Postcards from the Edge

After an overdose and a stint in treatment, the actress Suzanne Vale is allowed back to work on one condition: she has to live with her mother. Her mother is an actress too, with her own drinking problem. Mike Nichols directed. Carrie Fisher wrote the screenplay from her own semi-autobiographical 1987 novel. Meryl Streep plays Suzanne and Shirley MacLaine plays her mother. Nichols described the subject as a mother passing the baton to her daughter. Fisher answered the speculation about parallels briefly: I wrote about a mother actress and a daughter actress. It opened at number one and grossed 63.4 million dollars worldwide on a 22 million budget. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 83 percent. Streep was nominated for the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actress, and the film took a further Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. Streep won the American Comedy Award for Funniest Actress, and the then-new Annette Bening won Newcomer of the Year from the London Film Critics' Circle. Who it is for: viewers who like satire from inside Hollywood and mother-and-daughter films. Who it is not for: anyone wanting hardness about addiction. The film pulls the tone toward comedy and leaves most of the novel's interior voice outside.