THE MASTERPIECE
We reassess the greatest films of all time, one film at a time
Meryl Streep’s Madeline adjusts her head after a tricksy broken-neck incident.
Death Becomes Her
THE YEAR IS 1992. Goldie Hawn stands framed in the French windows of a Hollywood mega-mansion, her attitude confident and confrontational. Meryl Streep stands opposite her, holding a large shotgun. Cocking the gun, Streep drawls, “You brought this on yourself,” before proceeding to unload both barrels into Hawn’s midriff, blasting her through the air and into an elegant courtyard water-feature.
Streep turns away. Ain’t no way anyone’s coming back from that. In the subsequent scene, as Streep’s character and her nebbish, alcoholic husband (a game, goofy Bruce Willis) begin to make corpse-disposal plans, the Hollywood star played by Hawn rises from her liquid grave, water pouring through a hole in her mid-section. She is triumphantly very much alive and ready for Round Two.
This is both a literal description of one of the many standout set-pieces in Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her, and a metaphor for its reception as a film, with the unimpressed critics of yesteryear in the role of Streep and her shotgun. But you can’t keep a good film down.