Rave Reviews for Michelle Pfeiffer’s Performance in “French Exit”!

After the February limited release  in New York & L.A. and the April 2 national release in the US, Michelle Pfeiffer’s new movie “French Exit” finally opens in the UK & Ireland today (July 2).

Directed by Azazel Jacobs, and based on the same title novel by Patrick deWitt, “French Exit” earned Michelle another Golden Globe Best Actress nomination and a win of Best Actress in the 2021 Canadian Screen Awards. On this page you can find a selection of great reviews on Michelle’s wonderful performance and the movie itself.

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French Exit review – a duff display case for Pfeiffer’s jewel of a performance

Often stilted and self-conscious, this adaptation of Patrick deWitt’s 2018 novel nevertheless has one huge asset…

Through a steely force of will, with a diamond-cut edge to her performance and a gloss of rarefied disappointment in the world, Michelle Pfeiffer almost redeems this self-consciously quirky adaptation of Patrick deWitt’s novel. She plays Frances Price, a widowed Manhattan socialite whose plan “to die before the money ran out” is thwarted, leaving her virtually penniless, with just her minks and a manicure for comfort.

She decamps to Paris with her son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges, struggling to bring life to a desultory shrug of a character), and her cat, Small Frank, who may or may not be the reincarnation of her late husband. Her plan is to live quietly in a borrowed apartment until the final dregs of her vast inheritance have trickled away. Mother and son encounter, among others, a cruise ship fortune-teller with an unerring gift for predicting imminent death and a private detective hired when Small Frank goes missing. And Malcolm’s on-off girlfriend, Susan (Imogen Poots), hovers on the periphery, scoring a distant second in Malcolm’s affections behind his mother. “Oh, to be young-ish and in love-ish,” drawls Frances, cattily. Too indolent a film to overtly tap into Oedipal imagery, it does at least sketch a cosseted co-dependency between mother and son.

There are plenty of cherishable lines, which Pfeiffer deploys to perfection with the world-weary chagrin of a woman who has just found a supermarket olive in her martini. Other dialogue fails to make the journey from page to screen, sounding jarringly artificial and arch. The picture shares some DNA with the work of Wes Anderson, but this scattershot and rather uneven work lacks the obsessive precision of something like The Royal Tenenbaums. Ultimately, it’s less a fully realised movie, more a display case for Pfeiffer’s jewel of a performance. And there are moments, as Pfeiffer deploys her silky ennui and her venomous purr, where that’s enough.

Watch a trailer for French Exit

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French Exit review – Pfeiffer is glorious in this surreal comedy

James Luxford | CITYA.M.

The career of Michelle Pfeiffer is one that seems to have many comebacks, but in reality, the Oscar nominee never stopped producing good work. Despite missing half of the 2000s due to a self-imposed hiatus from acting, she still appeared in hits like Hairspray and Stardust, while the 2010s saw her feature in everything from Ant-Man and The Wasp to Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!

French Exit may be one of the quirkier films in her filmography, but it also one of her most engaging performances. She plays Frances, a Manhattan heiress with an abrasive temperament that is indulged because of her wealth. This luxury is taken from her, however, when she finds herself penniless following the death of her husband. Selling everything that isn’t nailed down, she and son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) head to Paris to live in the apartment of a friend. However, romantic entanglements and a possessed cat threaten to derail everything.

As the last sentence suggests, the plot isn’t afraid to take a turn into bizarre territory. While a welcome surprise, the peculiarity becomes a millstone around the film’s neck, as the characters find themselves with nowhere to go. This is literally illustrated at times as the various people in Frances’ life all sit together in the same room, unsure what to do next. Malcolm’s ex Susan (Imogen Poots) and Danielle Macdonald’s Madeleine, a medium they meet on the boat, both have their moments but find themselves ultimately stranded.

The plan involves the titular “French exit” – a hugely underrated term for ducking out of a party without saying goodbye. The Prices—Frances, Malcolm, and Small Frank—sell their things and quietly hop a boat to Paris. The plan is to stay at the empty flat offered by Frances’s friend Joan (Susan Coyne) where they can live rent-free until the money situation resolves itself. On the ride over, though, Malcolm bangs a mystic named Madeline (Danielle Macdonald) who can allegedly foresee deaths in the green haze that hangs atop the nearly departed. (With French Exit and Let Them All Talk, Hedges is having quite the season of kooky cruises.) Frances, meanwhile, mostly keeps to herself and enjoys martinis with the cat. Their relationship is one of peculiar cat fancy.

A scene-stealing Mahaffey

In Paris, though, Small Frank goes missing when Frances tells him what she’ll do when their money runs out. French Exit then follows the reliable comedic tradition of adding more characters to the pot. A lonely socialite, a private detective, an ex-girlfriend, etc. Despite the growing ensemble, however, nobody challenges Frances’ obviously loose screw, nor her accelerating spending habits. She is the stuff of legend in social circles and they’re all eager to enjoy the show.

Frances’s novelty is particularly evident in her magnetic charm to Mme. Reynard (a wonderful Valerie Mahaffey), an American ex-pat in Paris. She invites Frances and Malcolm to dinner and insinuates herself into Frances’s life. Like a homely little sister, Mme. Reynard lets Frances’s retain her grand aura and elevated status at the mere price of a cassoulet and companionship.

But Mme. Reynard also has a story of Frances’s past that is the key to Mrs. Price’s coldness. Her fascination with Frances lies in her ability to remain aloof to criticism that her late husband Frank was a rotten bastard. Frances’s pride, it seems, is well-earned.

