From an Obit Writer, the Last Word on ‘The Last Word’

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opinion/from-an-obit-writer-the-last-word-on-the-last-word.html

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In her next life, Shirley MacLaine may come back as a movie critic — you never know. If she does (or even if she doesn’t), she won’t likely look back on “The Last Word,” released this month, as a current-life highlight.

In the movie, Ms. MacLaine plays a relentlessly unpleasant woman who is convinced she knows better than anyone else about, well, anything. In her waning years, she decides she deserves more than the animosity she has elicited from just about everyone she has ever encountered, and she enlists (well, purchases) the aid of a newspaper reporter — a fetching young woman, of course, played by Amanda Seyfried — to write her flattering obituary in advance.

This is not a movie I would ordinarily race out to see, but my interest was piqued by what I know about Ms. MacLaine. For one thing, I thought it was odd that someone with an outspoken belief in reincarnation, someone who explored the subject in several books and allowed that she didn’t go to funerals because there’s no reason to say goodbye, would play a role in which the presumed end of her character is, in fact, the end.

For another, Ms. MacLaine herself already has an obituary. I know because I wrote it.

The advance obituary is a staple assignment at The New York Times, a hedge against the inevitable (we’ll have to agree to disagree, Ms. MacLaine) that is deployed for those whose accomplishments and influence would defy a comprehensive exegesis on deadline. Yes, writing an advance obit is a tad macabre, but really it’s just the journalistic equivalent of buying your own cemetery plot. If you wait until it’s too late, it’s too late.

In “The Last Word” I was disappointed by the way Ms. Seyfried, as Anne, the young reporter, goes about her job. Working from a list supplied by her imperious subject, whose name is Harriet Lauler, she reaches out to all of the contacts, visits many of them in person, including Harriet’s ex-husband, and fails to elicit a single compliment, blandishment or fond remembrance about a woman who was a prominent citizen for decades in her Southern California town.

More noteworthy, she fails to extract a single distinctive fact about Harriet’s past. Those only begin to emerge after Anne and Harriet start to buddy up during a series of highly unlikely adventures. Anyway, it finally occurs to Anne to actually look Harriet up in the files of her own newspaper. It turns out Harriet had a life! What do you know!

As a one-time obituary writer for The Times, I was miffed by all this, and especially by Harriet’s suggestion that obituarists aren’t “real” writers. So I leap here to the defense of my noble former colleagues at this paper and others. People who see this movie unawares should be told that it’s fake news, and that it’s the obits themselves that are real news. The kind of article that Anne started writing and that Harriet was trying to orchestrate is more suited to the tiny-type paid death notices placed in newspapers or on Legacy.com by bereft families who wish to announce publicly their bereftness.

Though obit writers at The Times and elsewhere do talk to relatives and friends of their subjects, they don’t spend too much energy on it precisely because most of what people say about their loved ones in such a circumstance tends to be fulsome praise or scented memories — exactly the kind of generic sentimentality that you don’t want to put in a news obituary, yet exactly what Anne was trying to get her interviewees to utter.

What the real writer is interested in from these people is factual information — the specifics of the subject’s education, for example, or where she was born and grew up — so that some connection might be made between the person’s background and the reason the obituary is being written in the first place. Which is why most of the time you do your research before, not after you call the friends and family. The last thing you want is for them to think you don’t know anything about the person you’re asking about.

Anecdotes are helpful, too, because they reveal character and are fun for the reader to read. Remember the reader? Anne never does. When she finally has anecdotes to write about, that’s when she decides not to write the obit at all. And by the way, when you’re writing an actual advance obituary, you tend not to approach friends and family at all, lest you freak them out.

There are exceptions, of course, and from time to time some people even agree to be interviewed for their own obituaries, but in “The Last Word” it is striking that no one seems perturbed or even surprised that a reporter is nosing around for an obituary of an acquaintance still very much alive.

Ms. MacLaine, I speak directly to you now. You have had a remarkable life; the movies I watched while I was preparing your obituary — “The Trouble With Harry,” “The Apartment,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Two for the Seesaw,” “Sweet Charity,” “The Turning Point” and “Terms of Endearment,” along with many others — add up to a résumé of one of Hollywood’s important careers. Along with your brother Warren Beatty (whom I didn’t call, by the way), you made your family indelible in the history of American culture.

The books you have written — I can say I read a couple, not most, not a lot — outline a history of brave outspokenness, political activism, wide travel and serious (though some might call it loopy) philosophical exploration. Which makes me want to ask: Why did you want to add this misleading trifle of a movie to your genuine achievements?

Now I have to add it to your obit.