In 1978, a narcissistic fading actress Madeline Ashton performs in a Broadway musical. She invites long-time frenemy, the meek aspiring writer Helen Sharp, backstage along with Helen's fiancé, famed plastic surgeon Ernest Menville. Smitten with Madeline, Ernest breaks off his engagement with Helen to marry Madeline. Seven years later, a lonely, obese, depressed, and destitute Helen is committed to a psychiatric hospital where she obsesses over taking revenge against Madeline.
Another seven years later, Madeline and Ernest live an opulent but miserable life in Beverly Hills: Madeline is depressed about her age and withering beauty and Ernest, now an alcoholic, has been reduced to working as a reconstructive mortician. After receiving an invitation to a party celebrating Helen's new book, Madeline rushes for beauty treatments. Desperate to look younger, Madeline is given the business card of Lisle Von Rhuman, a mysterious, wealthy socialite who specializes in rejuvenation.
Madeline and Ernest attend Helen's party and discover that Helen is now slim, glamorous and youthful despite being fifty years old. Jealous of Helen's appearance, Madeline observes as Helen tells Ernest that she blames Madeline for his career decline. Madeline later visits her young lover but discovers he is with a woman of his own age. Despondent, Madeline drives to Lisle's mansion. The youthful Lisle claims to be seventy-one years old and offers Madeline a potion that promises eternal life and youth. Madeline drinks the potion, which reverses her age, restoring her beauty, but Lisle warns her that she must disappear from the public eye after ten years, to avoid suspicion of her immortality, and treat her body well.
Meanwhile, Helen seduces Ernest and persuades him to kill Madeline. When Madeline returns home, she belittles Ernest, who snaps and pushes her down the stairs, breaking her neck. However, she inexplicably survives and Ernest takes Madeline to the hospital where the doctor's analysis shows she is clinically dead. Ernest considers her reanimation to be a miracle and uses his skills to repair her body at home. Helen arrives and, after overhearing her and Ernest discussing their murder plot, Madeline shoots Helen with a shotgun. The blast leaves a large hole in Helen's torso but she remains alive, revealing that she also has taken Lisle's potion. Helen and Madeline fight before apologizing and reconciling. Depressed at the situation, Ernest prepares to leave, but Helen and Madeline persuade him to repair their bodies first. Realizing they will need regular maintenance, they scheme to have Ernest drink the potion to ensure his permanent availability.
The pair knock out Ernest and bring him to Lisle, who offers him the potion in exchange for his surgical skills. Although tempted, Ernest rejects immortality, concerned about outliving anyone he cares about—forcing him to spend eternity with Madeline and Helen—and the physical consequences Madeline and Helen have already suffered. He flees with the potion but becomes trapped on the roof. Helen and Madeline implore Ernest to drink the potion to survive an impending fall but, realizing they only want him for selfish reasons, he throws the potion away. Ernest survives the fall after landing in Lisle's pool and escapes, leaving the pair in despair at the realization that they will have to depend on each other for companionship and maintenance, forever.
Thirty-seven years later, Madeline and Helen attend Ernest's funeral, where he is eulogized as having achieved true immortality by living an adventurous and fulfilling life and having many children and grandchildren. Now grotesque parodies of their former selves, with cracked, peeling paint and putty covering most of their grey and decrepit flesh, Helen and Madeline mock the eulogy and leave. Outside, Helen trips and falls down a flight of steps, dragging Madeline with her. Their bodies break apart, and Helen sardonically asks Madeline if she remembers where they parked their car.
