Journalist Jacob Bernstein’s portrait of his late mother, beloved essayist, humorist, journalist and writer/director Nora Ephron, is a fascinating portrait of a woman whose very private leavetaking mystified her friends, proving that for her, death, at least was not in fact copy ie material to be used as comedy, despite her parents’ advice. The combination of contemporary interviews with home movie footage in Beverly Hills where screenwriters Phoebe and Henry relocated their family of four little girls from NYC in the Forties interlaced with film clips and excerpts from her TV interviews creates a distancing device that makes her art all the greater. When accused of malevolence for cruel descriptions of people like Julie Nixon she accepted the charge. Yet her magnetism was legendary, her dinner parties the place to be. She channeled her enormous betrayal by (second) husband Carl Bernstein into a book (Heartburn) and movie that complicated their divorce and the custody arrangements over their sons. One of them was yet to be born when she found out Bernstein was sleeping with the British Ambassador’s wife, Margaret Jay, whose physical flaws Ephron described in devastating fashion. Interviewed by Jacob, Carl admits to his son that it had enormously damaged him and, he says, what Jacob and Max must have thought of him and Jacob admits that this is true. Ephron had a cycle of movies that just didn’t work, starting with the Meg Wolitzer adaptation This Is My Life which had resonances about her life with her siblings as children. She fell out with sister Delia when it came to adapting the latter’s novel Hanging Up, which outlined their upbringing and the problems with their alcoholic mom and philandering pop. (The sisters were stunned when they found out about their father’s serial infidelities as they had always believed their mother to be insane and fabricating the stories). Their tensions were eventually resolved and their relationship is underscored when Delia says, When we died … and realises her error. Meg Ryan, Lena Dunham, Reese Witherspoon, Rita Wilson all read extracts from her work; Steven Spielberg says getting her to laugh was like winning an Oscar; so many people sought her approval and so many received her counsel, whether they wanted it or not. She told people what to do. The fact that she didn’t inform any of them that she had leukaemia? Some appear to interpret it as a kind of betrayal rather than the woman’s own resilience and choice to remain detached and private in an era of oversharing. Since oversharing appeared to be her avocation you can kind of empathise. She had a lot of lunches with a lot of people in the days before she went to hospital and never breathed a word of her terminal illness. (She loved food but never ate dessert). She made Julie and Julia when she knew she was dying and everyone remarks upon how much kinder she was since marrying writer Nicholas Pileggi, and that the portrayal of Tucci and Streep was as much a reflection of them as it was of Paul and Julia Child. She was saying that it was possible to have a supportive husband and she wasn’t making it up because she was married to such a man. Utterly fascinating and a remarkable work about women in movies from a son whose devotion and puzzlement are equally evident. What is copy is what is lost.
mondomovies 