In this season of "Spider Men" and "Star Wars" clones, what a tonic to be treated to a movie for that most un-courted, ignored and generally dissed of demographics: the grown-ups.
"The Cat's Meow" stars a hot teen starlet, but don't let that fool you. This is not a film that depends on jiggles, gross-outs or special effects. The movie unwinds at an unhurried pace and scenes are allowed to play without a lot of jangly edits and jump-cuts. People talk to each other in complete sentences. Director Peter Bogdanovich, making his first feature film in nine years, simply seeks to tell a compelling story and to tell it well. This he does, if a bit sedately. There's a murder, yes, and even what might on a slow day qualify as mayhem, but not enough to get anyone's hair mussed.
Kirsten Dunst and Eddie Izzard star in
(Lions Gate Films)
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"The Cat's Meow" opens on a crystalline November day in 1924, when the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst (Edward Herrmann) convenes a yachting party in California's San Pedro Harbor. Spying from behind a porthole, listening in on conversations through hidden microphones, Hearst observes his guests anxiously as they arrive. There's the British novelist Elinor Glyn (Joanna Lumley), who wonders, as she observes the gathering throng, whether she's "visiting the zoo or one of the animals in the cage." There's Hearst's brand-new film critic, Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilly), a blowsy, starstruck chatterer who talks faster than she thinks. There's the film director Thomas Ince (Cary Elwes), who invented the Western and the modern, rationalized studio system. And, finally, there's the reason for Hearst's paranoid voyeurism: Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard), who is grappling with a box office flop ("The Woman of Paris"), a scandal involving a teenage actress, and his new picture, "The Gold Rush." Hearst is convinced that Chaplin is having an affair with the actress Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst), with whom Hearst himself has been enjoying an illicit liaison for several years.
The reason behind the excursion is Ince's birthday, but the guests have packed their own agendas along with their tuxedos, marijuana and black-market hooch. Having recently had a run of failures, Ince is in desperate need of a job. He wants Hearst to hire him to run Cosmopolitan Pictures. The grasping Parsons wants to move to California and write her own column. And Chaplin wants nothing less than to make Hearst's worst assumptions come true. It's clear, as Hearst's magnificent yacht the Oneida sets sail, that someone is going to get hurt. Someone does.
Based on an urban legend that has been quietly circulating around Hollywood for almost four decades, "The Cat's Meow" would be grounds for libel if the libeled one were still alive; but what this picture really recalls are the tame, ever-so-civil murder mysteries of Agatha Christie.
Bogdanovich directs "The Cat's Meow" with unfussy clarity, introducing a crowded cast of characters with quick scenes that immediately convey who they are and what they're up to. In the 1970s films "The Last Picture Show" and "Paper Moon," Bogdanovich coaxed some wonderful performances from his actors, and he clearly hasn't lost that touch: Herrmann inhabits Hearst completely (he even bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the late publisher). Dunst, heretofore relegated to kittenish teen roles, comes as close to capturing Davies' effervescence and spontaneity as anyone has (and no one has). Izzard is also very good as Chaplin. He has the compact, dancerly physique for the role, pitching his body in a way that communicates sexual longing far better than the torrent of words he unleashes on the cool, but not entirely unresponsive, Marion.
In fact, the film's most eloquent scenes elapse without a word, when the cast is breaking out into progressively wilder versions of the Charleston and when Marion and Charlie are engaging in an erotically charged pantomime during a late-night game of charades. "History has been written in whispers," the film's narrator says tantalizingly as the film opens. "This is the whisper told most often." "The Cat's Meow" proceeds to float breezily on a cloud of murmurs, glances and evanescent gestures – a fitting tone with which to pay homage to this particular time gone by.
THE CAT'S MEOW (PG-13, 112 minutes) – Contains sexuality, a scene of violence and brief drug use. At area theaters.