Before Bruce Willis was cast, Kevin Kline was the first choice to play Dr. Ernest Menville; however, he fell out of the project due to a pay dispute with the studio. Jeff Bridges and Nick Nolte were both considered before Willis was eventually cast.[1]
Filming
Principal photography for Death Becomes Her began on December 9, 1991, and wrapped up on April 7, 1992.[1] The film was shot entirely in Los Angeles and featured several locations frequently used in film and television, including the Greystone Mansion (Ernest's funeral home) and the Ebell of Los Angeles (Helen's book party).[6] The exterior of Madeline and Ernest's mansion is located at 1125 Oak Grove Avenue in San Marino, but the interior was a set built on a soundstage.[1] The ending scene where Helen and Madeline tumble down a set of stairs outside a chapel was filmed at Mount St. Mary's University in Brentwood.[7][8]
Visual effects
Death Becomes Her was a technologically complex film to make, and represented a major advancement in the use of CGI effects, under the direction of Industrial Light & Magic.[9][10] It was the first film where computer-generated skin texture was used, in the shot where Madeline resets her neck after her head is smashed with a shovel by Helen.[9] Creating the sequences where Madeline's head is dislocated and facing the wrong way around involved a combination of chroma key, an animatronic model created by Amalgamated Dynamics, and prosthetic make-up effects on Meryl Streep to create the look of a twisted neck.[11][12]
The digital advancements pioneered on Death Becomes Her would be incorporated into Industrial Light and Magic's next project, Jurassic Park, released by Universal only a year later. The two films also shared cinematographer Dean Cundey and production designer Rick Carter.[13]
The production had a fair number of mishaps. In the scene where Helen and Madeline are battling with shovels, Streep accidentally cut Goldie Hawn's face, leaving a faint scar. Streep admitted that she disliked working on a project that focused so heavily on special effects and vowed never to work on another film with heavy special effects again, saying:
My first, my last, my only. I think it's tedious. Whatever concentration you can apply to that kind of comedy is just shredded. You stand there like a piece of machinery—they should get machinery to do it. I loved how it turned out. But it's not fun to act to a lampstand. "Pretend this is Goldie, right here! Uh, no, I'm sorry, Bob, she went off the mark by five centimeters, and now her head won't match her neck!" It was like being at the dentist.[14]
Post-production
Multiple scenes that were filmed were omitted from the film's final cut.[15][1] Director Robert Zemeckis decided on cutting the scenes to accelerate the film's pacing and to eliminate extraneous jokes. Most dramatically, the original ending was entirely redone after test audiences reacted unfavourably to it.[16] That ending featured Ernest, after he has fled Lisle's party, meeting a bartender named Toni (Tracey Ullman) who helps him fake his death to evade Madeline and Helen. The two women encounter Ernest and the bartender 27 years later, living happily as a retired couple while Madeline and Helen give no sign that they are enjoying their eternal existence.[15] Zemeckis thought the ending was too happy and opted for the darker ending featured in the final cut.[15] Ullman was one of five actors with speaking roles in the film to be eliminated.[15] Other scenes that were eliminated included one in which Madeline talks to her agent (Jonathan Silverman) and one in which Ernest removes a frozen Madeline from the kitchen freezer he has stored her in.[15] Some of the scenes can be viewed in the original theatrical trailer.[17]
Release
Box office
Death Becomes Her was a box office success and opened at number one at the box office with $12,110,355, the same weekend as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bebe's Kids.[18][19] It went on to earn over $58.4 million domestically and $90.6 million internationally.[2] In Taipei, Death Becomes Her set a box-office record by earning $269,310 in two days, marking it the "biggest opening ever" for overseas distributor United International Pictures.[1]
Home media
The film's release on DVD was called "appallingly bad" due to the quality of its transfer, which has been said to suffer from excessive grain, blur, and muted colors.[20] A BBC review described it as "horrible" and "sloppy".[21] Many online DVD forum users speculated that the DVD transfer was taken from the Laserdisc edition of the film and called for a restorative release. Death Becomes Her was initially distributed in an open matte fullscreen (1.33:1) edition in the U.S. while a Widescreen version with its theatrical aspect ratio (1.85:1) was released worldwide. The latter version has also been mistakenly labelled anamorphic.[22] It was later released in North America on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory in 2016.[23][24]
