Psycho's Movie Reviews #292: Death Becomes Her (1992)

Death Becomes Her is a 1992 American satirical black comedy fantasy film directed and produced by Robert Zemeckis. Written by David Koepp and Martin Donovan, it stars Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as rivals who fight for the affections of the same man (Bruce Willis) and drink a magic potion that promises eternal youth, but causes unpleasant side effects.

Released on July 7, 1992, to mixed reviews from critics, Death Becomes Her was a commercial success, grossing $149 million worldwide on $55 million budget. The film was a pioneer in the use of computer-generated effects; it went on to win the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. In the decades since its release Death Becomes Her has developed a strong cult following, especially among the LGBT community.

Plot

In 1978, narcissistic actress Madeline Ashton performs in the poorly received Broadway musical Songbird!. She invites long-time frenemy Helen Sharp, an aspiring writer, backstage along with Helen's fiancé, plastic surgeon Ernest Menville. Smitten with Madeline, Ernest breaks off his engagement with Helen to marry her instead. Seven years later, Helen is obese, depressed and committed to a psychiatric hospital where she plots revenge on Madeline. Another seven years later, Madeline and Ernest live in Beverly Hills, but they are miserable: Madeline's acting career has declined and Ernest, now an alcoholic, has been reduced to working as a reconstructive mortician. Receiving an invitation to a party celebrating Helen's new book, Madeline rushes to a spa where she regularly receives facial treatments. Understanding Madeline's desperation, the spa owner gives her the business card of Lisle Von Rhuman, a mysterious, wealthy socialite who specializes in rejuvenation.

Madeline and Ernest attend the party for Helen's novel, Forever Young, and discover that Helen is slim, glamorous and youthful. Dumbfounded and depressed by Helen's appearance, Madeline witnesses Helen tell Ernest that she blames Madeline for his career decline. After the soiree, Madeline visits her young lover, but discovers he is with a woman his age. Dejected, Madeline drives to Lisle's home. Lisle, claiming to be 71, but looking decades younger, reveals a potion that promises eternal life and an everlasting youthful appearance. Madeline purchases and drinks the potion and is rejuvenated, regaining her beauty. As a condition of purchase, Lisle warns Madeline to disappear from the public eye after ten years to keep the potion's existence secret, and to take good care of her body.

Helen seduces Ernest and convinces him to kill Madeline. When Madeline returns home, she and Ernest argue, during which she falls down the stairs, breaking her neck. Believing Madeline dead, Ernest phones Helen for advice, initially not seeing Madeline stand and approach him with her head twisted backward. At Madeline's request, Ernest drives her to the emergency room. Madeline is told she is technically dead, and faints. She is taken to the morgue due to her body having no pulse and a temperature below 80 °F (27 °C). After rescuing Madeline, Ernest considers her reanimation a miracle and uses his skills as a mortician to repair her body at home. Helen demands information about Madeline's situation. Overhearing Helen and Ernest discussing their plot to kill her, Madeline shoots Helen with a shotgun. Although the blast creates a hole in her abdomen, Helen rises, undead like Madeline, revealing that she too drank the potion, in 1985. The two briefly fight before apologizing and reconciling their friendship. Fed up with the pair, Ernest prepares to leave, but Helen and Madeline convince him to do one last repair on their bodies. They realize they will need regular maintenance and scheme to have Ernest drink the potion to ensure he will always be available.

After bringing Ernest to Lisle, she offers to give him the potion free of charge in exchange for his surgical skills. Ernest refuses to drink it upon realizing that he will be their servant for all time. He pockets the potion and flees, but becomes trapped on the roof. Helen and Madeline implore Ernest to drink the potion to survive an impending fall. Ernest, realizing that they only need him for their own selfish reasons, refuses and drops the potion to the ground, but after falling he lands in Lisle's pool and escapes. Lisle banishes Madeline and Helen from her group, leaving the pair to rely on each other for companionship and maintenance.

