MOTHER
MAY I?
by John Leonard
New York Magazine
March 23, 1987
Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder is an adaptation by William Hanley of Shana Alexander’s best-seller about the blood-thirsty Frances Schreuder, based on research by the late Tommy Thompson. I haven’t read the Alexander book. A couple of months ago, on another network, there was another adaptation of the Schreuder story, which I didn’t see, based on another book which (again) I didn’t read. I’m sorry for these delinquencies; parricide is not among my kinks. But I did watch six hours of Lee Remick, which should be more than enough, although I’m not quite sure of what.
The facts about Frankie seem fairly straightforward. She was a difficult child and spoiled brat in SLC. She cried a lot, and her family hated having to sing to her to shut her up. She wanted to dance but went instead to Bryn Mawr, from which she was expelled. She stole some money from her father, a tightwad millionaire, before moving to New York to marry an Italian. By the Italian she had two sons, Lorenzo and Marco. Later on, she married a Belgian and had a daughter, Ariadne. She wanted Ariadne to be the dancer she hadn’t been. She bullied her sons into stealing from their grandfather and, finally, into killing him, after a hit man failed to do the job. Before she was nabbed for first-degree murder, she bought her way onto the board of the New York City Ballet, even though she couldn’t pronounce Balanchine’s name.
Frankie isn’t the only crazy person in Nutcracker. There’s a brother we never meet, who was lobotomized before the story begins. Her sister Marilyn is fist-faced in the grip of revenge fantasies. Her overindulgent and all-forgiving mother seems to be listening to some invisible, demented ghost. Her schoolteacher friend Dicky is a radio signal that drifts often into static. Lorenzo accuses his college roommate of trying to fry him with alpha rays, and cracks the kid’s skull with a hammer. Marco buys the gun and does the dirty deed and has eyes like the pips on dominoes.
There’s also something maniacal about Marilyn’s remark in a taxi, addressed half to her mother and half to the driver: “Larry murdered him, Mother. Bloomingdale’s!”
But Frankie has to be crazy all the time, and Lee Remick is. A Frankie, of course, shouldn’t happen to a child; as parents go, she makes Joan Crawford look like Shirley Partridge – or Medea like Mother Teresa. The only compass she consults is her own insane convenience. Her wounds are greedy mouths. Her sex is snakes-and-scissors. And Remick astonishes. She hasn’t aged an inch since The Days of Wine and Roses. She is seamless, yet shatters. For the first two hours, we are merely acutely uncomfortable; she is a permanent tantrum, a pom-pom girl at a death game. For the next four, she’s a nail in the optic nerve.
It is a relentless performance. Not for a minute does Remick connive at our sympathies; we are not permitted to understand her too quickly, or at all. She is what she is, uncompromised by scruple or excuse, an evil embarrassment and a Grimm witch, trying to jump out of windows or gobbling pills, in lounge pajamas on a king-size bed, a cigarette in one hand, a cocktail glass in the other, a telephone hanging on her ear like a feral squirrel: “It’s a sad commentary,” she’s always saying. Or, “Case closed!” When, that is, she isn’t mangling half-remembered quotes from dead writers, or telling lies easily, or doing her diva twitch, so high-strung she should be hanged.
None of this is for laughs. Remick isn’t showing off. Even when she munches toast, she terrifies. What are we supposed to think? A nervous camera almost bites itself in flashbacks and flash-forwards and spasms of montage. A creepy musical score insists on affectlessness. We grin like Glover, a used-up skull. She’s a monster.
At least Medea had a legitimate gripe. Jason dumped her, after she’d helped him with his fleece, for Creon’s nubile daughter. Euripides saw Medea’s point. I’m not so sure about William Hanley and Shana Alexander and Frankie. The Greeks went crazy from hubris and too many meddlesome gods. Shakespeare’s otherwise worthy big boys had fault lines that opened up to fatal flaws. If we were Jude the Obscure, we’d be sullen, too, and we’ve got some idea of why Madame Bovary felt so bad. Freud knows, I don’t want any more psycho-babble of the sort we heard too much of from the credentialed quacks at the Baby M trial in Hackensack, but Frankie just stares back at us unblinking and mindless, a killer of fathers and children, a hole in the head.
See Nutcracker for the remarkable Remick, but you’ll be sorry.
