Paleo Retiree writes:

There was a lot about this 2006, made-for-HBO movie that I loved. It’s a very small-scale, low-budget rhapsody on a historic fact: late in life, the famous tobacco heiress Doris Duke, who had never managed to have satisfying intimate relations, bonded with Bernard Lafferty, her new butler, a wayward, drunken, gay Irishman. Little seems to be known about the actual facts of their relationship, so the filmmakers (writer Hugh Costello and director Bob Balaban) try to imagine their way into what might have been. 

The result, it seemed to me, had many of the ingredients of a moving and funny small classic. The production — facing the challenge of how to depict on a tiny budget the life of one of the world’s richest people — is amazingly resourceful; and Bob Balaban is a major, even masterly directing talent, in confident command of filmmaking’s many dimensions (design, rhythm, sound, mood, flow, etc). And, as you might expect from his background as a performer, Balaban is a perfectly amazing director of actors. He and his actors wring more emotions, tones and ideas out of flickering interpersonal interactions than most of today’s studio-type filmmakers squeeze out of immense CGI action setpieces.

As Doris Duke, Susan Sarandon gives one of her best performances. As written, Doris is a moneyed lonelygal of a kind I’ve met only a few times: childish and sometimes horrifyingly arbitrary; confident she can get away with more or less anything; carefree but untrusting; more willing to engage with animals and religion than with people; getting by despite a lot of childhood hurt. (“I would look at the way she caressed her furs and diamonds and wish she felt the same way about me,” the real Doris once said about her mother.) It’d be easy not to care a lot about her. But, firing on all cylinders in a role that’s a very unusual one for her, Sarandon does make us care. (Made me care, anyway.) Sarandon connects with something very real and even likable in Doris. Doris is a spoiled brat; she’s an aging diva; she’s a clueless monster … But she’s also an earthbound human being, and one who’s living out a sometimes sadly oddball fate. Plus, it’s always fun to observe Sarandon’s trademark way of making the categories “sexy” and “soulful” seem indistinguishable.

As the drunken butler, Ralph Fiennes was, for me, the movie’s weak link. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe Fiennes is the greatest actor who ever lived, and maybe the performance he gives here is a marvel. But for me, Fiennes is nearly always a sunken, apologetic presence. At his best he’s sexily hesitant — and, hey, come to think of it, why shouldn’t there be room in the moviemaking world for that too? I really need to be more open to this kind of thing than I am, I suppose. But, as Bernard, Fiennes wasn’t right. He and Sarandon give over to each other very touchingly; he grows the far-out hair and he dons the big jewelry … But we, er, I never felt that Fiennes’ Bernard had a genuinely flamboyant or eccentric soul. (And, despite his recessiveness, Fiennes also came across as ‘way too sexually straight for Bernard.) So, although I could see it, I never managed to feel why Doris bonded with him.

Verdict: one of those “it didn’t totally work” films that’s still a surprisingly satisfying watch.

Related

• “Bernard and Doris” isn’t available on either Netflix Instant or Amazon Prime, darn it. But you can buy a DVD of it here.
• A good intro to the life of Doris Duke.
• Bernard only lived to be 51 years old.
• Doris died in 1993 but the squabbles over her legacy continue to this day.
• An interview with Bob Balaban.