A new documentary makes the case that under her hardened exterior, the novelist Patricia Highsmith was a longing romantic.
“Loving Highsmith,” a constrained documentary by the filmmaker Eva Vitija, tries to make the case that author Patricia Highsmith was prodigious in both writing and romance.
When Highsmith died in 1995 at the age of 74, she left behind several lifetimes-worth of words, according to her biographer: 22 novels, including the best-sellers “Strangers on a Train,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and “Carol” (originally titled “The Price of Salt”), plus over 200 unpublished manuscripts and over 8,000 pages of personal journals.
Her handwritten entries, snippets read aloud here by the actress Gwendoline Christie, burn with the grievances — class, racial, familial, romantic, professional — that fed her fictional characters’ homicidal impulses and the public’s image of Highsmith as a coldblooded loner who preferred the company of her pet snail, Hortense. Even her sometime publisher called her “a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being.”
Such comments are not included in Vitija’s tale, which is intended to be a counterpoint. “Loving Highsmith” reveals Highsmith’s squishy bits under her shell, the dalliances she tucked into her diaries during an era where queer women like her exited the subway one stop early, lest strangers suspect they were headed to a lesbian nightspot.
Highsmith was something of a playgirl, Vitija finds, an assertion confirmed by several former girlfriends interviewed in the documentary who recall the novelist partying with David Bowie in Europe or outfitting herself in men’s wear and grandly buying a round for the bar. Most of her exes’ memories stop short of being psychologically insightful. Strung together, however, these tender confidences shape an outline of a woman who never trusted anyone with her heart. Again and again, Highsmith’s craving for connection is thwarted by her competing desire to be an emotionally invulnerable workaholic.
The film builds its conception of Highsmith selectively from her mercurial notebooks, highlighting excerpts that support its argument that her lovelorn disappointments drove her into isolation (“I am the forever seeking”) while omitting those that conflict (“One situation — one alone, could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness”).
To make her adventures feel alive, the editor Rebecca Trösch stitches clips from Highsmith’s Hollywood adaptations alongside recently shot B-roll of glitter-strewn drag shows. Slow-motion footage of a cowboy roping a baby steer is paired with Highsmith’s turn to gay conversion therapy in a failed attempt to please her conservative Texan family, particularly her mother, Mary, a figure as cruel as any character she imagined.
It’s hard to imagine the author herself would have approved of the documentary’s flowery narration and sentimental acoustic score. More impactful is the realization that Highsmith’s chilliest calculation was correct: She’d inspire more acclaim — and less moral outrage — exposing her murderous hatreds than her strangled loves.
Loving Highsmith
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