The Green Glow

Adapting his own novel, de Witt retains much of the sprightly banter that makes French Exit as darkly funny on film as it is in prose. This is a wry comedy of manners that relishes the minutiae of the upper class. Frances’s stack of cash becomes the hourglass ticking down her fate, and as de Witt conjures kookier ways for Frances to make it rain dollars all over Paris, the character becomes grounded as she doubles down on the frivolity of money.

These scenes accentuate French Exit’s quietly blooming strangeness. The aforementioned “green glow” that Madeline observes in those approaching death becomes inseparable from Frances’s intoxication by money. Two scenes, one near the beginning of French Exit and one near the end, see Frances offer money to homeless men. The first comes on a stroll home through Central Park. Frances finds herself taken in by the romanticism of the man’s poverty. Sharing a cigarette with the man who flatters her, she offers him a twenty with an air of patronising pride. Despite being broke, money is a status symbol to Frances. She later gives a much more generous offering to a man in a Parisian parkette. The transaction confers upon Frances a different kind of status consciousness: a sort of acceptance that she too has not a penny to her name but is seeing green.

Catwoman Forever

French Exit accentuates the light touches of magical realism that are more apparent here than in the novel. (I won’t spoil them, but fans of de Witt’s book should be pleased with the film’s handling of Frank the cat.) Each one makes Frances oddly endearing. She is something from another lifetime, a sort of aristocrat held over from The Age of Innocence when “old money” meant something.

This sophisticated air is inseparable from Pfeiffer’s star status. Pfeiffer carries herself in a cool manner that gives Frances her lived-in edge. Michelle Pfeiffer is ferociously funny in French Exit by playing it straight. Her measured responses and well-cadenced diction ensure that the dry humour of de Witt’s script is casually caustic. Few actors master the art of the resting bitch-face to such hilarious effect. There is a faint, barely perceptible smirk that never leaves her chin, like the masked grin of a Cheshire cat. In Pfeiffer’s hands, Frances is a woman with high tastes and low patience. She is both good company and intolerable, like Moira Rose with a more mannered accent and tasteful wardrobe, but equally so a fish-out-of-water.

Like Moira, Frances finds redemption in her own way by seeing what money can and can’t buy. Although de Witt’s adaptation dispenses with much of Frances’s backstory aside from the tale offered by Mme. Reynard, and a crucial flashback about the day she found Small Frank, she feels like a fuller character by the film’s end. De Witt gives Frances a new fate in the adaptation, one that is equally dire but far more beguiling. Frances might have called herself a cliché by the last page of the book, but she’d hardly say the same by the end credits.

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Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges are well-matched in French Exit

Andrew Kendall | Stabroek News

“French Exit”, Azazel Jacobs’ new film takes place in a world removed from our own. Yes, it takes place in something resembling contemporary New York and Paris, and the characters speak in English and look like people we are familiar with. But, an important part of the fabric of its existence depends on something existing on the peripheries of normality and reality. A world, just slightly askance.

The opening moment of “French Exit,” which is an adaptation of Patrick deWitt’s novel, is a brief two-minute prologue. In it, a woman – clearly rich, and clearly unconventional – arrives in the middle of the day to remove her son from school. The headmaster is against it. The woman, shepherding her pre-teen son out of the building, does not care. The son is concerned about the lack of clothes, and his other things. “We’ll buy new ones,” she insists. And so, they leave. Later in the film the scene appears in full, contextualising the seemingly spontaneous escape and the countenance of the players. But it sets up two things that are critical to the film that will follow: The obedience of Malcolm (Eddie Holland), the son, to his mother, Frances (Michelle Pfeiffer), and her carelessness about money and the world around her.

If, “French Exit” has any straightforward crises to resolve, it is that both characters must come to a point where they overcome these issues. And, in their way, Malcolm and Frances do work at grappling with these issues over the course of the film. But, “French Exit” is not straightforward. And as familiar as Malcolm and Frances might be, they are not quite like people we know. It’s important that they not be, and that the world they inhabit feels ever so slightly off-kilter.

The proper story begins, some years later, in something like the present. Frances and Malcolm (now, an adult, played by Lucas Hedges) live in a grand house in New York but the money is dwindling. So much so that the new year, less than a month away, will see all their resources repossessed and their income stream – all inherited from Frances’ dead husband – will be cut off. The only valid solution is for Frances to, not quite legally, sell everything off and take the money and escape to Paris. Malcolm, despite his engagement, accompanies her on this impromptu exit to Europe, along with their cat – a physical vessel for the soul of Frances’ dead husband.

The cat-as-father aspect of “French Exit” is inarguably the most explicit evidence to argue for the oddity of “French Exit”, but it’s important that the film, like the novel, delays this information for some time. For “French Exit” to work, this fact must be a mere casual bit of information in a world that already seems off. deWitt, adapting his own novel for the screen, keeps the shape of the original text and cedes much control and trust to Jacobs’ direction, which produces a critical mood of slippery strangeness on-screen.

In some ways, the arch tweeness of “French Exit” seems out of place for now, too affected to exist in the here-and-now. An ambivalent engagement with an heiress hanging on to her finances in a 2021 that has only revealed the perversions and corruption of the very rich feels at best tone-deaf, at worse exhausting. But part of the charm of “French Exit” is that it does not quite fit. This is not a world recognisably like ours.

deWitt’s novel is riffing on a particular kind of absurdist-lite comedy of manners that is inherently literary in the way it seems to be more novel and novelistic than real or realistic. But the external trappings of the story are only performing a kind of sleight-of-hand for the emotions lurking beneath that counter than distancing artifice for something more complicated. This is not a world like ours but beyond the specifics of the plot and the content of these odd people “French Exit” is exactly of this time. It’s suffused with an ambivalent sadness that dances into comedic that is not as much funny as it is sadly wan.

