Do you all remember the era when Robert Zemeckis used to make good-hell, even great-movies? Making Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Back to the Future is an all-time run of hits, and even things like Contact and Flight are solid, mature movies made by a talented journeyman director who has since given himself up for CGI dreck, making his downfall frustrating in a very unique way. So imagine my delight as I watched Death Becomes Her, a charming 1992 black comedy-fantasy-horror mash-up, and was reminded of the often charming, genuinely innovative spark that Zemeckis once had.
Death Becomes Her's central conflict, beyond the idea of man vs. element in the two leads battle with aging, is between Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) and Madeline Menville (Meryl Streep), an aspiring writer and fading actress, respectively, and their decades-long rivalry hitting its peak. Hawn and Streep, who had not worked together, suit their roles perfectly: snippy, catty, and often vicious in the way only two people who have been "friends" for decades can be. One of the film's standout moments is a duel to the "death" between the two, a pouring of grievances and old wounds that slowly melts away as they realize the pettiness of it all. It's perfectly symbolized in the film's mystical element (and source of it's, par the course for Zemeckis, excellent VFX work) of a magic potion capable of making one immortal but doing little to protect their bodies as the ravages of time wear on them. In this potion, the characters find eternal outer beauty, but the festering nastiness of their personalities ultimately wins out.
It's this nastiness that often gives Death Become Her such a bite, lacking much of the earnest attitude of it's director's usual fare. At its best, the film feels like a garish Looney Tune, doling out slapstick violence to its protagonists, putting them through the wringer with a cruelty that works in its favor. The effects work, full of prosthetics, genuinely grotesque make-up, and (for the time) impressive usage of CG superimposing, add to this. While the scene of Helen, hole blown through her with a shotgun, is a famous standout, the way the film uses immortal bodies for comedy pretty consistently gets a laugh. A personal favorite is Madeline, deprived of a chunk of her spine, having to awkwardly keep her head from sinking beneath her shoulder, a funnier take on the surprisingly tense moment of her, now freshly immortal, rising up after being shoved down the stairs, her broken body snapping and creaking as she pays no mind to the fatal wounds on her body.
Of course, the true MVP is Bruce Willis, giving a wildly out of his element turn as Ernest, a squirrely mortician/plastic surgeon and object (heavy emphasis on this) of conflict between Helen and Madeline. Effectively trapped as a straight man between the two, Willis is nothing like the macho everyman persona he had cultivated to that point. As Ernest, he's cowardly, easily manipulated, and as quietly cruel as his manipulators, shrinking under their gaze and hiding his frustrations behind a tired, bitter gaze. It makes his arc, a rejection of an immortality spent afraid of everything regardless, fun to watch, a spineless (figuratively) man learning to stand up for himself. His increasingly frantic reactions as the film veers more into the supernatural give it a grounding presence, while Willis's performance does a master class in not just making Ernest a boring source of conflict.
In retrospectives, Robert Zemeckis has mentioned that he wishes that the film's tone could've been more decisive, closer to its origins as a Tales from the Crypt movie than the bigger Hollywood production it ended up being. While, in a way, you can see that in its ending, I found this to be a perfectly nasty treat. Sure, there's a pulled punch or two, but there's so much to enjoy that I'm hardly going to fault the movie for it.
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