Griffith Dunne

(On Cable TV, July 2021) On a very surface level, Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds is a documentary about the relationship between mother Debbie Reynolds, a classic Hollywood star who had the lead in 1951’s Singin’ in the Rain, and daughter Carrie Fisher, who achieved her own superstardom a generation later with 1977’s Star Wars. The documentary presents both women later in age, as they live in adjacent houses “separated by a hill.”  Even by the standards of mother/daughter relationships, theirs is complex: A mixture of codependency, affection and long-festering resentment all tempered by aging. The film does a really good job at portraying what it feels like to grow up under the spotlight for Fisher and her brother, with a movie-star mother and a music crooner father. That’s interesting by itself, and the film does a fine job at showing (or reminding) viewers about their achievements. There’s some added interest here for those interested in measuring Classic Hollywood with New Hollywood: We get a look both at Reynold’s effort to preserve Golden-Age Hollywood memorabilia, and (through Fisher’s wry humour) as honest a take as possible on the weird demands of modern fandom from the stars’ point of view. It’s probably not an accident if Fisher gets the most airtime here — that a child of a less inhibited age would be at times painfully honest about her issues, while her mother would cling, even late in life, to the decorum expected of studio stars. (Her brother Todd Fisher acts as a fact-checker at times, as he practically becomes a narrator to fill in some context.) Fisher does come across as a fun eccentric here — although we’re warned that the camera is capturing her in a manic, outgoing phase. Still, that conversation with Griffith Dunne in which both discuss how he took her virginity (!) will strike many as being incredibly, even uncomfortably forthright. Those with a better awareness of the meta-contextual history of Reynolds and Fisher will be able to fill in some of the blanks that the film merely hints at — in particular the long periods of estrangement between the two, some of it reflected in Fisher’s semi-autobiographical Postcards from the Edge or better yet her filmed one-woman show Wishful Drinking. Thanks to a mixture of interviews, historical footage, explanations and fly-on-the-wall footage, Bright Lights becomes a way to do justice to a relationship almost too extraordinary to believe. But the one thing that puts the entire result in perspective is something that is (sadly) not mentioned in the film, something that happened a few months after its theatrical premiere and two weeks prior to its TV premiere as an HBO presentation: Fisher died and then, one single day later, Reynolds died as well. Dramatic to the end, they went out adding even more credence to this portrait of their lives.