The Last Word (2017)

The Last Word (2017)

IMDB rating 6.8/10

Harriet (Shirley MacLaine) is a successful, retired businesswoman who wants to control everything around her until the bitter end. To make sure her life story is told her way, she pays off her local newspaper to have her obituary written in advance under her watchful eye. But Anne (Amanda Seyfried), the young journalist assigned to the task, refuses to follow the script and instead insists on finding out the true facts about Harriett's life, resulting in a life-altering friendship

 Director: Mark Pellington

Writer: Stuart Ross Fink

Stars: Shirley MacLaine, Amanda Seyfried, AnnJewel Lee Dixon

IMDB link Here

Pretty much the minute the three generations of feisty females bond in The Last Word, you know that sooner or later they're going to take a slow-mo power walk wearing cool sunglasses. But if you must make another entirely predictable comedy about an unapologetic old white curmudgeon who steamrolls all opposition, you can't do better than draft the redoubtable Shirley MacLaine to keep audiences in her barbed corner while we wait for her inevitable bittersweet humanization.

Casting is everything in director Mark Pellington's latest, with MacLaine in blazingly fine form as she dignifies the movie's every pre-programmed emotional cue while blossoming from dragon lady into nurturing giver of life lessons.

First-time screenwriter Stuart Ross Fink's setup is nothing if not schematic, but to be fair, the script does score its share of hearty laughs, particularly in the early going as we first witness MacLaine's formidable Harriet Lauler in action.

Pellington's approach can best be described as correct, and the glossy movie looks tidy, if undistinguished. There's also Nathan Matthew David's pretty score to underline every mood shift, along with songs, song, songs of every vintage. Though it's hard to complain about over-reliance on music in a movie that pays homage to the undersung greatness of The Kinks and then unleashes "Waterloo Sunset" at a moment of maximum poignancy.

Still, Fink's script continually blurs the line between efficient and shameless, notably in a road trip that seals the three-way pact among Harriet, Anne and Brenda with a moonlight dip, and in the late breaking news of a heart condition, just as Harriet appears ready to re-embrace life.

While Seyfried's role is strictly an accessory to the main event, and Anne's arc of self-actualization even more formulaic, she's appealing as always. Sadoski does what he can with a cookie-cutter sensitive dude; lively newcomer Lee almost gets around the script's cutesiness concerning her character; veteran Hall's sad bloodhound eyes communicate warmth even when Edward is in combative mode; and who doesn't want to see MacLaine and Heche face off in a mother-daughter bitchfest? A little more of that would have been welcome.

But this is MacLaine's show and she devours every minute of it. Though she's required at times here to perform tasks beneath her skill set — like a liberating funky-granny dance break, or an insta-melt from scowl to sappy smile — there's a spiky vitality behind her characterization that won't quit. In fact, it becomes almost plausible that morning radio listeners would eat up the vinegary wisdom of this indomitable octogenarian. Even in a pandering sentimental comedy like this one, it's a pleasure to see MacLaine back in the spotlight.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

Shirley MacLaine Wants ‘The Last Word’? She Should Have It

 Shirley MacLaine enters beautiful scowl first in “The Last Word,” a sweet-and-sour dramatic comedy that would be unbearable without her. She plays Harriet Lauler, a retired advertising executive who has effectively walled herself up in a grand, immaculate house that’s a testament to her former glory but so quiet it might as well be her mausoleum. Frankly, it’s a wonder no one has strangled her yet. Unapologetically domineering, Harriet all but grabs the garden clippers from her exasperated gardener and pushes her blissfully patient cook out of the kitchen. She knows better, does better, always has, always will. Her elbows aren’t sharp; they’re lethal.

There is more to Harriet than meets the eye, of course, including secrets and lost connections, and if the movie simply stayed focused on her it might have been considerably better. The director, Mark Pellington, who scatters photos of the young Ms. MacLaine in the house like religious relics, clearly adores her. Some of the movie’s most satisfying moments show Harriet alone in her house, lingering in its empty rooms, needlessly fussing over its sterile perfection and staring into the distance. Ms. MacLaine, 82, holds the screen effortlessly.

Read full review at New york times

Amanda Seyfried, Shirley MacLaine movie dead on arrival  

There's a piece of great advice in "The Last Word," courtesy of a character who is reluctant to speak ill of an acquaintance: "If you don't have anything nice to say about someone, say nothing at all."

If that standard were to be applied to this movie review, it would render it the world's shortest piece of film criticism. The story of a lonely, ailing and unlovable crank (Shirley MacLaine) who tries to bully a young, socially isolated obituary writer (Amanda Seyfried) into helping her burnish her legacy is just as weird and unrewarding an endeavor as it sounds. How ironic — in a movie about the power of truthful writing — that the screenplay (by first-timer Stuart Ross Fink) is so tin-eared and phony that it seems to have been written by a team of Martian anthropologists with no familiarity whatsoever with actual human behavior, after one week in the field.

Director Mark Pellington ("I Melt With You") at least recognizes that the setup is little more than a freakish showcase for MacLaine do her blunt-spoken-battle-ax thing. ("She puts the b---- in obituary," Seyfried cracks, in one of the few sassy lines in the script that actually land.)

There is, however, no joy in watching Harriet's other sidekick, a young African-American girl (Ann'Jewel Lee) whom Harriet has picked out of a school for disadvantaged children, treated almost like a piece of property. The unseemly racism embodied by this miniature version of the Magical Negro stock character — who curses like a sailor but is just waiting to be polished by her white benefactor so that she can, in turn, confer redemption on Harriet — is nauseating.

Cue the montages of spontaneous dancing and late-night skinny-dipping, signaling that all three characters have bonded, against great odds, even as they prepare to leave their chrysalis form and turn into the human butterflies they have been along. Could there even be love in store for Anne, in the form of the radio station manager (Thomas Sadoski) who hires Harriet as his new morning-drive DJ — based on nothing more than a shared love of the Kinks? I ain't telling.

Not because it would be mean. But because you already know the answer to that question, in a moribund movie that doesn't have a spontaneous, surprising — or genuine — bone in its body. May it rest in peace.  

 Read full review at Chicago Tribune