You don’t have to have had his face as your avatar since you joined Twitter, like a certain @jessicakiang we could mention, to believe that Cary Grant is possibly the greatest movie star that cinema has ever produced. But nor does choosing to have Roger O. Thornhill from “North By Northwest” grimace out from your every tweet mean that you’re unaware of the actor’s rumored checkered personal history or that you uncomplicatedly embrace his mythos. It does, however mean that you’re more than ready for Mark Kidel‘s “Becoming Cary Grant,” which airs on Showtime this Friday, June 9th and played as part of the Cannes Classics sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival. Or rather, you’re ready for the documentary that “Becoming Cary Grant” purports to be, and not the linear, rags-to-riches-to-revelation portrait it finally delivers.
To know even a little about Grant is to suspect that he may have attained that Boss-level stardom because, in some sort of cosmic audition process, he won the role and never stopped playing it. “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant” was the actor’s famous quip, and these ideas of self-creation and aspiration contribute to Grant’s indefinable, oddly vulnerable charisma. And so to understand how he, or rather broken little Archie Leach from Bristol, went from musical-hall stiltwalker to “become” the icon of un-smarmy suavity and impeccable timing that he embodied on and largely off-screen (to the public anyway), feels like the kind of meta-endeavor that could get to the very heart of classic Hollywood cinema’s silvery, elusive appeal.
But “Becoming Cary Grant” doesn’t even begin to explore Grant’s contradictions, instead it reduces his interior life to a series of Freudian cause/effect circumstances, starting with his perceived abandonment by his mother as a child (she was actually summarily removed to a mental institution by his father), and ending neatly, according to the film, with some therapeutic breakthroughs thanks to experimental LSD treatment. Grant’s inner turmoil and his fraught relationships are alluded to but never explored with anything beyond wistful regret, and there’s not the merest whisper of his alleged repressed homo/bisexuality. Instead, the Grant we get here is screwed up in carefully unspecified ways that are portrayed as affecting only him. Kidel’s film is more admiring of Grant’s realization that his four failed marriages were about him “punishing” the women in his life than it is interested in how those women felt about being punished, or what form their punishment took.
The reason behind this generous myopia is clear: after a beginning tracing Grant’s humble origins and the roots of his maternal issues, Kidel gets access to never-before-seen home movie footage of the actor. For this, he needed the blessing of Grant’s surviving relatives: his daughter Jennifer and widow Barbara Jaynes, both of whom appear as affectionate interviewees, and both of whom have an understandable agenda in keeping Grant’s memory as polished as possible. And the deal is almost worth it just for that footage, much of which is a delight to watch: Grant clowning around with friends, relaxing in his garden, playing with his daughter.
Some of it even boasts Grant’s hand behind the camera, though Kidel’s assertion that it shows off his innate director’s eye is perhaps rather hyperbolic. Still, in the contrast between that off-the-cuff footage and the clips selected from Grant’s films — his Hitchcock collaborations, “Father Goose,” “Bringing Up Baby,” “The Awful Truth” and even lesser-seen titles like “Penny Serenade” and “None but the Lonely Heart” — the documentary comes closest to greatness, by seeing what the performances tell us about the man. If the film were only this, it would probably be wonderful.
But Kidel wants a tidy narrative structure around which to form his documentary, and he chooses, a little arbitrarily, to have Grant’s experiences with LSD as a therapeutic aid serve that purpose. So the film is interspersed with rather unilluminating recreations of a psychiatrist’s office in which an actor in an eyemask mimes being in the throes of an acid trip, while Jonathan Pryce’s voiceover reads Grant’s own words describing the process, and the score by The Insects and Portishead’s Adrian Utley, veers from foreboding to sentimental without a lot of nuance in between.
Those voiceover excerpts from Grant’s memoirs do not help with the film’s lack of outside perspective, which feels like a glaring omission because so much of what “Cary Grant” stood for was defined by outside perspective. Film historian David Thomson‘s insightful contribution in this regard is a rare exception, but it’s too small a segment to really add heft to this curiously lightweight affair. Perhaps it’s simply that Grant was not that engaging a memoirist: compared with the sublime and surprising “Listen To Me Marlon,” which is entirely composed of excerpts from Brando’s personal archive of recorded musings, the focus on Grant’s therapy sessions yields no sense of the man as interested in anything in the world except his own psyche. The pursuit of the kind of enlightened equanimity he finally attains was no doubt extraordinarily important to him personally, but the sense of Grant as a fascinatingly complex and conflicted amalgam of reality, fiction, aspiration, and repression is lost in the mix. He is paradoxically diminished by the self-serving device.
It’s laudable that Kidel wants to avoid sensationalism or prurience, but his fastidiousness soon starts to feel fainthearted, veering close to hagiography. And so “Becoming Cary Grant” falls into that disappointing category of a documentary that, in wanting to do its subject a favor, actually does him a disservice: Uncomplicating Grant as the film does, further sanding down an already smooth edifice, lessens his mystique and flattens out his indefinable allure. Here Kidel delivers the partial story of a conflicted human trying to become a better husband, a better father and a better son — struggling, perhaps, to become a better man — none of which sheds much light on how, somewhere along the way, he also became Cary Grant. [C+]
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