Pfeiffer and Hedges are excellent at inhabiting the space of that ambivalence. For Pfeiffer, much of it is in her intonation. Pfeiffer, notably excellent at inflecting her voice to arch effect, performs Frances as a woman preternaturally aware of her ludicrousness but also unable to resist it. Her affectations are maddening, but too knowingly ridiculously in their self-awareness; too silly for tragedy, but too deliberate to be silly. It sets Hedges up as a perfect dramatic foil for her. If Pfeiffer is the best offence, then he is the best defence. Hedges has always been good, but here – equipped with a deadpan ability to react to the chaos around him – he has never been better, and as the ambivalent comedy gives way something less ambivalent and less funny, they both get even better.

In France, the pair finds comfort and distraction. First, a medium enters the picture to act as an intermediary between the world of the film and the magical cat. Then, another American expatriate, (a note-perfect Valerie Mahaffey) offers something like friendship for Frances. They are joined by Malcolm’s jilted fiancée, her new-boyfriend, an amiable detective and a childhood friend of Frances.  Important conversations between “dead” dad, living son and in-between mother become the focal point of the story and suddenly the incongruous patterns of “French Exit” reveal themselves slowly, but surely, as an exploration of grief and loss of control.

Can sadness be comedic? Each moment of “French Exit” seems suffused with it. From the melancholy timbre of Nick deWitt’s score, which interjects as a release from tension but also to extend our uncertainty, to the casual way that Tobias Datum’s camera traipses through the streets and hallways, considering and questioning the artificial surroundings of these people and their artificial lives. The undertones of sadness only serve to augment the wry whimsy, but the whimsy is never working to release us from the tensions of grief. When we get the full context of the opening scene at the end, it is as if a puzzle has been worked out but still without a solution. “French Exit” depends on its slipperiness, its abruptness and its unwillingness to let us figure out exactly what it is. But, by the end, it’s hard not to be moved by its sincerity. Even in a world that seems completely removed from ours, the trueness of the emotions beneath it feels real enough.

“French Exit” is now available for streaming and purchase on GooglePlay, iTunes, and YouTube.

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French Exit

Taryn Allen | Chicago Reader

Famous Manhattanite widow Frances Price (Michelle Pfeiffer) has just been told that she’s bankrupt. It’s not a surprise—her financial adviser has been warning her for years—she just figured she’d be dead by the time it happened. With nothing else to do, Frances abruptly takes her adult son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) to a friend’s apartment in Paris, smuggling in their cat Small Frank (Tracy Letts), who’s mutually understood to be the late Franklin Price reincarnated. Resigned to her fate as a cliche-come-to-life, Frances is isolated and unpredictable, hinting that once her cash supply runs out, she’ll go ahead and kill herself. Played by a delightfully erratic Pfeiffer, Frances carries the dramatic comedy French Exit alongside a slow-growing cast of offbeat secondary characters who find themselves tied up in her and Malcolm’s affairs. (Valerie Mahaffey stands out as a hauntingly awkward Madame Reynard, a fan of Frances and fellow widow who brings both humor and incredible cringe-horror elements to the film.)

At face value, it’s a meandering rich white people movie, adjacent to being a knock-off Wes Anderson film with a toned-down aesthetic, but there’s something about French Exit that feels compelling in an intangible way. It’s a film that’s hard to read, with its present-day setting and characters riddled with anachronisms, and its occasional supernatural moments, but those couple with a solid cast and simple score to mold French Exit’s identity. Patrick deWitt’s screenplay, based on his book of the same name, contains smart humor and self-aware characters in no hurry to divulge details or backstories. It has its own set of rules that the audience never quite learns, but that just contributes to the antiquated dreaminess that director Azazel Jacobs fosters in the film. Accept that you’re living in Frances Price’s reality—which Pfeiffer makes easy—and French Exit will feel like a fascinating escape.

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French Exit review — Pfeiffer impresses throughout, the movie occasionally

Carsten Knox | Halifax Bloggers

An Irish-Canadian co-pro, which explains the Canadian novelist writing the thing, and the presence of veteran Canuck thespian Susan Coyne in a key role, French Exit is a comedy soufflé of sorts — equal parts droll chamber piece and meandering, melancholy character study. If it rarely hits laugh-out-loud targets, it gives Michelle Pfeiffer her best role in years. The entire picture hangs off her character, who is worth getting to know better.

She’s Frances Price, who at one time was the toast of New York high society, married to a fellow named Franklin (Tracy Letts). But, he died and she spent his money. Now, deeply insolvent, she has to sell all her valuables before the bank takes everything. Cash in hand, the family cat, Little Frank, in her carry-on bag, and her adult son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) tagging along, they sail to Paris where she’ll hide out in a flat her good friend Joan (Coyne) barely uses and spend the last of her cash.

It’s a slow start. Frances is frequently miserable company, while Malcolm is even worse — he cruelly abandons his terribly-dressed fiancé, Susan (Imogen Poots), to join his mother on this trip. His mommy fixation isn’t especially well explained, but mostly he’s there just to give Frances someone to bounce off of. Fortunately, French Exit isn’t really about the hard times of an obnoxious family of privilege, which would be intolerable.

