Review of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) by Alec B — 19 Nov 2014

Jeff Daniels plays an actor who played a character in an escapist film, and Mia Farrow plays a woman who needs to escape. In this movie about people's intimate relationship with movies, virtually every meta-angle is explored, with humor and heart. The ideas are not new: at issue are the distinctions between movie problems and real world problems, celluloid romance and real life love, the idealism that art reflects and the cynical business of making art. It is, however, rare for a film to be able to critique its own medium without abandoning the medium's conventions; it is difficult to be truly experimental and yet to tell a relatable story with a familiar dramatic arc. "The Purple Rose of Cairo" finds a way, and it works as both a commentary on classical movie stories and as a classical movie story in its own right.

Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) is a minor character in a big RKO release sometime in the 1930s, a decade when incomes were down but box office revenues were up. He is earnest and heroic and wealthy and romantic because it's "written in his character" to be those things. When he meets Mia Farrow's Cecilia, a woman from the real world, he is a breath of fresh air from her distinctly unromantic problems of poverty and an unhappy marriage. Baxter doesn't know about the Depression, about brothels, even about God; those things aren't written, which provides an opening to discuss them and to contrast the world that is with the world that we like to imagine could be. Leaving no permutation unturned, the film also examines the downsides of life on the other side of the silver screen. Movie characters, were they to become cognizant, would face existential questions about the limits of their free will and about what happens to them when the projectors shut off. Though real people have more or less the same uncertainties, the film eschews the macabre and maintains a humorous tone. There are moments of real emotional weight, though, as when Cecilia must choose between Baxter and the man who brought him to life, Gil Shepherd, whose excuse for being less perfect than his creation is "I'm real." The darkest the film gets is the fatalistic final sequence in which Cecilia, having chosen to live in the real world and to experience the perfect life of movie characters only vicariously, is denied a Hollywood ending. Farrow's face is achingly expressive as it slowly changes over a few long shots.

It must have been difficult to create a rapport between the actors in the fictional movie and the actors watching the movie, and between the two characters played via split screen by Jeff Daniels, but the pace of the dialogue is steady and the jokes are well-timed. Yet the script is not Woody Allen's densest or wittiest. Some of the words feel ad libbed, even in crucial plot-moving scenes between Baxter, Shepherd, and Cecilia. There is also a fair amount of repetition despite the movie's short runtime. Some of this is essential, as in the two scenes when Cecilia's manipulative husband tells her she'll be back despite her apparent intention to leave him. But there is perhaps one scene too many of Hollywood producers debating and fictional movie characters bickering about the absence of a supposedly minor player. More interesting are the vignettes that explore the implications of Baxter's existence: what happens if he gets in a fight? What will he do for money? Can he make love without a Hays Code-era fade out? The movie's answers manage to be funny, touching, and thoughtful all at once.