Stream This: Carrie Fisher's 'Postcards From the Edge'
Carrie Fisher will always be valorized for her role in saving an entire galaxy from Imperial tyranny as heroic princess-turned-general, Leia Organa. But back here on terra firma, the Star Wars royal, who passed away on Dec. 27, also came to the rescue of numerous Hollywood productions as a highly sought-after “script doctor” throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Recent tributes to Fisher have credited her with making key contributions to hits such as Sister Act and The Wedding Singer, even though — as per industry convention — her name doesn’t appear in the credits of the films from screenplays she reportedly punched up.
That’s why, despite a prolific and profitable writing career that includes novels, one woman shows, and a TV movie, Fisher has only one feature film script officially on her resume: 1990’s Postcards from the Edge, the under-appreciated Hollywood-insider comedy adapted from her own novel and directed by Mike Nichols. (The film is available to stream on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, and Vudu.)
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Originally published in 1987, Postcards recounts the journey from addiction to sobriety undertaken by actress Suzanne Vale (played by Meryl Streep in the film version), one she makes with the help of her friends and family, most notably her mother, showbiz legend Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine). It’s a tale that has obvious similarities to Fisher’s own life story as the child of Hollywood royalty — Debbie Reynolds (who died one day after her daughter, on Dec. 28) and Eddie Fisher — who publicly struggled with drug addiction, although she resisted discussing how much of the semi-autobiographical plot was actually her own. ”I wrote about a mother actress and a daughter actress,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 1990. ”I’m not shocked that people think it’s about me and my mother. It’s easier for them to think I have no imagination for language, just a tape recorder with endless batteries.”
Much of the mother/daughter material was written expressly for the screen version of Postcards, as Doris has a smaller presence in the novel. But having cast actresses of Streep and MacLaine’s caliber, it’s no wonder that Fisher and Nichols would want them to share the frame as much as possible. And their scenes together crackle with an electric wit and impressive economy, as Fisher expertly sums up years of personal history in a handful of incisive lines of dialogue. “My daughter doesn’t like it when I talk,” Doris remarks at one point, and Suzanne immediately validates that opinion by rolling her eyes. While their conflict may be a familiar one — predicated on Suzanne’s feelings of inadequacy and Doris’s mixture of jealousy and love as she regards her daughter’s whirlwind experience in show biz — it’s dramatized and performed in compellingly complex ways.
Take one of Postcards’ best known sequences, where MacLaine belts out Stephen Sondheim’s defiant cry of a song, “I’m Still Here,” in front of assembled guests at Suzanne’s “welcome home from rehab” party. Another writer probably would have used this moment to underline Suzanne’s insecurity and Doris’s desire for attention. But in Fisher’s version, Suzanne is among the partygoers clamoring for her mother to perform, and regularly smiles throughout her bravura rendition. It’s a scene that demands to be watched twice: the first time to take in MacLaine’s performance, and the second to track the rich mixture of emotions that dance across Streep’s face — from admiration at her mother’s moxie to frustration that Doris is, in part, using this song as yet another lecture, this time in song form.
Seen today, Postcards from the Edge isn’t just a lived-in portrait of a mother/daughter relationship, one that takes on added resonance in the wake of Fisher and Reynolds’s deaths a mere day apart: It’s also a trend-setting Hollywood satire. Made two years before Robert Altman’s more celebrated industry send-up, The Player, Nichols and Fisher anticipate that movie in several notable ways, including an extended opening tracking shot, a parade of famous faces making cameos, and a final sequence that knowingly breaks the wall between art and artifice. In The Player’s deservedly lauded first scene, Altman’s camera roams around a studio lot for nearly eight minutes, listening in on various pitch meetings. Then, in its darkly funny closing moments, Tim Robbins’s studio executive listens to a pitch that summarizes the movie the audience just watched.
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Two years prior to The Player, Nichols and Fisher made the choice to begin Postcards with a four-minute single take that follows Suzanne as she performs a sequence from her latest movie, cutting only when she blows a line and acknowledges the camera. They conclude the story with another self-reflexive moment, as Suzanne tears into the original country song, “I’m Checkin’ Out,” while a soundstage filled with extras, crew members, and her mother watch in rapt attention. The last spoken lines in the movie are the director’s order to “Cut, print!” at which point, Streep drops the pretense of performance and delivers a barnburning reprise that continues through the closing credits.
The fact that The Player — a terrific movie in its own right, it should be said — has eclipsed Postcards from the Edge amongst Hollywood satires is indicative of another theme that Fisher addresses throughout the movie and in her other writing: the difficulty of women’s voices and experiences being heard in an industry that all too often prioritizes men. In the process of rebuilding her career following a successful stint in rehab, Suzanne is subjected to treatment that almost certainly wouldn’t be forced on a male star. During her first day on set, a producer (played by Fisher’s When Harry Met Sally director, Rob Reiner) barges into her tiny trailer and demands a prompt drug test.
Later on, she crouches outside the wardrobe trailer, listening as her figure is mercilessly critiqued. “If you have her on her back, her tits are going to move into her armpits,” the costume designer sighs. One imagines that Fisher — who often spoke honestly about her struggles with her body image, most recently in 2015 when she revealed she was pressured to lose weight for Star Wars: The Force Awakens— had first-hand experience with that kind of blatant sexism.
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Revisiting Postcards from the Edge in the wake of Fisher’s passing can’t help but make one mourn the fact that it’s the only produced feature film screenplay for which she’s credited. At the same time, the movie itself is frequently a celebratory experience, marking a career high point not just for its author, but also its stars and director. “I don’t want life to imitate art, I want life to be art,” Suzanne tells her sympathetic, but stern director (Gene Hackman, whose wry presence here makes you regret his retirement all over again) toward the end of the film. With Postcards, Fisher achieved her character’s wish, drawing on her own life, or at least aspects of it, to produce a vibrant, vital work of art.
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