Loving Highsmith (2022) User Reviews

Patricia Highsmith was a complicated person

[Red-125 · 8/10 · 6 November 2022]

Loving Highsmith (2022) was written and directed by Eva Vitija.

The film is a biography of Patrica Highsmith, who was a successful author and a legendary figure.

Highsmith appears in the movie in archival footage. Many of her friends and lovers give candid interviews. What makes Highsmith different from other successful authors is that she was openly lesbian.

Loving Highsmith reveals that Highsmith was not a lovable woman. She seduced younger women and was a virulent anti-Semite. (She supported Palestinian rights, but this support was overtly linked to her hatred of Jews.)

Highsmith is important because she wrote the first novel about lesbians that had a happy ending. (Novels about lesbians were OK in the 1950's, but they had to have an unhappy ending.) She used a pen name in 1952.

In 1983 the book was republished as Carol, with Highsmith listed as the author. (The book was made into a movie that was highly successful.)

Loving Highsmith was an honest and accurate portrayal of a woman who was hard to like. Maybe Highsmith's story is the reason that the movie has a relatively low IMDb rating of 7.1. I thought it was better than that.

I think that a biopic should be rated on its effective portrayal of its subject--not on whether you like the person portrayed. I rated it 8.

We saw this film as part of Rochester's excellent ImageOut LGBT festival.

Far too broad with at least one massive inaccuracy

[hbeeinc · 4/10 · 12 November 2022]

The movie starts off with the filmmaker saying "I started reading her diaries and fell in love with her."

I'm currently reading her diaries and it really doesn't feel like the filmmaker read them. The docu portrays her as a man-hating lesbian. That's not true. Her diaries show that, while she preferred women, she certainly slept with men. On purpose. And even enjoyed it sometimes.

The relationship with her mother, too, was much more complicated than the filmmaker lets on. She and her mother actually talked about her lesbianism with her mother sometimes commenting about her current girl friend. Both of her parents read her work and, as Highsmith tells it, were helpful and supportive.

The oddest choice was continuing the Texas theme throughout the whole movie. Highsmith left Texas when she was 6. To see the movie, you'd think that Texas was all she thought of. That's just not the case, at least from her diaries.

I suppose I went into this expecting this to blow me away since the diaries are so powerful. The interviews were interesting...except when the white subtitles blended into the white background. Why is this still a thing??

She's a fascinating woman and deserved a better tribute to her.

Disappointing

[elision10 · 5/10 · 29 September 2023]

I love Patricia Highsmith's work so much. It's almost criminal to think that, at least when I was growing up, she wasn't taught at all in school. Always read the Highsmith book before seeing the movie based on it. As highly regarded as Strangers on a Train and Carol are, neither has one-tenth the extraordinary complexity and moral ambiguity of Highsmith's writing (nor, with the exception of Blanchett's Carol, do any of its characters).

Thus any documentary about this magnificent author is going to be of some interest. But by focusing so relentlessly on Highsmith's relationships with women, the film conveys little of why we should care about Highsmith at all. There is little about her professional life -- relationships with editors, failures, sales volumes, etc., let alone any serious examination of her work.

So for the devoted Highsmith fan the movie is worth watching but nevertheless a disappointment.