BRIGHT LIGHTS, WITH CARRIE FISHER AND DEBBIE REYNOLDS

US, 2016, 95 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Alexis Bloom, Fisher Stevens.

This film was released by HBO at the beginning of 2016. Film fans around the world experienced the sadness at the end of 2016 with the death of Carrie Fisher after a heart attack on a flight from London, the grief of her mother Debbie Reynolds and her collapsing the next day and dying.

Debbie Reynolds story is in many essentials a very Hollywood story. This film highlights the extent of her career with many glimpses of film clips as well as nightclub performances and other concerts. The film also highlights the personal background, her marriage, very young, to crooner Eddie Fisher, the disillusionment when Eddie Fisher went to “console� Elizabeth Taylor and then married her. There were two children, Carrie and Todd.

Carrie Fisher had a very difficult life, the absence of her father, and gambling and reckless stepfather, being in the light of her mother and her career yet being encouraged to sing and to perform, bonding with her brother. As Princess Leia when she was 20 and throughout her 20s, she became one of the most popular icons of cinema culture. Yet, she suffered from depression, drug addiction and drinking, but experienced some rehabilitation as well as a successful career as a writer, novelist, screen doctor.

At the end of their lives, mother and daughter became very close, living next door to each other, knowing each other’s thoughts and feelings, mutually supportive – not without some daily exasperation.

The film was interesting in showing the origins of Mary Frances Reynolds from Texas, her mother’s disapproval of a show business career, her early auditions and screen roles, contract at MGM, singing Abba Dabba Honeymoon in Two Weeks with Love, followed by Singing in the Rain, a film with Frank Sinatra, The Tender Trap, her Oscar nomination for The Unsinkable Molly Brown. She did make a lot of other films over the decades but these are not touched on. Rather, the film goes onto her cabaret career, her exuberance in performing, getting energy from the audience, establishing an instant rapport with them – and, as she grew older, so also her grey-haired audiences., Carrie joined her on stage in singing.

Full of verve, it is interesting to hear Debbie Reynolds’o reflections on the alienation for many years from her daughter, their reconciliation, their happy dependence on each other – which makes a lot of sense that Debbie Reynolds would die the day after her daughter.

Carrie Fisher has always had a sardonic tone. There is quite a lot of home video of Carrie and Todd as children, of performance in teenage. There is acknowledgement of the Star Wars phenomenon – even in later decades Carrie Fisher going to conventions and signing autographs. She had filmed her sequences for Star Wars VIII, with sequences of her fitness regime to prepare for this film, and there was a computer generated image of her as young at the end of Rogue One.

For film buffs, there are sequences from the film version of her novel Postcards from the Edge (1991, directed by Mike Nichols), a fictionalised version of her life and breakdown and the impact of her mother – with Meryl Streep the equivalent of Carrie Fisher and Shirley Mac Claine as the equivalent of Debbie Reynolds.

In later years, Carrie Fisher had a show with which she travelled and was filmed for television, reviewing her life, its ups and downs, family, her marriage to Paul Simon, her health and mental health crises: Wishful Drinking.

There is a lot of pathos in the sequence in this film where, three months before he died in 2010, Carrie goes to visit Eddie Fisher, just a shell of the man ill in bed, going back on his life, his absence as father, his drug addiction, the collapse of his career – but an opportunity for him to express his love for his daughter and her love for him.

This is one of the more interesting Hollywood documentaries, with great affection for the subjects, celebrating the ups and downs of their lives without targeting them. Actor Fisher Stevens is one of the sympathetic directors.