It gets a lot wackier — and better — when they pull into Paris. There’s something strange going on with the cat that involves a clairvoyant they met on the boat (Danielle Macdonald), an ex-pat American of their acquaintance (Valerie Mahaffey), and a French private investigator (Isaach De Bankolé). By the time our peculiar crew are gathered around a flickering candle for a seance with Franklin’s feline-bound spirit, you’re either on board with how silly this is getting or you’re not. I was, for the most part. This is definitely weird, sometimes approaching wonderful.

Pfeiffer has always been a potent character actor in the body of a Californian leading lady. Frances might feel the glamour is gone from her life, but it’s still plenty evident in Pfeiffer’s performance. The melancholy in the story — it’s really all about aging and death — keeps the picture grounded underneath all the shenanigans, and Pfeiffer roots it in place, channeling both grief and her particular brand of brittle iciness. It’s as if she’s revisited Elvira, her character from Scarface, but at age 60 — with all the cocaine and hard times still haunting her. It is a little hard to believe someone as vital as she is wouldn’t see Paris not just as a coda but as an opportunity for the next chapter, but a dark finality is where this picture is heading.

And while it mostly charms on its way there, French Exit leaves its audience with plenty of questions. Not the least of which is: Why did the scenes aboard the ocean liner look so unreal? (Especially having just seen Lucas Hedges in Let Them All Talk, where the Queen Mary was basically a character in the film.)

Furthermore, what was up with the dildo in the freezer? And why did Julius the Investigator, and Mme. Reynard, the American ex-pat, feel it necessary to stay over in Joan’s flat with Frances and the rest of them? As I said, wacky. Also, weird. Sometimes almost wonderful.

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Michelle Pfeiffer reigns over flawed ‘French Exit’ with mesmerizing hauteur

Ann Hornaday | The Washington Post

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What Lies Beneath: The Startling Intensity of a Michelle Pfeiffer Performance

Matthew Eng | THE FILM STAGE

“Seriously?” asked the celebrated, thrice-Oscar-nominated actress of an overstepping journalist.

It was April 2018 and Michelle Pfeiffer was sitting on the stage of the Beacon Theatre beside director Brian De Palma and actor Al Pacino, her collaborators on the controversial gangster classic Scarface. And to the apt mystification of actress and onlookers alike, the moderator of the event, Jesse Kornbluth, wanted to know what Pfeiffer weighed in 1983.

Pfeiffer had reunited with De Palma and Pacino at that year’s Tribeca Film Festival for the 35th anniversary of the movie that propelled her to multi-million-dollar-paycheck, magazine-covering movie stardom. Pfeiffer was so intent on scoring the supporting role of Elvira Hancock—the abrasive, indolent, fashion-forward wife of Pacino’s vicious drug kingpin Tony Montana—that the then-little-known actress paid her own airfare from New York to Los Angeles to audition. The actress, who the year prior had tackled her first lead role in the initially laughed-off but since-reevaluated Grease 2, beat out peers like Sharon Stone, Sigourney Weaver, and Glenn Close (Pacino’s preferred choice) for the part that would make her an era-defining icon, emulated by the likes of Rihanna (who allegedly wanted to play Elvira in an aborted reboot) for decades to come.

Between Elvira’s backless dresses, bobbed hair, and languid strut, it’s no wonder that Pfeiffer’s performance is mostly recalled for its surface appearances. But what lingers beyond the clothes and cosmetics is Elvira’s face, emaciated from years of drug abuse and self-starvation, flushing with hurt as she stands alone after being publicly assaulted and humiliated by Tony in a crowded restaurant, realizing her loveless marriage to him is finally over and she is the only one adult enough to accept it. As Elvira unleashes a flood of clipped and cutting insults at her husband, Pfeiffer’s tightly controlled fury, barely able to mask her character’s despair, packs a greater punch than Pacino’s swaggering, blustering brownface routine. The raw emotional honesty of Pfeiffer’s acting is what gives the character depth and dynamism, what makes her far more than a walking mannequin.

Pfeiffer’s performances have always contained this duality between stunning surfaces and the dense interiority that only the greatest screen actors can map out across spliced frames. What exactly is it about Pfeiffer, an untrained and elusive actor who’s long shunned the glare of publicity all movie stars must endure and whose incurable perfectionism has often made her one of her fiercest critics, that inspires such fascination and devotion in film lovers? In French Exit, Pfeiffer returns with her most conspicuous role in years as Frances Price, an acerbic Manhattan socialite who flees one metropolis for another with her devoted son (Lucas Hedges). But the key to Pfeiffer’s singular skill lies elsewhere, beyond the forced quirk of this gabby Parisian comedy full of bon mots that would sound stale in a late Woody Allen movie.

After years of child-rearing and supporting parts that have displaced her from the Hollywood limelight she dominated not so long ago, Pfeiffer remains nothing less than an actress for the ages, one whose peak performances reveal a captivating, camera-ready quality that is easy to dismiss under the banner of beauty. Though Pfeiffer is hardly the first female film star to receive condescension for her pageant-ready good looks—she placed sixth in the 1978 Miss California competition—it’s consistently made her unfair game for cynical criticisms and patronizing misconceptions.

