Carrie Fisher: Wishful Drinking (2010)

(On Cable TV, April 2022) There’s a telling moment, early in Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show Wishful Drinking, in which Fisher states that it’s by taking ownership of one’s flaws – here by laughing at them – that you get to master them, and the show itself is an incredible illustration of that idea. Walking barefoot on a stage made to look like a living room (but with some surprising multimedia refinements that become obvious over the course of the show), Fisher delivers a surprisingly hilarious take on her own life as the daughter of a pop-culture royalty couple (and associated tangle of complications), as someone with textbook mental health issues, as a much-divorced alcoholic and, by the way, as pop-culture icon Princess Leia. It’s clearly a comedy show, and even the most enthusiastic viewers may squirm a bit in hearing Fisher boil down painful moments into one-liners. But they’re great one-liners – Fisher’s underappreciated career as a writer (as novelist, but also most notably as a script doctor) shines through here, and it’s not rare to hear a very quotable line in the middle of her autobiographical patter. There’s a strong “gosh, look at those weird Hollywood people” quality to the show, as she acknowledges the sheer weirdness of her life when compared to the more usual yardsticks used by her audience. (And let’s acknowledge the valuable contribution of cute audience member “Nicole,” plucked from the front row to become a minor participant in the show.)  Fisher herself is a lot of fun here, and the film goes hand-and-glove with Bright Lights, the documentary chronicling her complex relationship with her mother Debbie Reynolds completed just before their near-simultaneous deaths. The highlight of this one is probably the “Hollywood inbreeding 101” number, in which we go through a complex web of marriages and births to determine whether two young people wanting to date are, in fact, related. Only in Hollywood, suggests (erroneously) Fisher – but that’s the nature of the documentary. Wishful Drinking is absorbing viewing, frequently hilarious even as it handles heart-wrenching material. A must-see for any Fisher fans, and a great show for anyone else – don’t worry, Fisher will provide the context required to make sense of it all.