Mariel Hemingway stars in Bob Fosse's "Star 80", a film based in part on the Pulitzer Prize winning article "Death of a Playmate", and portrays the events that led to the 1980 murder of Dorothy Stratten. Even though Hemingway gets top billing and the film's title refers to her character, the main story falls fully on Eric Robert's shoulders, as the charismatic loose canon that "discovers" her.
Roberts brings a gravitas to the smarmy, manipulative, and ultimately violent Paul Snider. His performance is the most engaging part of the film, and unfortunately leaves the viewer wondering whether the movie is little more than a means to show the killer as a three-dimensional individual, thereby making him the only fully formed character in the piece.
Hemingway plays Stratten as a one-note naive, easily victimized young woman. It's a decent performance, but she has so few expressions and lacks any real presence that it's a wonder anyone would be so enamored with the woman she plays, and at points her performance is so familiar it feels as if she's back on the set of "Manhattan", the film she was in a few years earlier.
The most misguided performance, though, is Cliff Robertson's Hugh Hefner, who brings little more than a pipe and a bathrobe to the proceedings. It would be unreasonable to assume an actor would mimic everything about a real person, but his take on Hefner was so wrong that supposedly "Hef" himself sued after this film's release.
"Star 80" is certainly not the fluff of the quickly tossed together made for TV movie with Jamie Lee Curtis as Stratten, but for something that obviously had something to say about celebrity and those that struggle to gain it, it hit far short of it's mark.
Roberts brings a gravitas to the smarmy, manipulative, and ultimately violent Paul Snider. His performance is the most engaging part of the film, and unfortunately leaves the viewer wondering whether the movie is little more than a means to show the killer as a three-dimensional individual, thereby making him the only fully formed character in the piece.
Hemingway plays Stratten as a one-note naive, easily victimized young woman. It's a decent performance, but she has so few expressions and lacks any real presence that it's a wonder anyone would be so enamored with the woman she plays, and at points her performance is so familiar it feels as if she's back on the set of "Manhattan", the film she was in a few years earlier.
The most misguided performance, though, is Cliff Robertson's Hugh Hefner, who brings little more than a pipe and a bathrobe to the proceedings. It would be unreasonable to assume an actor would mimic everything about a real person, but his take on Hefner was so wrong that supposedly "Hef" himself sued after this film's release.
"Star 80" is certainly not the fluff of the quickly tossed together made for TV movie with Jamie Lee Curtis as Stratten, but for something that obviously had something to say about celebrity and those that struggle to gain it, it hit far short of it's mark.