When Pfeiffer was notoriously cast as a battered, plain Jane diner waitress in Garry Marshall’s 1991 romantic comedy Frankie and Johnny, many cried foul—including Kathy Bates, who originated the role of Frankie off-Broadway in Terrence McNally’s play, a romance about two everyday people overcoming their dark histories to connect and commit to their love. Yet Pfeiffer delivered what is arguably her greatest performance in Marshall’s underrated gem, ineffably and gently affecting in every moment. As her believably nerve-bruised Frankie slowly opens up a heart she thought was nailed shut, Pfeiffer singlehandedly renders moot the mentality that physical beauty somehow precludes its possessors from domestic abuse and dead-end jobs.

Pfeiffer’s best performances encourage viewers to look harder and think deeper, and she has routinely elevated underwritten parts and studio-made productions that are beneath her talents. She dignified the terrorized and unraveling housewife at the center of Robert Zemeckis’ delightfully absurd horror blockbuster What Lies Beneath (2000) and the guileless, well-intentioned Texan hairdresser who falls for a Black man at the height of the civil rights movement in 1992’s Love Field. Pfeiffer received the last of her three Oscar nominations for the latter performance, eloquently and empathically underplaying a broadly written ditz another star might have simply caricatured. The actress scorches through A Thousand Acres (1997) as a cancer-stricken farmwife rebelling against the evils of patriarchy with a fiery-eyed ferocity that later flourished in 2002’s White Oleander. Playing an incarcerated artist bent on maintaining control of her teenage daughter, Pfeiffer intimidated scene partners into near-total submission, just as she did to Jennifer Lawrence with her few indelible scenes as a libidinous, uninvited houseguest in mother! (2017).

These are highly dissimilar characters united by Pfeiffer’s startling and malleable intensity. It’s what Pauline Kael detected when she watched Pfeiffer as a home-wrecking starlet in PBS’s Tales from the Hollywood Hills: Natica Jackson (1987) and subsequently urged director Stephen Frears to replace Kelly McGillis with Pfeiffer as the seduced and abandoned Madame de Tourvel in his 1988 Dangerous Liaisons; Pfeiffer’s tragic, lachrymose turn in Frears’ searing 18th-century drama ultimately netted the actress her first Oscar nomination. It’s what Jonathan Demme, who directed Pfeiffer to screwball perfection as a liberated mafia widow in that same year’s Married to the Mob, admired when he asked her to play FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, only to be turned down by Pfeiffer because the grisly material made her squeamish.

Like many a star, Pfeiffer is almost as famous for the roles she nearly played at the height of her stardom as the ones she did. Instead of starring in Pretty Woman, Basic Instinct, and Thelma & Louise––the lattermost of which she cannot bring herself to watch out of disappointment––Pfeiffer was nonetheless giving some of her most acclaimed and essential performances. Her leather-bound Catwoman in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) is perhaps even more idolized than Scarface’s Elvira, a performance remembered for its sinuous physicality and kinky impudence. But when Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle takes a spin on the dance floor with Michael Keaton’s de-caped crusader, each deceiving the other, the actress raises the stakes of this comic book lark, drawing palpable romance into the picture through the melodramatic conviction of her performance.

Even more devastating is her Ellen Olenska, the disgraced countess besotted with a man she cannot have, in Martin Scorsese’s 1993 period drama The Age of Innocence. Pfeiffer’s pained face, blue eyes bearing the bright clarity of stained glass, and self-conscious delicacy of gesture convey the emotional toll of abiding by the decorum and mores of a constrictive society at the expense of one’s own happiness. Pfeiffer egregiously lost an easy Oscar years earlier to Driving Miss Daisy’s sentimental favorite Jessica Tandy, despite claiming every major critics’ prize for playing escort-turned-lounge-singer Susie Diamond in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989). Slinking on the piano in a backless red dress while purring “Makin’ Whoopee” remains one of the more memorable scenes of Pfeiffer’s career, but the heart of the performance is the character’s wounded pride as she defends her years of sex work against the heartless derision of Jeff Bridges’ piano man, for whom she croons and cares deeply. Traversing the realist, fantastical, and historical in three films, Pfeiffer is just as plausible trilling into Suzie’s mic as she is cracking Catwoman’s whip as she is waving the Countess’ fan across her tell-tale face because she has connected with these characters at their soulful cores.

There is too little opportunity for Pfeiffer to dig deep in French Exit, adapted by Patrick DeWitt from his 2018 novel. Whatever comedic spark DeWitt’s story possessed on the page is lost in Jacobs’ woefully lethargic film, which restricts Pfeiffer from expressing the reservoir of complex feeling that seems to excite her most as a performer. Instead she is pushed into reiterating the same notes of imperiousness, mordancy, and acrimony from opening scene to last, preempted from deepening the character beyond the unfeeling hauteur of her first impression. Pfeiffer can still slice glass with one withering look and cut a magnetic figure that briefly vitalizes a flatlining scene. But comic badinage is not her forte. And that’s okay. Perhaps we overrate versatility at the expense of the emotional profundity Pfeiffer seems to innately access and which allows her to get inside the conflicted hearts of her hurting characters. Frances is defined by her acerbic nonchalance, but the most affecting Pfeiffer characters cannot help but care—sometimes hotly, sometimes silently, always deeply—in spite of their best efforts to submerge their concerns beneath cool facades. Her best scene in French Exit is thus her most nakedly emotional, a pledge of eternal devotion delivered directly to her adolescent son as she drives him away from boarding school, turning him into a lifelong conspirator through the powerful current of her intense sincerity.