Thirty-seven years later, Madeline and Helen attend Ernest's funeral, where he is eulogized as having lived an adventurous and fulfilling life with a large family and friends. The two women are now parodies of their former selves, with cracked, peeling paint and putty covering most of their grey and rotting flesh. Outside the church, Helen trips at the top of stone steps leading to the church by stepping on their bottle of lost spray paint; when Madeline hesitates to help her, Helen grabs Madeline and the two tumble down the steps, breaking into pieces. As their disembodied heads totter down together, Helen sardonically asks Madeline where she parked their car.

Production

Special Effects

Death Becomes Her was a technologically complex film to make, and represented a major advancement in the use of computer-generated effects, under the pioneering direction of Industrial Light and Magic. For example, it was the first film where computer-generated skin texture was used, in the shot where Madeline resets her neck after her head is smashed with a shovel by Helen. Creating the sequences where Madeline's head is dislocated and facing the wrong way around involved a combination of blue screen technology, an animatronic model created by Amalgamated Dynamics, and prosthetic make-up effects on Meryl Streep to create the look of a twisted neck.

The digital advancements pioneered on Death Becomes Her would be incorporated into Industrial Light and Magic's next project, Jurassic Park, released by Universal only a year later. The two films also shared cinematographer Dean Cundey and production designer Rick Carter.

The production had a fair number of mishaps. For example, in the scene where Helen and Madeline are battling with shovels, Streep accidentally cut Goldie Hawn's face, leaving a faint scar. Streep admitted that she disliked working on a project that focused so heavily on special effects and vowed never to work on another film with heavy special effects again, saying: "My first, my last, my only. I think it's tedious. Whatever concentration you can apply to that kind of comedy is just shredded. You stand there like a piece of machinery—they should get machinery to do it. I loved how it turned out. But it's not fun to act to a lampstand. "Pretend this is Goldie, right here! Uh, no, I'm sorry, Bob, she went off the mark by five centimetres, and now her head won't match her neck!" It was like being at the dentist."

Filming Locations

Death Becomes Her was shot entirely in Los Angeles and featured several locations frequently used in film and television, including the Greystone Mansion (Ernest's funeral home) and the Ebell of Los Angeles (Helen's book party). The exterior of Madeline and Ernest's mansion is located at 1125 Oak Grove Avenue in San Marino, but the interior was a set built on a soundstage. The ending scene where Helen and Madeline tumble down a set of stairs outside a chapel was filmed at Mount St. Mary's University in Brentwood.

Editing

The theatrical version of Death Becomes Her omitted or shortened many scenes featured in the film's rough cut. Director Robert Zemeckis decided this was needed to accelerate the pacing of the film and eliminate extraneous jokes. Most dramatically, the original ending was entirely redone after test audiences reacted negatively to it. That ending featured Ernest, after he has fled Lisle's party, meeting a bartender (Tracey Ullman) who helps him fake his death to evade Madeline and Helen. The two women encounter Ernest and the bartender 27 years later, living happily as a retired couple while Madeline and Helen give no sign that they are enjoying their eternal existence. Zemeckis thought the ending was too happy and opted for the darker ending featured in the final cut. Ullman was one of five actors with speaking roles in the film to be eliminated. Other scenes that were eliminated included one in which Madeline talks to her agent (Jonathan Silverman) and one in which Ernest removes a frozen Madeline from the kitchen freezer he has stored her in. None of the scenes has been released publicly, but sequences can still be viewed in the original theatrical trailer.

Music

The score was composed by American film composer Alan Silvestri.

Release/Reception/Box Office

Death Becomes Her opened at number one at the box office with $12,110,355 on the same weekend as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bebe's Kids. It went on to earn over $58.4 million domestically and $90.6 million internationally.

