Marvin's Room Marvin's Room (Air Date: Week Of 02/12/97)
Early last year, in our interview with Marlene Gorris, director of the Oscar-winning "Antonia's Line", starring middle-aged Willeke Van Ammelrooy, I asked if she thought it was becoming easier for middle-aged actresses to get juicy roles. She answered, “I hope so, but I doubt it. It would be nice if women over 40 got better parts, but utopia is a long way off, I'm afraid.
Well, it's gotten a lot closer, judging from films released in the past year. "The Proprietor" starred the almost septuagenarian Jeanne Moreau, still on a pedestal. "The First Wives Club" has Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, and Goldie Hawn loving, losing, and finally winning, especially at the box office; Catherine Deneuvre remains beautifully inscrutable in "Ma Saison Preferee" and "Les Voleurs"; fiesty Shirley MacLaine cavorts with a man young enough to be her son in "The Evening Star"; Goldie Hawn is romantically floating on air at the end of Woody Allen's "Everyone Says I Love You"; Marisa Parades finds life after marriage in "The Flower of My Secret"; and Streisand has the romantic lead in "The Mirror Has Two Faces".
Which takes us to "Marvin's Room", and "Unhook the Stars, with more choice roles for women of a certain age. "Marvin's Room" is a superbly crafted interweaving of several difficult topics -- broken family ties, a hopeless mother/son relationship, the needs of the elderly, and, to top it off, leukemia. But don't panic -- it may sound Bergman-esque, but the treatment is low-key with comic touches -- therapeutic, not traumatizing, like vigorous massage on a sore muscle.
Merryl Streep plays Lee, the sister who left home twenty years before, and hasn't been back since, leaving older sister Bessie, played by Diane Keaton, to care for their invalid father, Marvin, and their Aunt Ruth. Lee returns with her two sons when she finds out that Bessie, diagnosed with leukemia, needs a bone marrow transplant from a family member to save her life.
Looking glamourous and youthful, Lee has just gotten her cosmetology license, and claims her life is in order, even though her teenaged son, Hank, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, recently burned down their house. Diane Keaton looks luminously her own age as Bessie, who wears an unflattering wig due to hair loss after radiation. Robert DeNiro plays a doctor without a bedside manner, in scenes combining comic relief with medical tests and treatments.
Lee re-styles her sister's wig, the troubled Hank goes on an exuberant joyride with Aunt Bessie, and blushing Bessie tells Lee the secret of her one great, youthful love. The truth in these imperfect, believable, relationships, and offbalance, but normal lives make "Marvin's Room" a rewarding film.
Copyright 1997 Mary Weems