It is a sad truth that Hollywood, for which Pfeiffer has done the lion’s share of her work, simply doesn’t know what to do with women over 50 who aren’t named Meryl Streep. But there is promise in independent cinema, should Pfeiffer choose to work there more steadily. Pfeiffer hit a new career high in Andrew Dosunmu’s Where Is Kyra?, a searing character study that the actress—who has recently embraced the spotlight if only to publicize her successful perfume line Henry Rose—seemingly refused to promote upon its micro-release in 2018. After years of diverting, albeit unchallenging turns in studio amusements like Hairspray, Stardust, and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Pfeiffer lent her talents to an interesting, up-and-coming filmmaker, whose every formal choice is centered around his leading lady, and impressed mightily as a Brooklyn woman pushed to criminal ends by economic desperation. Shot in close-up with rapt, lingering attentiveness by Bradford Young, Pfeiffer found the ungovernable maelstrom of thought and feeling in her highly disciplined stillness, as she has done time and again, charisma undimmed.

In her finest performances, Pfeiffer has proven herself an actor uniquely gifted at expressing all that language cannot capture, excavating the ambivalent hearts of so many women. She makes you wonder what secrets her characters are bent on keeping, what past pains they are struggling and failing to forget and move past. Her mode of acting is rooted in the body, though not in the lurid way suggested by that sexist Scarface incident. In front of the camera, Pfeiffer shows us all the body can conceal and reveal about a human life. With any luck (and the right collaborators) Pfeiffer may still have a great deal left to show us—not only about who we are, but what she alone is capable of expressing.

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‘French Exit’ – A European get-away full of a surprisingly amount of laughs [REVIEW]

Brandon Schreur | Film Munchin

Booking our trip to France now.

Oooohhh, I get it! Because they’re escaping to France! Clever!!

French Exit is a new dramedy of sorts (one that’s perhaps a little bit odder than the trailer might suggest) from director Azazel Jacobs, a man whose past filmography I am unfamiliar with even though he’s worked a decent amount up until this point.

Based on a novel of the same name from Patrick DeWitt, who is also a co-writer on the film, French Exit premiered at the New York Film Festival last fall before beginning a slow theatrical roll-out over the past couple of weeks.

Within French Exit, we’re introduced to Frances (and her name is France, too!!) Price (Michelle Pfeiffer) — a woman who’s just coming to terms with the fact that she no longer has everything she ever wanted.

There was a time when she did have it all. A time when, after marrying a rich husband (Ford v Ferrari’s Tracy Letts), she could live a high-luxury lifestyle without having to care how much money she was spending. Did she truly love her husband? Maybe. Maybe not. What does it matter, really? He’s been dead for the past 12 years and she’s long since moved on.

There’s a problem. After all this time, the bank has come to collect. They’re here for everything. The money. The house. The possessions. All of it.

Frances, then, is left with “nothing” — not literally nothing, mind you. She’s still able to sell some of her jewelry and earn a small pile of cash that’s likely worth more money than most people will ever see in their lifetimes. To her, however, it feels like nothing.

No longer sure what to do with her life or if society will even have her, Frances accepts an offer from a friend to stay at an apartment in France.

Accompanying her is her son, Malcolm (Let Them All Talk’s Lucas Hedges), who didn’t really know his mother until he was around 12 years old, but has since become close with her. Malcolm is engaged to be married to a woman named Susan (The Father’s Imogen Poots), which he hasn’t gotten around to telling his mother yet, but decides to put that on hold for the France trip nonetheless.

They arrive overseas and quickly begin trying to figure out where they’ll fit in, if anywhere. While Frances is impervious to making friends (she’d rather just spend the rest of the money and then die), they quickly find a dwelling of people to surround themselves with.

That dwelling is fairly large and familiar-looking supporting cast; including the incredibly funny Valerie Mahaffey as one of the first friends Frances makes when staying at the apartment, Danielle Macdonald as a medium they meet on the cruise ship, Susan Coyne as one of Frances’ former acquaintances and Isaach De Bankolé as a private investigator who kind of randomly decides to hang around.

There’s also a black cat, which Frances has owned for quite some time, that’s staying at the apartment. HINT HINT. The cat is going to wind up being important. And not in the way you’re probably expecting it to be.

It’s got somewhat of a similar premise as that of Schitt’s Creek, with the kind of tone or character disdain as HBO’s Succession mixed with the wit and dry humor of a Wes Anderson movie, perhaps.

That’s what they’re going for, at least. French Exit is something that certainly feels like it could be an A24 release (it’s actually being put out by Sony Pictures Classics) in that it’s something some people might perceive as being a bit more of a “stuffy” kind of comedy.

Honestly, I found myself thinking it might be a little stuffy, too, just by judging from the trailer. They’re going for a certain kind of tone that some audiences might not respond to — the kind of tone where the movie makes you feel like you have to “get it” in order to understand the joke.

For the first act or so, that’s kind of the line French Exit walks on, too. It’s not bad or anything like that; it’s just something that feels a bit over-written and extravagant to the point where it’s trying to be weird and quirky without really knowing how to do so.

When Frances and Malcolm make it to France, however, is when the film begins to shift. That’s when it goes from something that’s *trying* to be funny to something that actually *is* funny.

And, like, it’s really funny, too, I thought. There’s a certain kind of surrealist, absurd humor toward it that the trailer doesn’t really let on to — one that slowly begins to show itself as the thing comes along, until things kind of just start going batshit crazy around the halfway point.