The film's release on DVD was called "appallingly bad", due to the quality of its transfer, which has been said to suffer from excessive grain, blur, and muted colours. A BBC review described it as "horrible" and "sloppy". Many online DVD forum users speculated that the DVD transfer was taken from the Laserdisc edition of the film and called for a restorative release. Death Becomes Her was initially distributed in an open-matte, full screen edition with an aspect ratio of 4:3 in the U.S. before a widescreen version with its intended ratio (1.85:1) was released worldwide. The latter version has also been mistakenly labelled anamorphic. It was later released in North America on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory in 2016.

Death Becomes Her received mixed reviews from critics. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 54% based on reviews from 54 critics with the consensus: "Hawn and Streep are as fabulous as Death Becomes Her's innovative special effects; Zemeckis' satire, on the other hand, is as hollow as the world it mocks." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert both gave Death Becomes Her a 'thumbs down', commenting that while the film had great special effects, it lacked any real substance or character depth.

Budget $55 million

Box office $149 million

My Review

Wow--this is one strange and inspired comedy that is so unlike any other I can think of! Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn play aging childhood friends who grow to absolutely hate each other. Both are shallow and vain and both feel 100% in the right for hating the other. The awfulness of their relationship culminates in Meryl stealing away Goldie's husband--just because she COULD! Years pass and Meryl is a fabulously wealthy actress--who STILL down deep is vain and self-centred. Back comes the previously fat and unattractive Goldie but instead, she is thin and looks even younger than she looked decades ago! It looks as if she went to the greatest plastic surgeons in the world and said "here's a million bucks--gimme the works!!". Goldie is back to rub in her good looks and also to steal back wayward hubby Bruce Willis--not because she even wants him but because she CAN! Well, Meryl is worried about losing her man but she's much more upset because Goldie looks so much better than her! So worried that she goes to a strange witch-like lady (Isabella Rosselini) who tells her she has a magic substance that can give her eternal youth!! Despite the cost, the vain lady gladly pays and drinks the formula--and immediately feels the wonderful effects.

When she arrives at home, there is Goldie and Bruce to finish their plan--which is to kill Meryl and leave! Well, here is where the movie and special effects get REALLY, REALLY weird. Meryl is shoved down the steps and obviously breaks her neck. Goldie and Bruce are celebrating as Meryl wakes up and is alive--but, her head is on completely backwards!! After a little adjustment, she's back to how she was and the formula was an apparent success! So then she attacks Goldie with a shotgun--blowing her across the room into a fountain. A few moments later, Goldie gets up and walks about with a huge hole in her body--so big you can see right through her!! It's now obvious that she, too, has used the formula! Well, after some more senseless punching and slapping, the fight is over--they really can't kill the other no matter how hard they try. Plus, for some inexplicable reason, they decide to bury the hatchet and become friends again. Now, their immediate goal is to use Bruce's expertise as a plastic surgeon to make them look better--spackling in the hole in Goldie and being ready in case they needed touching up! Bruce has had enough and they try to force his to take the formula and be their permanent fixer-upper! But, despite their efforts and those of the weird little group with the potions, he escapes and vows to never see them again nor use the formula.

At this point, the film is wrapping up and the film ends with one of the funniest and visually impressive endings in film history. Instead of elaborating, you just need to see it for yourself.

The film has terrific over-the-top performances by Goldie and Meryl and Bruce plays an appropriately creeped out guy who just wants to be left alone!! The script is fresh and funny and provides a lot of amazing laughs. On top of everything, the biggest star are the special effects--amazing and so important to the movie.

An old favourite of mine. I don't know that I would describe it as a guilty secret but I can see where someone was coming from who said that. It is in no way a great film but I enjoy watching it and it makes me smile to think about watching it. The jokes are many and frequent if, admittedly, not necessarily gut busting, it is just that the whole idea is amusing and the ridiculous special effects so lovely. Where the doctor is forcing Meryl Streep's hand further and further backwards towards her arm (as if he really would) it is as if he is daring her to speak out, as it gradually dawns on him she is dead. Dead-ish anyway, and I think this is a problem for some, the silliness of the whole situation. I however love the fact that what most people consider so important (life extended as long as possible) is being treated as a joke. Ha! 8.7/10