with Anna and shoot her pic for no more than 3 minutes of screen time). Everyone exists as a pawn in Anna Nicole's life to be used and drained of all financial resources except for her cherished Daniel, who eventually succumbed to drugs and died before Anna did. If the movie had established a closer look at Anna and her son (especially the reality show they were in), in addition to revealing more insight into her lifestyle beyond drinking binges, it might have been more than a mediocre biography about any starlet (a shame considering the director is Mary Harron, who also helmed "American Psycho" and "Notorious Bettie Page"). The truth is Anna Nicole was more than an average starlet - she was Anna Nicole Smith!