That’s going to divide some viewers, I imagine, with one scene in particular being a pretty obvious marker of that division. For some, that scene will be completely unexpected and hilarious. Others will think that it belongs in a different movie, entirely, and in no way matches the tone of what they’ve been setting up. I’m finding myself somewhere down the middle. Why can’t it be both funny and out-of-place, I ask?

The humor isn’t the only draw toward French Exit, I’ll point out. We aren’t just laughing at Frances and Malcolm for being so horribly out of touch with reality. There’s a certain kind of bitter sadness to this one, again similar to something like Succession, in just how out of touch they are.

Frances, who is marvelously brought to life by one of Pfeiffer’s better performances as of late, is a complex character struggling through a lot of different emotions. Those emotions aren’t always so prevalent at the start of the film — at first, she kind of just comes across as an extravagant weirdo who has a weird fascination with homeless people and doesn’t understand how currency actually works.

As the film goes along and you start to peel back some of the layers of reasoning behind that, you quickly realize that, while she may be a part of the .1%, she’s also an incredibly sad person. A sad person who, really, just needs some kind of stable connection in her life.

There are a few things that they do with that, then, some of which work and some of which don’t. Ultimately, though, French Exit has more personality to it than you might be expecting. There’s some spunk to this one, hidden beneath. A kind of spunk that worked well enough for me.

Rating: 7.5/10

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Screen Savor: French Kiss

Gregg Shapiro | qnotes

Can you believe that Michelle Pfeiffer has never won an Academy Award? She’s been nominated three times but has never taken home an Oscar. Her “Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy” Golden Globe Award nomination for French Exit (Sony Pictures Classics/Stage 6) is her eighth (she won for The Fabulous Baker Boys), but with fierce competition from Frances McDormand in “Nomadland” and Viola Davis in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” she’s been shut out again.

In Azazel Jacobs’ “French Exit,” Pfeiffer draws on all her comedic gifts (and some of her dramatic ones, too) to make Frances, a deeply unsympathetic woman, worthy of our time and attention. Think Cate Blanchett’s character in Blue Jasmine (which earned Blanchett an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA).

Recently widowed, Frances is an itinerant mother and New York socialite who shows up at her son’s prep school on the day he’s about to be kicked out and sweeps him out the door with her. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other in a long time, and this kind of event sets the tone for the rest of the movie.

Over breakfast in their Manhattan townhouse a few years later, Frances reveals to her son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges), that she has a meeting with her financial guy and it doesn’t look promising. She’s right. “Every penny” in Frances’ account, as well as her investments and property, now belong to the bank. She was warned years before but didn’t listen. Now she’s being advised to sell everything — jewelry, art and books — privately. You see, Frances’ plan was to die before the money ran out, but she “kept not dying.”

Malcolm has his own drama to deal with. He’s engaged to Susan (Imogen Poots), but he still hasn’t told Frances. On the night he decides to do so, Frances shares her news with him first — “we’re insolvent.”

There are signs of hope. Frances successfully sells everything and ends up with a good sum of cash. Her best friend, Joan (Susan Coyne), offers to let her and Malcolm move into her unoccupied Paris apartment. Having converted her dollars into euros, she announces to Malcolm that they are going to France. Malcolm, in turn, breaks the news to Susan, who doesn’t take it well.

Frances and Malcolm travel in style, of course, aboard a transatlantic cruise. Along with the family cat, Small Frank. On the luxury liner, Malcolm meets and hooks up with Madeleine (Danielle Macdonald), a fortune teller in a tent who is too good at her job. Not only does she predict the death of one of the passengers, but she also recognizes something special about Small Frank (more about that later).

Frances and Malcolm settle into their Paris life. A confrontation with a rude waiter in a café has a fiery conclusion. A dinner invitation from expat Mme. Reynard (scene-stealer Valerie Mahaffey) gets off on the wrong foot but soon corrects itself in the best way possible. But the good feeling is short-lived when Small Frank runs out of the flat and into the unfamiliar streets. Mme. Reynard comes to the apartment to comfort Frances, but she’s inconsolable. That is until she remembers Madeleine also disembarked in Paris, and they need to find her because of her connection to the cat.

Frances hires Julius (Isaach De Bankolé), a private investigator, to track down Madeleine who in turn will track down Small Frank. Why the obsession with the cat? Because the soul of Frances’ late husband Franklin is in Small Frank. Once Madeleine is located, there’s a séance where they talk to Small Frank (voiced by Tracy Letts) and attempt to establish a kind of closure.

Before you know it, Joan’s apartment is suddenly crowded. Joan shows up because she thinks Frances will self-harm. Susan and her fiancée Tom (Daniel di Tomasso) arrive because Susan is likely still in love with Malcolm. The only thing taking up less space is Frances’ stash of cash which dwindles daily.

If that seems like a lot to keep track of, it is. But here’s what keeps the offbeat “French Exit” afloat: Jacobs and screenwriter Patrick DeWitt (who also wrote the screenplay to Jacobs’ Terri from 2011) have made a movie that draws on only the best elements in Wes Anderson movies. Absurdity balanced with reality. Pathos offset by humor.

Rating: B+

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The Art of Making a FRENCH EXIT

Frank Calvillo | CINAPSE

When French Exit first launched as the closing night selection of the 2020 New York Film Festival, it didn’t take long to realize that not everyone was going to respond to the absurdist comedy. It was a suspicion confirmed by the early reviews that followed, nearly all of which praised lead actress Michelle Pfeiffer, but weren’t sure how to react towards the film itself. Upon French Exit’s New York and L.A. release this past February, it seemed early audience reaction was the same. It’s a reaction that’s easy to comprehend. The film’s script blends more than a couple of tones and all but abandons the three-act plot structure in favor of one that’s decidedly free-flowing while placing at its center a protagonist who isn’t the warm and cuddly sort made relatable enough to where any audience member would want her as a best friend. Instead, French Exit’s heroine represents the kind of emotional damage and human flaws mixed with acerbic humor that may rub some the wrong way, but serves to make French Exit the enchanting surrealist screwball comedy that it is.

