'Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me': The Broadway legends keeps on keeping on
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: B] Elegant yet eminently silly in that mega-loaded old New Yorker sort of way, Stritch, an Emmy and Tony winner whose career launched in the 1940s, has always been at her best when somebody's watching.
City Paper grade: B
A long, fertile career in any line of work is an accomplishment worth toasting, but at some point, the plaudits become patronizing. Nowhere is this more blatant than in showbiz, subsidized by youth-covetous actors who elevate the act of “honoring” lifetime achievements into a self-serving art form. It doesn’t seem intentional, but such pro-level condescension is the underwire of Chiemi Karasawa’s docu-feature on Elaine Stritch, the sandpaper-tongued octogenarian who personifies a long-gone era of American entertainment.
Elegant yet eminently silly in that mega-loaded old New Yorker sort of way, Stritch, an Emmy and Tony winner whose career launched in the 1940s, has always been at her best when somebody’s watching. This includes the Shoot Me crew, which she hews to like a dance partner at a dress rehearsal. Wrapped in posh fur, she emerges from her home at the Carlyle Hotel early in the doc, practicing one-liners and hamming it up with pedestrians every six steps. (At one point, she gives the cameraman unsolicited notes on how to record her opening a package of English muffins.)
But Karasawa also applies a diligent eye to Stritch in quieter times, revealing cracks in her subject’s constitution. Proud of her tough public persona (“I like the courage of age,” she proclaims), Stritch is much more insecure in private, brought to chilling hysterics by her own mortality. Struggling to memorize the lyrics for a touring Sondheim revue, she’s challenged by her fading health, questioning why she’s still chugging along — even though she knows it’s because she needs artistic affirmation the way a plant needs sunlight.
Julie Keyes, who met Stritch in Alcoholics Anonymous, describes her longtime friend as “a Molotov cocktail of madness, sanity and genius,” and it’s easily the most honest talking-head description of the performer’s proclivities. The rest of the celebrity commentary, from the likes of Tina Fey, Nathan Lane, Alec Baldwin and John Turturro, comes off as a series of soft pats to granny’s head. They fawn over her truthfulness and authenticity, coming just short of calling her a hero, as if some sort of mystic energy is rewarding her brassiness with longevity. Karasawa does the more respectful thing by letting Stritch speak for herself.
