Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me

Synopsis:  A documentary about Broadway legend Elaine Stritch whose career on stage began in the 1940s.

Chiemi Karasawa’s documentary starts off looking like one of those heavily packaged promotional exercises designed to create an audience for an upcoming stage production – in this case Stritch’s one-woman show built around the songs of Stephen Sondheim. There's lots of backstage footage and encomiums from well-known faces, notably the cast of 30 Rock (see the promotional poster for more) who in familiar fashion all swear that she’s the bomb while via stills and archival footage highlights are plucked from her stage and screen career.

Fortunately sooner rather than later the film moves into more genuinely revealing material and becomes a quite moving portrait of Stritch, a one-time convent girl from Michigan.  Given Stritch's abrasive candour many will be reminded of the 2010 doco Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work, which similarly dealt with another indefatigibly brassy trouper (although 75 at the time Rivers was a mere strippling compared to Stritch). This film goes deeper however, Stritch both having the ability to switch off in front of the camera in a way that Rivers did not and allowing Karasawa to film her in uncontrolled situations as she struggles to remember song lyrics and in one instance during an diabetic episode when she loses her bearings.

\What we get is an intimate engagement with a woman who is very literally fragile yet who is driven by what for her makes life worth living. As Stritch puts it, quoting her now long dead husband “Everyone’s got a sack of rocks”.  The unspoken implication is, of course, "...so get on with it".  That she was 86 going on 87 when she was touring her show is remarkable and inspiring for us all.  Not in some hokey triumphalist way but rather in seeing someone confront their fears, frustrations and disappointments every day, not always beating them but returning to the fray for as long as time and health permits.

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me is showing at ACMI from April 02 - 28. See the ACMI website for details 

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