Seen now, Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her might
almost be a prequel to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, the latter film
taking Zemeckis’s themes of overpromising and grotesquely misdelivering remedies
to aging, and of reluctantly co-dependent women, and ramping them up for an
even more sensation-seeking audience. The comparison especially comes to mind given the
blandly rarified Hollywood setting of both films, and the reliance on female
protagonists with no apparent inner life or aspirations other than youth itself;
Fargeat at least provides the sense of a concept pushed to the very edge, making
Zemeckis’ film feel even blander and complacently hysterial than it already
did. The plot, such as it is, introduces a lifelong rivalry between two women
(Meryl Streep’s Madeline and Goldie Hawn’s Helen), unaccountably coming to a
head over plastic surgeon David (Bruce Willis, going through the motions as if
under his own kind of life-depleting spell) who breaks an engagement with one
to marry the other; eventually they both separately find their way to the
mysterious Lisle von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini, doing her own barely-clad thing),
whose anti-aging remedies come with awful and unavoidable side effects. The
film’s squandered concepts and assets (in addition to its one-note lead actors)
include the notion that all of Hollywood’s legendary premature victims (Monroe,
Dean etc.) are still alive and youthful-seeming, executed with all the panache
of a half-hearted flick through a Madame Tussaud’s brochure; the special
effects are inevitably somewhat dated, which wouldn’t matter as much if they
were used to more enjoyable ends. Further low points include the
cringe-inducing depiction of Helen in her overweight cat lady phase …well you
get the point. An early musical number, performed by Madeline in an ill-fated
Broadway show, is one of the more enjoyable sequences, but it’s apparently
intended to be so bad that half the audience walks out, so even that doesn’t work
as intended.
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