Jennifer Jason Leigh offers an acclaimed performance as humorist
Dorothy Parker, who together with such 1920s luminaries as
Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman, was a charter member of the legendary Algonquin Round Table. The story is related in flashback form, as Mrs. Parker, in Hollywood to cowrite the 1937 feature
A Star is Born with her second husband Alan Campbell (
Peter Gallagher), recalls her glory days as an Algonquinite. A great deal of attention is afforded Parker's vituperative bon mots, her alcoholism, her self-destructiveness, her suicide attempts, and her affairs with such literary contemporaries as
Charles MacArthur (an uncharacteristically unsympathetic
Matthew Broderick) and Robert E. Sherwood (
Nick Cassavetes). The one person Parker truly seems to care about is humorist
Robert Benchley (
Campbell Scott), who prefers to keep their friendship platonic. Director
Alan Rudolph attempts to convey the ambience of the 1920s by having dozens of that decade's luminaries appear in fleeting cameos, from Will Rogers (
Keith Carradine) to
Harpo Marx. Also featured in
Mrs. Parker are Tom McGowan as the waspish Alexander Woollcott and
Andrew McCarthy as Dorothy's near-invisible first husband,
Eddie Parker. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide