This film covers 22 years of Anna Nicole Smith's life in 88
minutes. If you are particularly cynical you might note: (1) that's
because she never did anything important; (2) enough time has been
devoted to her already. Those are superficial comments. Anna Nicole's
life was, in fact, full and interesting. One day she was working in a
fast food joint in East Noplace, Texas, and a short time later she was
the spokesperson for Guess Jeans, a Playmate of the Year, a
billionaire's wife, and an actress in some feature-length films. Not
too long after that, she was monstrously overweight. Then she lost 69
pounds and looked
great again. Then we looked away for a few seconds, and when our gaze
returned to her, she and her grown son were both dead. In the background were several legal contests between her and
the billionaire's
family, plus a sexual harassment suit filed against her by a former
employee. An aspect of one of her cases even made it to the Supreme
Court! That was just while she lived. The end of her life was followed by various
additional legal complications
relating to the circumstances of her death, the custody of her infant
daughter, and the disposition of her estate, with all of the legal
maneuverings chronicled daily by the cable news networks.
While Anna painted no masterpieces and brought no peace to the
Middle East, her life fascinated us in its own way, and there is
probably enough material there to make several interesting movies,
with several different possible perspectives, because Anna's public
life was larger than ours, was both innocent and sleazy, both a comedy and a tragedy.
On the comic side, there was her ridiculous movie career in the
mid-90s, her
notoriously dim-witted public comments, her obese phase, and the
ridicule she received from stand-up comics and shock-jock Howard
Stern.
On the tragic side, she lost her billionaire (she really did
seem to love that old geezer, and he her) and totally fell apart. Then just
when she seemed on the verge of a comeback by regaining her figure
and producing a new baby, she lost her grown son and her own life, all
before her 40th birthday.
Unfortunately, the script has no focus and no point of view. It's a
broad-brush bio, and there is too much material in Anna's life to
cover in a docudrama. This film just walks through her life, checking
off the highlights and taking no time to reflect upon any of it. The
center of the film, to the extent it has one, is the relationship
between Anna and her son Daniel, but even that feels half-finished.
The only part of the film I liked at all was the brief part that
explored the relationship between Anna and her billionaire. As
portrayed in this film, they were two completely ingenuous people who
genuinely brought pleasure to each other in an atypical way. When the
film concentrated on their offbeat love story, it was interesting.
Unfortunately, that relationship was given the surface treatment, like
everything else in the film. The rest of the film ... well, it's got
nothin'.
In her everyday appearance and using her natural voice, Willa Ford
doesn't look or sound like Anna Nicole, but she did deliver a
reasonably convincing impersonation. Unfortunately, all of the other
characters are virtually anonymous, excepting her son. As I watched, I kept thinking to
myself, "Now who is this character again?" Even the familiar
characters like Larry Birkhead and Howard K. Stern are just
undeveloped background players in this broadly painted treatment. If I
had not known a bit about Stern and Birkhead in advance from various
Larry King Shows, I would not have understood their significance in
Anna's life by watching this film. In fact, I wouldn't even have known
their last names.
With a sensationalized choice of excerpts and some really bad
background music, the trailer below makes the film seem like a 1970s
porno flick, or maybe a surreal Ken Russell biopic. That's utterly
misleading. If the film had really gone for some Ken Russell decadence, it would
have been more fun. Or it could have ridiculed Anna Nicole. Or it
could have treated her as a tragic victim of the lust for fame created
by her culture. Any of those positions might have worked effectively,
but the actual film took no position at all and created no hook, so it
plays out like a network TV "movie
of the week" from the 1980s.
