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‘Last Word’ swaps chick-flick sweetness for some saltiness
REBECCA L. FORD
Law Bulletin columnist
Published: March 27, 2017
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Gloria Steinem defined “chick flick” as a movie “that has more dialogue than car chases, more relationships than special effects and whose suspense comes more from how people live than from how they get killed.”
“The Last Word,” starring Shirley MacLaine as Harriet, an involuntarily retired advertising executive, is definitely a chick flick.
It is also a movie which acknowledges that for corporate women of Steinem and MacLaine’s generation, being as sharp as a knife and as hard as a rock was one of the few ways to gain professional altitude — until it wasn’t.
Harriet’s control-freak nature and her isolation are established at the beginning of the movie. She wanders aimlessly through her beautiful house, making adjustments to the already-perfect appointments and micromanaging the help. She has nothing to do — and nothing in particular to live for.
In her existential crisis, Harriet becomes interested in the obituaries. Glowing obits, she notices, are written about people she knows to have been truly terrible. So she ferrets out the four elements that are necessary for a great obituary.
The obit must report that the departed: (1) was loved by family; (2) was admired by co-workers; (3) touched someone’s life unexpectedly; and then, there must be a (4) wild card.
As an executive, Harriet advertised heavily in the city’s newspaper. The publisher grudgingly “reciprocates” by brokering Harriet’s enlistment of a young obituary writer, Anne (Amanda Seyfried), to write Harriet’s obituary that weekend, under Harriet’s direction.
One of the movie’s highlights is the montage of opinions from the people Anne interviews to gather string for the obit. When asked to say something nice, one of Harriet’s “friends” responds, after a long pause, “If she were dead, that would be nice.”
She puts the “bitch” in “obituary” Anne complains, after several such interviews.
Harriet realizes that Anne must help her shape her legacy, not just transcribe it.
To satisfy the requirement that she touch someone’s life, Harriet visits a community center to find a “hooligan who will benefit the most from my wisdom.” The women take a potty-mouthed African-American moppet, Brenda (Ann’Jewel Lee), under their wing.
This cheeky waif is obviously a mini-Harriet, which makes us curious for some context about the child’s life. Where is Brenda’s oft-referenced mother? Is she happy to lend her child to these people? Adorable as a puppy, little Brenda’s character is a mash-up of sassy stereotypes.
A straight line can be traced directly backward from “The Last Word” to “A Christmas Carol,” with sunny California standing in for dreary, industrial-age London: A curmudgeon finds new purpose when compelled to assess a long life, revisiting the past and imagining the future of folks whose lives she’s touched. There is hugging. There is learning. Old scores are satisfyingly settled.
Although its story is as old as the Dickens, the treatment of Harriet in the “The Last Word” is light years ahead of movies made in the shoulder-pad era of Harriet’s prime, when corporate women stood in a lineup of acceptable stock Hollywood villains next to terrorists, Nazis and Russian spies. (Think of Sigourney Weaver in “Working Girl” or anything starring Glenn Close.)
What is radical about this comfortable shoe of a movie is that it embraces Harriet as openly as any salty Clint Eastwood character.
For that, “The Last Word” is a chick flick in the finest sense of the phrase.
Rebecca L. Ford is counsel at Scharf Banks Marmor LLC, and concentrates her practice on complex litigation, compliance, board governance and specialized employment issues. She is the former executive vice president for litigation and intellectual property at MGM. She can be reached at rford@scharfbanks.com.