OVP: Shirley Valentine (1989)

Film: Shirley Valentine (1989)
Stars: Pauline Collins, Tom Conti, Julia McKenzie, Alison Steadman, Joanna Lumley, Sylvia Syms, Bernard Hill
Director: Lewis Gilbert
Oscar History: 2 nomination (Best Actress-Pauline Collins, Original Song-"The Girl Who Used to Be Me")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In 1989, the Oscars had a lot of choices for their fifth nomination for Best Actress.  The Academy could've gone with a beautiful breakout star in a Best Screenplay nominee (Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally or Andie MacDowell in sex, lies, and videotape), or a past nominee in the category in a populist hit (Sally Field in Steel Magnolias or Kathleen Turner in War of the Roses) or even an international icon in a film getting awards season buzz (Isabelle Huppert in Story of Women or Liv Ullmann in The Rose Garden).  Instead, though, the Academy decided to pick a movie starring an actress they'd likely never heard of in a film that made little money, and was a strangely-translated adaptation of a Tony-winning play.  This is where we're going next in our week devoted to Best Actress, where Pauline Collins won her (to date) only Oscar nomination in Shirley Valentine.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Shirley Valentine (Collins), a housewife in Liverpool who is bored of her life, suffering a bit from empty nest syndrome with her husband, whom she has grown cold with (though it's not so much a loveless marriage as one where love used to be stronger).  She has few friends, and spends a lot of her time talking to a wall as a bit of therapy to understand her life.  In the first half of the film, we learn about her backstory, meet her smattering of chums, and see the listless existence she's in, until her friend Jane (Steadman) proposes a trip to Greece for them.  Shirley initially refuses, but after meeting her old friend Marjorie (Lumley), a former schoolmate who is now a high-end prostitute, and seeing how happy she is even in an unconventional life, Shirley up-and-leaves her husband (she tacks a post-it on a poster of Greece in their pantry as a goodbye), and heads to Greece with Jane, who promptly leaves her to have an affair with a man.  After feeling lonely, Shirley decides to invest herself in the culture & also has an affair with Costas (Conti), a local businessman.  Shirley afterwards abandons Jane at the airport, runs back to Costas (only to find that he pulls this line with traveling women all of the time), and decides that they can be professional partners rather than lovers, and asks if she can stay in Greece.  The movie ends ambiguously, with her husband Joe (Hill) coming to Greece to chat with a now-changed Shirley, with us to wonder if they stay together.

The movie in some respects is a pretty standard-fare "midlife crisis in a foreign country" trope.  We've seen this before (When Stella Got Her Groove Back, Under the Tuscan Sun, Eat Pray Love, etc), though with Collins we have a slightly different take-this isn't a woman who is conventionally considered beautiful by cinematic standards like Angela Bassett or Diane Lane, and Collins is willing to give us the sadness of this woman's ordinary life.  We see the disappointment in how Shirley was dismissed from a young age when she had dreams, and how she was worth more than what most people considered of her.  There's a good movie lying in Shirley Valentine, and I especially get why this was a moving play, particularly since this is a one-character show (Collins would tell the stories that we see played by other actors in the movie)-Collins understands the character well, and gives her both an optimism we don't normally see in this situation, as well as a sadness that we know she's never going to recover her youth completely, but that she understands she still has time to live the life she wishes.

But Collins performance is marred by a truly terrible plotting device that they holdover from the play-her repeated attempts to break the fourth wall.  Initially I thought I was just confused by this (I thought she was talking to the dog), and at one point the character admits to talking to the "fourth" wall (literally-it's a wall that has until-this-point been offscreen).  This is a terrible decision-it takes us out of the performance & the film all the time as we have Shirley-the-narrator underlining the feelings of what Pauline Collins is attempting to do with her face and actions.  It ruins the film, which could have been interesting, and basically destroys her performance by making it unnecessary. Narration is always hard in a movie, but here in particular it's exhausting because it becomes expositional, as if we're having the character reexplain what we've just seen.  The film's other nomination for Best Song is a moody, sad ballad that fits the film but is also such a languid piece of music from the Bergmans that I prayed it wouldn't be a constantly recurring theme to the film (thankfully it wasn't-just the front & end credits), but it's a bizarre to me that such a stylized, offbeat performance in a botched adaptation got nominated over the actresses I name-checked above, particularly Ryan & MacDowell, who were giving breakthrough performances which Oscar usually clings to in this category (and despite major stardom, both actresses likely will never win Oscar nominations as a result).