Parker Posey Asks For Your Consideration
by Robert Urban, November 16, 2006

“Dying is easy. Playing a lesbian is hard!” Such is one zealous fan's opinion — shouted aloud at a TV set — as an entertainment news show prepares to announce the latest round of movie award nominations in For Your Consideration, the new film from Christopher Guest (Best in Show).

Starring many Guest regulars including Parker Posey (Superman Returns), Jennifer Coolidge (American Pie) and openly gay Jane Lynch (The L Word), For Your Consideration follows a struggling independent film company's production of period melodrama Home for Purim, which generates Oscar buzz for several of its lead actors, including Posey's character of Callie Webb, a struggling ingénue who plays a lesbian in Purim.

Webb has come to Hollywood after the disastrous failure of her autobiographical comedy stage piece, No Penis Intended. Posey explains: “I knew that Callie would be emasculating, having written a show called No Penis Intended. I knew she would have ‘issues' around her relationships. Why can't she have it all? Who around her is against her?”

Posey continues, “I think there are father issues … obviously, abandonment issues. I saw her as someone who has a lot to express and wants to be understood, who has a lot happening inside.”

“I saw rage,” says actor Harry Shearer with a laugh. Shearer plays Victor Allan Miller, an aging film actor who portrays patriarch David Pischer in Home for Purim.

“I thought a lot about her rage,” Posey says. “There's lots of rage in L.A. — like road rage. There's lots of entitlement — you have to be so strong. I get flipped off by strangers, and I just hold up the peace sign.”

The film within the film, Home for Purim, which is set in the 1940s, centers on a Jewish family, the Pischers, who gather together to see their dying mother on the Jewish holiday of Purim. Among the Pischer family members is prodigal daughter and lesbian Rachel (played by Parker Posey's character Callie Webb), who brings along her not-too-secret lesbian lover, Mary Pat (played by Rachael Harris' character Debbie Gilchrist).

Rachel Pischer is a stylish, sophisticated lesbian reminiscent of a sly Lauren Bacall in Young Man With a Horn. For Your Consideration's filmmakers make good use of Posey's striking, natural resemblance to Katherine Hepburn. Posey's Rachel Pischer looks exactly like Kate, yet speaks more like a brooding Bette Davis.

“Bette Davis … hmm … Bette Davis is good,” Posey muses. “The actresses of the '40s — there was a kind of air about the way they acted, and there was kind of a lesbian undercurrent. I love acting in that style. It's almost all ‘style.' They weren't ‘playing' lesbians, they just came off as lesbians. Like Joan Crawford. It was just kind of like a feeling … and intensity.”

In one especially turgid scene, Rachel stuns her mother with a revelation dripping with campy pathos and self-loathing: “Yes, Mama, I did meet a nice fella. Her name is … Mary Pat!”

“The movie is so heightened and melodramatic,” Posey states in For Your Consideration's press materials. “They don't make movies like that anymore. So I was like actresses in the '30s and '40s. They were all kind of butch, when it was OK for women to smoke and be independent and really assert themselves and be fiery that way.” Rachael Harris (Fat Actress, The Daily Show) plays Debbie Gilchrist, the actress who plays Rachel Pischer's “special friend,” Mary Pat, in Home for Purim.

In the character of Mary Pat, screenwriters Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy created an amusing sendup of old Hollywood's stereotypical portrayals of lesbians in film. Mary Pat is stiff, joyless and rather dehydrated-looking. (Judith Anderson's dour portrayal of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca comes to mind.) Mary Pat's pale, ever-deadpan face is sharply framed by the hard-edged, severely styled, Prince Valiant-type wig she wears. She starchly carries herself across the screen in a hilariously cinched-up wool suit.

Guest and Levy clearly had fun devising the arch lesbian characters in Home for Purim, but they claim to have barely researched the subject in their preparation. “We didn't really do research per se,” Guest says. “It was more of a culmination of the writing and the costumes. … We wrote the [lesbian] relationship, but our costume designer, Durinda Wood, came up with that amazing suit that Rachael Harris wears. At one point … Jennifer Coolidge said, ‘She looks like a bird watcher from 1941!'”

Guest adds: “It was just a genius choice. But that's the way it was in that era: You didn't talk about it. You just kind of looked at each other.”

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