Directed by Azazel Jacobs from Patrick DeWitt’s novel, French Exit sees Pfeiffer playing Frances Price, a Manhattan socialite existing under the shadow of scandal stemming from her late husband’s (Tracy Letts) death and the part she played in it. Living with her directionless son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) on what’s left of their inheritance, things take a turn for the dire when Frances is informed that her fortune has nearly run out, causing mother, son and family cat to sell what they can and relocate to a friend’s (Susan Coyne) apartment in Paris. Once there, they attract the attention of various characters including a psychic (Danielle Macdonald), a private investigator (Isaac De Bankolé) and a cooky American expat named Madame Reynard (Valerie Mahaffey).

Much like the novel it comes from, French Exit is an undefinable sort of cinematic cocktail. This is especially true when it comes to its differing tones. The film is somber and poetic one moment before becoming darkly comedic the next. Influences of Woody Allen and Luis Bunel are apparent here, especially among the movie’s supporting characters, none of which can be considered as anything close to cookie cutter. As everyone finds themselves setting up shop in the Paris apartment, inexplicably drawn to the story’s central pair, the film’s various colors can’t help but continuously show with every moment.

French Exit is melancholy, humorous, bewitching and whimsical scene by scene thanks to the world it creates; a slightly heightened reality with one foot slightly off the ground where people are guided by instinct and feeling rather than logic and practicality. It’s the kind of world where Frances and Malcolm will hire the aforementioned private investigator to find the psychic, who proceeds to conduct a seance at the dining room table before the film eventually cuts to the whole group having drinks together in the same apartment four days later never having left it. Such events in French Exit are so wonderfully random and intriguing due to the sheer lunacy of them, that it might be easy to forget that the film is partly about lonely people reaching out to find some sort of human connection and end up finding it in a room full of strangers.

If there’s one element about the film that’s all but impossible to dismiss, it’s Frances. As a character, there’s hardly been a screen heroine that doesn’t offer up a myriad of personal reactions. At first glance, Frances is…a lot. She cares very little about what she says, who hears it or how it’s perceived. After she’s been rude to Madame Raynard, who is hosting them for dinner, Malcolm calls out his mother‘s rude behavior to which she sarcastically replies: “Isn’t it awful,” evoking the driest of humor. For Frances, it’s humor that has been her only weapon in a world which she feels has never had any use for her, regardless of how much money she’s had. For her entire life, money and all its trappings has been how Frances has defined herself and now that it’s vanished, she suspects she will soon follow.

But Frances is also a mother with a son she loves in her own way and vice versa. The relationship between her and Malcolm is an odd one which could well be called co-dependent if it weren’t for the fact that despite the pair’s closeness, they’ve remained largely strangers since Frances picked up her son from boarding school following her husband’s death. By the time the film reaches its end, French Exit has waded through the eccentric characters and odd happenings to be a story of a mother and a son with their own language finally finding each other. A late scene in the kitchen spells this out beautifully with Frances at her most open. When Malcolm asks her why she came for him that day, she says: “That was strange, wasn’t it,” with a coy smile before adding: “I didn’t know you were you. I would have come right away if I had. I never would have let you go in the first place.”

To say Pfeiffer steals the show is a grave understatement. Her hold on the character is so strong and captivating, that there simply wouldn’t be a French Exit this spellbinding without her stunning interpretation. The way the actress holds her face, fixes her gaze and delivers the film’s wickedly clever dialogue with that unique inflection results in one of the best performances of both the year and the actress’ career. Her reading of such a tricky character is pitch perfect and in Pfeiffer’s hands, Frances’s pain and humor shine through beautifully. As her partner in crime, it would seem that Hedges has very little to do besides gaze in awe at his legendary co-star, but the young actor brings a soulfulness and a longing to Malcolm that’s surprising and cannot be mistaken, furthering his standing as one of the best young actors working today. Each member of the supporting cast get a moment or two to leave an impression which shows their participation wasn’t for nothing. But Mahaffey is the only one able to come close to stealing scenes as a woman seeped in romantic ideals and who cannot help but wear her heart on her sleeve.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks French Exit will have with modern audiences is the fact that its protagonist doesn’t fit into the need most American audiences have to see themselves on the screen. Frances likewise doesn’t adhere to the notion today that people are essentially black and white; a bad guy or a good guy. The reality is that almost everyone lives in a sea of grey with flaws and foibles which are a part of their character, but ultimately don’t wholly define them. French Exit knows this to be true and has offered up such a heroine who has long been defined by a world she’s loathed for most of her life that no longer exists. Frances is caustic, unfiltered and doesn’t suffer fools easily. But she’s also vulnerable and tragic. She’s made made so by the fact that she’s spent her entire life building up a protective wall against a society that in the end has no use for her and where her future is almost certainly uncertain. She may not be the most approachable character to grace the screen in recent times, but in her own way she’s almost definitely one of the most alluring and heartbreaking.

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FRENCH EXIT is another showing of the great versatility and swagger of Michelle Pfeiffer.

Leo Brady | AMOVIEGUY.com