Funny Girl

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Dorothy Parker quipped her way into minor celebrity, wrote her way into modest immortality and drank herself into near oblivion. All talk and no action, she is not an ideal subject for a movie. But if you must film this life, you'd better do something more than flatly recount the failed promise and failed romances that made it miserable.

At times Alan Rudolph, the director (and co-writer) of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, seems to have a larger purpose, which is to challenge the supposed glamour of the bright, bibulous young writers who drew themselves up to the round table at Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s. Yet Rudolph remains of two minds about his subjects. He wants them to charm us, but he also wants to show how their infinite distractability stunted their lives and careers. His ambivalence creates not an intriguing thematic tension but merely confusion.

Rudolph doesn't sharply differentiate these figures -- this is a movie of cameos -- and his re-creations of their famously brittle conversations suffer from a desperate case of fallen archness. What's worst is that the development of the film's central character is so uninvolving. Jennifer Jason Leigh's draggy performance as Parker is all studied accent (something vaguely mid- Atlantic but never before heard on Earth) and equally studied self-pity. Her sadness is attributed mainly to her failure to sexually consummate a relationship with her pal Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott). But this is a dithery and inconsequential tragedy, and it cannot sustain our sympathy, or our interest in this inept film.