Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992)

Even at the time, I could sense there was something empty about this adored-by-the-gays black comedy during which I may have lightly chuckled once or twice. Thirty years later, I can better articulate the film's shortcomings. There's just not that much (can it be?) story here. Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play a writer and an actress respectively who have long resented one another. But Zemeckis, along with screenwriters Martin Donovan and David Koepp, tell us so little about their past that all the subsequent Oscar-winning special effects lack narrative urgency. I wanted to learn more about the apparent class animus between the two when they were younger. During a brief moment of calm, Hawn admits that she found Streep too white trash for her presumably higher-class friends. But we're granted little more information than that before the viewer is plunged back into ever-more FX, the gaping hole in Hawn's body after Streep nails her with a shotgun mirroring the hole at the center of the narrative. And the motivation which sets the plot in motion (jealousy over doughy, ineffectual Bruce Willis) is too thin to compensate. I applaud Zemeckis' commitment to cartoonish grotesquerie (at least at this point in his career). But yet again (gawd, I could use a rubber stamp here), there has to be something at stake in the spectacle and Death Becomes Her lacks the sense of purpose that fuels the best cartoons.

Grade: C+