Thoughts on The Last Word

   I liked the 2017 film The Last Word, I thought it was decent as a "unlikely women become friends" kind of movie, and I like Shirley MacLaine and Amanda Seyfried. It's directed by Mark Pellington, whose name I recognized as a music video director from the 90s (Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" video, U2's "One" video, etc.), and he has also directed movies like Arlington Road and The Mothman Propecies. It's a dramedy where MacLaine plays Harriet, who is the town grinch, and a major control freak, and she's jealous of the glowing obituaries printed about people she knew were awful in real life, so she goes right into the local newspaper's offices to talk to Anne (Seyfried) the obituary writer, to write an obituary for her while she's still alive so she can be remembered as a great person. But when Anne interviews people who know Harriet, nobody has anything nice to say about her, and when Anne is blunt with Harriet after much prodding about that truth, Harriet decides she wants to control the narrative and do good deeds just so she can have nice stuff written about her in her obituary.

    Part of the movie ends up being a road trip film, and that part can drag out more, but I did like the interactions between MacLaine and Seyfried. MacLaine is really great at playing grumpy old women, very much set in their ways, and Seyfried has more of the modern-day millennial sarcastic attitude that I like. There's also some fun scenes where Harriet talks her way into getting a radio DJ job because she knows how to make the right playlist flow and has good taste in rock, jazz, and blues.

    AnnJewel Lee-Dixon is very cute and sweet as Brenda, a young girl from an at-risk center who Harriet casually acts as a mentor to, and ends up coming along with them on their road trip. Her character is a little one-dimensional as "cute kid who swears," and I would wonder who in her family knows that she's off in a car with two women she barely knows, so some of that would take me out of the movie. But her acting was good and she was adorable.

    Harriet had been partner of a major advertising firm until she essentially got pushed out, and in a cameo with the late Anne Heche as her estranged daughter in a lunch meeting, Harriet refuses to acknowledge that she might have OCD like her daughter was diagnosed with. Harriett is a woman of the 1950s, who had to fight to be accepted in the corporate world, and carried that chip on her shoulder throughout her life. So it does explain her attitude more, even if it doesn't excuse her rude actions towards others.

    Like I said, the movie runs a little long, and there's a romantic subplot between Anne and a radio DJ (played by Seyfried's real-life partner Thomas Sadoski) that felt more tacked-on, though I did like a scene where Seyfried explains why Andalusia, Spain has cultural importance to her due to a childhood memory with her estranged mother.

    It's a nice movie, nothing too memorable, but good for the leads and a decent entertaining story.