Death Becomes Her

Death Becomes Her

How do you age gracefully? In Robert Zemeckis and David Koepp’s supernatural black comedy film Death Becomes Her, the almost indisputable belief is that in order to retain happiness and health without a single crease or wrinkle on one’s skin, it’s not really about being well but about knowing the right people.

Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn who played the leading lady roles of the film were both around 40-45 years of age when the film was first launched in 1992. While the plot had people wondering how could any real magic exist in a world ruled by technology, their emotional concepts were genuine and relevant: what now only seems an exaggeration to many people, Streep previously called the movie a hit documentary about the never-ending obsession felt by LA inhabitants towards the unnatural appearance of signs of aging.

Death Becomes Her is set in 1970s Hollywood the decade defined by regular trips to a plastic surgeon, untrustworthy lovers, stage dying to be able to live off the grid, and a portable spray can filled with skin tone as the modern accessory.

The center of this romantic-comedy gone wrong drama is about two archrivals Madeline Ashton (Sreep), the has-been Broadway star and Helen Sharp (Hawn), the insecure writer who are struggling with aging and one’s own death. They are winners, or at least they think So. Madeline takes Helen’s husband; Helen returns after several years as a bright-eyed writer; She is their ex-fiancé, and Madeline drives her younger lover; Now Helen tries to woo her ex-fiance swearing that she loves him.

Love Romero meets a widow the plastic surgeon turned an undertaker Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis who for once stepped away from the muscular machismo embodied in the first two Die Hard movies to offer a softer depiction of masculinity in this film). Once famed for his impressive work in maintaining a wrinkle-less image of stars, he now resorts to a funeral art – ensuring people look natural for their funeral pictures not for when they were alive.

One stormy day, she goes too far and gets dumped by a toy-boy she has been secretly seeing and who’s ashamed of her. This realization hit her hard and she soon finds refuge at the doorstep of Lisle Von Rhuman (gorgeous Isabella Rossellini), a rich woman who practices witchcraft.

Finally, Ashton’s self-consciousness about his age is in a sense understood thanks to Von Rhuman’s perspective, who offers to make all these problems (wrinkles, bags, sagging skin) disappear: a magic pill that’s often not available and contains a deadly secret that grants the consumer ten years of absolute beauty without the ability to be altered by anything.

In theory, it all sounds like a fairy tale. But then, it is Beverly Hills it comes with a price: beauty hurts, the curse of simper viva suggests, your clean-off body, no less, is always going to survive every accident, no matter how graphic.

This zany, usually witch-y film has definitely been ahead of the time in that it has imagined everything there is about a scripted reality television show and there’s always a narrative behind every juicy detail, scene and even a twist. The film has managed to gross over $149m dollars in sales as an international hit but was meanwhile slammed by reviewers as pathetic and demented. It did, however, appear to enchant a younger generation of drag queens and followers of cult related cosplay which later turned into a budding queer audience.

Back in the early 90s, it sounded absurd to see around a virtual 180 degree head spin or to view a gaping gunshot inflicted on the human body along with other lifelike body parts made purely using computer graphics. But Death Becomes Her retains these classic and wonderfully quotable lines because some of the best scenes in the film are strongly built around the special effects the films team received an Oscar and Bafta for.

While the film begins with a storyline where one person betrays the other because of some petty reasons and attempts to take revenge, what emerges out of the mélange of tranquillizer laced wine glasses and outdoor blood-bath is an incredibly heartwarming female friendship story about standing together (in more than one ways at times) instead of competing against each other.

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