I learned a great deal about Ms. Davis from this movie. Certainly there was a lot to learn. This is a woman with a 50-year film career, with 2 Oscars and 9 other best actress Oscar nominations; with four marriages, three children, numerous affairs, and drama-packed relationships with nearly all her relatives and studio heads. There is enough material in this for several movies, or at least a serious mini-series. And here it is all jammed into 90 minutes! It's an ambitious project.
I'm glad to have seen it, but I can't pretend there are no flaws in it. First, as suggested above, there are a lot of events to cover and it's hard to do them all justice in this short a time, or even to present them in a logical sequence that the viewer can actually follow.
The movie's chief sources of informational footage are film of public appearances by Ms. Davis and her relatives and contemporaries during her lifetime, and more recent interviews with surviving relatives and acquaintances. But we are repeatedly told that these are not all reliable narrators. Indeed they can't be, as they often disagree with each other. As for public appearances by Ms. Davis, studio heads, and other film industry people, filmed from the 1930's into the 1960's, suffice it to say that they are necessarily full of diplomacy, promotional intent, and courtesies which might be completely sincere or completely the opposite. The movie opens with footage from a "This Is Your Life" episode honoring Bette's mother, Ruth Davis. You can imagine how much sincere exploration of their relationship came out on that occasion.
At this point it would be good to have a sense of what Mr. Jones, the auteur of this work, really thinks. But his presence is hard to discern. His words of course are being delivered by Susan Sarandon. He also may have been affected by the obligations he incurred in gaining access to Ms. Davis's papers and convincing her children, widows of ex-husbands, and other connections to sit for interviews. Anyway, it's hard to make out how he selected what to show and what not to, or who he thought was reliable and who he didn't. I got the feeling he was just dumping out a box of information on the tabletop in front of us and letting us make sense of it if we can.
Where he does provide words of interpretation, I'm not sure where they came from. As an example, he refers at one point to the warm support Ms. Davis's absent father gave to her movie successes. But all we have really seen of this is a few thrifty ten-word telegrams of congratulation, including his full name as three of the words.
Now, someone could of course say: "What do you expect? The narrative is jumbled because Ms. Davis's public and private lives were jumbled and full of contradictions. The witnesses disagree because their experiences were different at the time and because their recollections now after forty are fifty years are different. There's no real way to determine the 'real truth' about all these things, so the pile of information on the tabletop is the only way to go." That may all be true, but I would like to have heard it explained by Mr. Jones. At the end of the day it's worth seeing, of course.
I'm glad to have seen it, but I can't pretend there are no flaws in it. First, as suggested above, there are a lot of events to cover and it's hard to do them all justice in this short a time, or even to present them in a logical sequence that the viewer can actually follow.
The movie's chief sources of informational footage are film of public appearances by Ms. Davis and her relatives and contemporaries during her lifetime, and more recent interviews with surviving relatives and acquaintances. But we are repeatedly told that these are not all reliable narrators. Indeed they can't be, as they often disagree with each other. As for public appearances by Ms. Davis, studio heads, and other film industry people, filmed from the 1930's into the 1960's, suffice it to say that they are necessarily full of diplomacy, promotional intent, and courtesies which might be completely sincere or completely the opposite. The movie opens with footage from a "This Is Your Life" episode honoring Bette's mother, Ruth Davis. You can imagine how much sincere exploration of their relationship came out on that occasion.
At this point it would be good to have a sense of what Mr. Jones, the auteur of this work, really thinks. But his presence is hard to discern. His words of course are being delivered by Susan Sarandon. He also may have been affected by the obligations he incurred in gaining access to Ms. Davis's papers and convincing her children, widows of ex-husbands, and other connections to sit for interviews. Anyway, it's hard to make out how he selected what to show and what not to, or who he thought was reliable and who he didn't. I got the feeling he was just dumping out a box of information on the tabletop in front of us and letting us make sense of it if we can.
Where he does provide words of interpretation, I'm not sure where they came from. As an example, he refers at one point to the warm support Ms. Davis's absent father gave to her movie successes. But all we have really seen of this is a few thrifty ten-word telegrams of congratulation, including his full name as three of the words.
Now, someone could of course say: "What do you expect? The narrative is jumbled because Ms. Davis's public and private lives were jumbled and full of contradictions. The witnesses disagree because their experiences were different at the time and because their recollections now after forty are fifty years are different. There's no real way to determine the 'real truth' about all these things, so the pile of information on the tabletop is the only way to go." That may all be true, but I would like to have heard it explained by Mr. Jones. At the end of the day it's worth seeing, of course.