Reception
Death Becomes Her received mixed reviews from critics, who praised its special effects and lead performances, but found it lacking depth and substance.[1][25][26][27] Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 57% based on reviews from 58 critics with the consensus: "Hawn and Streep are as fabulous as Death Becomes Her's innovative special effects; Zemeckis' satire, on the other hand, is as hollow as the world it mocks."[28] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 56 based on 24 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[29] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[30]
The Chicago Tribune's Dave Kehr wrote, "Instantly grotesque, relentless misanthropic and spectacularly tasteless, 'Death Becomes Her' isn't a film designed to win the hearts of the mass moviegoing public. But it is diabolically inventive and very, very funny."[31][32]Todd McCarthy of Variety said, "While the fountain of youth theme has often come up in films, it has never been given anything like this treatment before."[33]People praised the film's "flashes of originality, brilliant special effects and terrific performances—Willis as a curdled Milquetoast and Hawn as a woman who is finally feeling her own power. Streep makes a fine untamed shrew, by turns shrill, whiny and cooing".[34] Willis was also singled out for his against type comedic performance.[35][34]
Negative reviews criticized the script and pacing, noting that its satire feels scattershot and that the plot is pushed aside for the special effects.[36][37]Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert both gave Death Becomes Her a 'thumbs down', commenting that while the film has great special effects, it lacks any real substance or character depth.[38]People said "screenwriters David Koepp and Martin Donovan would have done well to keep their skewed, scabrous vision in sharper focus and to display satire that rises to the level of a scene in which Rossellini is throwing a party for her myriad clients".[34]Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly said, "The trouble with Death Becomes Her isn't that its comic vision is too dark but that it has no shadings, no acerbic glee. Zemeckis gives nastiness such a hard sell he forgets to take any delight in it."[39]
Rita Kempley of The Washington Post gave an overall positive review in which she praised the script's "offbeat lines and unexpected laughs", but noted there is still an "underlying high-and-mighty moral tone, which might have come straight from the pen of Hawthorne -- a puritannical posture wholly deserving of Madeline's retort: 'Blah, blah, blah, blah.' Really, fellas, what's a little cucumber mask going to hurt?"[40]
In Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, "Oddly, the more fantastical and grotesque this comedy becomes, the more conventional it seems-and the less it has to say. Somewhere in the middle of the movie, the characters take a back seat to the pyrotechnics, reality is replaced by cliffhangers and Gothic claptrap, and the laughs start to dry up. Satire needs a social context, but the filmmakers have little to say about the culture that created these age-obsessed women. Still, even when 'Death Becomes Her' wanders off course, it remains worth rooting for."[41]
Death Becomes Her has acquired a significant cult following, especially in the LGBT community.[44][45][46] In RogerEbert.com, Jessica Ritchey wrote, "Time has been kind to 'Death Becomes Her', and the mordantly funny eye it turns to Hollywood pretense and our cultural inability to forgive women for aging. With the virtual extinction of Hollywood's interest in women over thirty, it's a real pleasure to see a film centered on and held down by two actresses as strong as Streep and Hawn."[47] An article in Vanity Fair titled "The Gloriously Queer Afterlife of 'Death Becomes Her'" called the film a "gay cult classic" and "a touchstone of the queer community".[5] The movie is screened in bars during Pride Month, while the characters of Madeline and Helen are favorites of drag performers. In this vein, the movie inspired a Death Becomes Her-themed runway show on season 7 of RuPaul's Drag Race.[44] The winner of season 5, Jinkx Monsoon, has cited the movie as an inspiration to become a drag queen. Jinkx has participated in Death Becomes Her-themed photoshoots,[48] and in 2018 they played Madeline in a drag stage show parody called "Drag Becomes Her" alongside season 6 contestant BenDeLaCreme.[49] Tom Campbell, an executive producer of RuPaul's Drag Race, reflected on the appeal of the movie to gay audiences:
They're fighting for beauty. They're against the system. They're also villains, but we understand their complexity. We root for the undead divas because they're trying to win a game that's rigged against them, and—to borrow an apocryphal quote from Ginger Rogers—they sort of have to do it 'backwards and in high heels.'[5]
