The friendship that evolves between the mismatched pair is certainly among the film’s primary focuses, but it often plays second fiddle to Carlisle’s solo journey of self-discovery, and ultimately self-actualization. Having been abandoned by her biological mother (Blythe Danner) soon after her birth, she is desperate to track the elusive parent down in the hopes that it will provide her with a sense of direction and catharsis. When she finally does meet the woman, while surrounded by the ageless statues in Central Park, Danner’s matriarch is revealed to be tragically aloof, unwilling to embrace Carlisle as her own flesh and blood, let alone introduce her daughter to the rest of her family. Her lack of knowledge regarding the functions of her body at an early age—she thought menstruation signaled impending death—deftly illustrates the pitfalls of innocence, as does Carlisle’s marriage to her much older husband (Campbell Scott) at age 16. Her terse response to his declaration of love, “That’s nice,” foreshadows a wrenching flashback where McGovern transforms her lines into a howl of pent-up fury after decades of consistently repressed needs.
It is largely to the credit of McGovern’s superb performance that Carlisle emerges as a compelling subject, since she also happens to be almost entirely fictional, contrived by Moriarty as the Julie Powell to Brooks’ Julia Child. On the cusp of her character becoming one of the most sexually liberated stars of the silent era, Richardson radiates the allure and sophistication that made Brooks such a revolutionary figure onscreen. From her trend-setting bobbed hairstyle and non-theatrical emoting to her rejection of gender norms that led her to become an outsider in Hollywood, Brooks sorely deserves to be the subject of her own film, hopefully one headlined by Richardson. Just as she overcame the melodramatic excesses of Justin Baldoni’s recent teen drama, “Five Feet Apart,” with her vibrant humanity, the assured actress makes the most of her screen time, channeling Brooks’ fearlessness for subverting notions of societal impropriety. If Richardson’s Instagram page is any indication, where she repeatedly posts amusing snapshots of her face askew—accentuating her chin flab—in order to poke fun at the app’s photogenic falseness, it seems clear that she and Brooks may indeed be kindred spirits.
Even when she’s asked to do the impossible during an epilogue that jumps ahead two decades, requiring her to portray a 35-year-old version of herself with age lines suggested solely through smudges on her face, Richardson somehow suspends our disbelief through the dramatic shift in her behavior. Devoid of the vigor that marked her adolescence, Brooks now resembles a hollow shell whose youthful fire has been stamped out, courtesy of endless battles with studio moguls and patriarchal oppression. Had she chosen not to shun Paramount for denying her a guaranteed raise, she likely wouldn’t have secured her immortality in Germany, where she pushed the boundaries for sexual frankness in 1929’s “Pandora’s Box,” a landmark work glimpsed all-too-fleetingly in the end titles.
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