A terrific biography of Australian-born Hollywood costume designer (and 3 time Oscar winner) Orry-Kelly. Gillian Armstrong's fun and emotional look at Kelly's often challenging life includes wonderful taking heads; actresses like Jane Fonda and Angela Landsbury, great designers of the more modern era like Ann Roth and Catherine Martin, film and Hollywood historians like Leonard Maltin and others. They tell absorbing stories about the wildly talented, sometimes wildly difficult perfectionist, as well as heartbreaking ones about his personal life as a gay man in Hollywood at a time when being 'out' was still cause for possible unemployment and human banishment. These attitudes and threats led to – among other things - a terribly painful and ultimately cruel break-up of many years from his early lover and one time best friend Archie Leach, later known as Cary Grant.
But what makes the documentary much more interesting than most Hollywood hagiographies are the more theatrical elements Armstrong and screenwriter Katherine Thompson bring to the party. Along with the great stories, clips and still photos there are also actors playing Kerry (an excellent Darren Gilshenan), his mother and others from his life. Kerry enthusiastically narrates his own story in the midst of wonderfully surreal, theatrical and playfully symbolic settings (rowing alone in a tiny boat is a constant metaphor). These sequences paradoxically bring both lightness and depth to the film, giving us a far more personal connection to the man than most screen biographies have. In the end it's both a lot of fun and tremendously sad and informative about the sexual and human politics of Hollywood, and their costs on real human beings (not only gay men, but women both straight and gay as well).
One of those films I almost didn't see since it's not a subject that called out for me, only to be very happily surprised at how much I got out of it.
