Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is based on a memoir by Peter Turner, who is played by Jamie Bell, about his romantic relationship with Gloria Grahame, who was actually an Oscar award winning actress and is played by Annette Benning, from 1979 to 1981 told concurrently instead of sequentially. I actually did not know any of this information going into the film. I just know that Bell is a counter-intuitively fearless actor from his brief appearance in Nymphomaniac, and Benning is solid so this movie could be a welcome detour from their standard fare. I’m the idiot in the audience who remarked at the end of the film, “Oh, she is real.”
To truly get into Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, you have to deem it plausible that the two could and should be in a relationship together. They may be approaching life from completely perspectives, but they are on the same arc like spectrum, and there is a tragically brief eclipse when their paths would cross so they could be together. They are both actors trying to make their mark, but her star is waning while his star is rising. In the movie theater and dancing scenes, they are both able to become completely absorbed individually and as a pair in appreciation of what they are experiencing. It is the reason that they do what they do for work—they want to recreate that sense of abandon for others while simultaneously feeling it.
Unfortunately time is a cruel mistress. Peter is fully aware that she is older, which he notices, and it does not matter to him. He is attracted to her because she is still hot, not because she can literally do something for him. She is completely different from his normal life, a world of possibilities, American, experienced, “sunshiny” and exciting, the opposite of Liverpool. Her old stories probably evoke what made him become an actor in the first place. Gloria would prefer to pretend that she is not older, and that they are contemporaries, which is why when he casually punctures that fiction, she reacts so negatively. It is her main boundary: don’t puncture the illusion that she is still on the threshold of life. Sadly this impulse results in wasted time that could have been spent together. The Romeo & Juliet story arc is emblematic of her gradual acceptance of reality, which comes too late for them to be together. They will be separated like the Shakespearian couple.
Paul McGuigan creates a cinematic, permeable landscape that bleeds present into the past sparked by Peter’s thoughts reflected clearly on Bell’s face, but owes money to Spike Lee for borrowing his free-floating, dolly shot in a climatic scene. Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool captures the period aspect of the story well without fetishizing or hitting the usual notes very hard. Unsurprisingly the past is shot in warmer hues than the present. If it was not in the book, kudos for choosing Alien, a classic! During the scenes with the Turner family, I needed closed captioning. The accents get really pronounced in the early scenes when there is no time to adjust.
If I have one main problem with Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, it is the same problem that I had with Lovelace. It is cinematically possible and economical to depict, without showing the same scene to the audience twice, different characters’ perspective in one scene. The story is predominantly told from Peter’s perspective, and we get a brief explanation for Gloria’s behavior when the story briefly pauses and reveals what she was doing at the time from her point of view. Sure it was illuminating, but it ruins the rhythm of the film unless it is used as a centerpiece, which it was not, it was used near the end. The actual scenes were poignant, but there needs to be a more creative way to structure it.
People have compared Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool to My Week with Marilyn, which seems completely far-fetched and reductive. Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is a very intimate look at two people’s lives intersecting whereas My Week with Marilyn provided a more panoramic view of classic cinema with an incidental tryst with an icon. There is very little personal that does not occur in professional spaces in the latter movie, but sure, if you’re creating a genre where younger nobodies get to sleep with blonde legends then later become notable in their own right, then sure, put them in the same category.
There are some terrific performances by the supporting actors, including Vanessa Redgrave as Gloria’s mother, Julie Walters as Peter’s mother and was in Billy Elliot with Bell, and Frances Barber in a single scene stealing moment as Gloria’s spoilsport sister. All the photographs and black and white film footage of Gloria is real. I missed the cameo by the real life Peter who apparently plays someone named Jack. Shrug.
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool isn’t for everyone. If you are not into the actors or their real life counterparts, then the only reason to delve is if you are interested in the idea of a May December romance in which the gender roles are reversed. Otherwise you may wonder why this story needed to be told.