Postcards from the Edge movie review (1990)

The story involves Suzanne, a young actress who has a more-famous actress for her mother. The father, also famous, has been misplaced somewhere along the way. As the film opens, Suzanne has awakened in the bed of yet another boyfriend she does not quite remember meeting. Her life has become a confusion of blackouts, memory lapses, screw-ups on the set and behavior that baffles even her. All that keeps her going on the set of a movie are the frequent visits to her dressing room of a woman who sells her cocaine.

Streep plays this character with a kind of defiant sweetness that recalls the late Irene Dunne. She is not a bad person, and she doesn't want to cause trouble for anybody, but her drug usage has befuddled her to the point where she's not much use. Her mother (Shirley MacLaine) is also a basket case - a maintenance alcoholic who is never far from her glass of chilled white wine. But because wine is socially acceptable and drugs are not, the mother is able to deny her problem while lecturing her daughter to the point of distraction. Meanwhile, MacLaine's latest husband sleeps most of the time, possibly as a way of avoiding his wife's voice.

Suzanne barely gets through her latest film. She is obviously on the edge of a crackup. And after another misadventure, she ends up in a rehab center, where her mother comes to visit and basks in the applause of her recovering fans. It's here that the movie takes the wrong turn, into a domestic show-biz comedy that plays up the mother-daughter rivalry at the cost of its original subject, drugs in show business.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy MacLaine's performance in this movie; her role has been made too important, and yet I appreciated every moment of it, even a Christmas party at which mother and daughter perform songs that turn into a competition for the love of those present. MacLaine creates a glorious caricature of the aging star who has to put down her daughter to maintain her own ego.