Review – Frances

Imagine The Snake Pit redone as a golden-age-of-Hollywood biopic and you’ve got some idea of how the folks who made this movie saw the life of Frances Farmer. Jessica Lange surprised a lot of people – including me – by doing a decent job in the title role. After Kong, I wouldn’t have thought she could act her way out of a paper bag. But she really puts some feeling into poor Farmer, the onetime Hollywood starlet who ran afoul of the studios and ended up spending a chunk of her life being brutalized in insane asylums. Worth seeing