A modern-day “femme fatale” goes to stay with her baby sister and her husband. She seductively plays the role of her life, hiding an agenda while clutching onto her dream of stardom at the tender age of fifty. That is the premise of Christina Beck’s film Hancock Park, a neo-noir drama built less on twists than on conversation, family tension and the uncertainty of never quite knowing what its heroine wants. Femme fatale, yes, in the sense that the female acts in self-interest, causing others to be trapped.
Beck, who writes, directs and stars as Ruby Lewis, is an aging actress facing financial collapse after the death of her father, and she moves into the Hancock Park home of her married younger sister Sara, with Lisa Peet giving a wonderful performance of a together person morphing into a stressed-out booze head. Her injured stuntman husband Andy is played magnificently in Joe Pesci/ Sam Shepard style plus his own. Ruby arrives as someone temporarily down on her luck, but almost immediately there is the feeling that she is still performing. Ruby enters rooms like an actress making an entrance.
“She seductively plays the role of her life, hiding an agenda while clutching onto her dream of stardom at the tender age of fifty.”
Sunset Boulevard is an obvious reference point. Ruby is not Norma Desmond, but she shares Norma’s refusal to believe that the spotlight should have moved on. Like Gloria Swanson’s great, faded star, Ruby clings to the identity of actress and a teacher because it is inseparable from how she sees herself. The difference is scale: Norma has her decaying mansion and memories of silent-era greatness; Ruby has to move in with her sister because the dream no longer pays the bills.
Otto Preminger’s Angel Face with Jean Simmons’s Diane Tremayne is a very different woman from Ruby, but they share the vulnerability and manipulation that become so intertwined that it is difficult to know exactly where one ends and the other begins. Both women also bring danger into an affluent Los Angeles domestic setting, where family, money, attraction and concealed motives begin feeding off one another.
There is also a strong echo of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? especially in the film’s use of sisters and old family wounds. Beck’s film is nowhere near as grotesque as Robert Aldrich’s, but it has some of the same emotional territory: rivalry, dependency, resentment, performance, and the frightening intimacy of siblings who know exactly where each other is weakest. Ruby’s younger sister wants to help her, yet family generosity gradually becomes its own trap. The inheritance and the death of their father turn the house into a place where old grievances return disguised as present-day arguments.
"…a neo-noir drama built less on twists than on conversation, family tension"
