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The Life of Reilly

Starring Charles Nelson Reilly

Directed by Frank L. Anderson and Barry Poltermann

Written by Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Linke

Rating: ***

For years, rumours of his death were greatly exaggerated and then, sadly, they weren't. But before he died in May, Charles Nelson Reilly spent the latter part of his career back where it began: on the stage, this time in a one-man show spinning bittersweet stories from his own checkered past. In the last of these shows, at a small theatre in Hollywood, a film crew gathered to preserve the performance, and we're the beneficiaries – The Life of Reilly is a tender tale of semi-triumph.

Before it officially begins, co-directors Frank Anderson and Barry Poltermann take their camera on the streets to ask the common man, “Ever heard of Charles Nelson Reilly?” They get a common reply: Used to be on some TV game show. Flamboyant. Flouncy. Bad toupee, big glasses, bigger laugh. No one, of course, mentions the Tony he won on Broadway for starring in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, or his acclaim for directing Julie Harris in The Belle of Amherst. Instead, what brought him to the attention of the viewing masses will inescapably be his legacy. So, in the public mind, Reilly is remembered, if at all, as an oversized cartoon on an underwhelming medium.

The camera switches to the stage, where the cartoon, minus the toupee and the flounce and strolling about a minimalist set, is busy revealing himself in three candid dimensions. His tools are the sharp chisel of honesty, the all-purpose oil of humour, and the velvet cloth of excusable sentimentality. With them, he reconstructs his childhood as the only offspring of a Swedish mother, a screaming racist, and an Irish father, an institutionalized drunk. Add in the lobotomized aunt, the flaky uncle, along with dour grandparents right out of a Bergman film, and the punchline – coming after his recollection that the neighbours thought him an odd kid – begs to be delivered: “How do you think I felt being the odd one in a family like that!”

But there's not a trace of self-pity in the memory, nor in the account of his slow climb out of Bergmanesque hell. Rather, in his telling, the bizarre co-exists peacefully with the mundane, like mixing the outrageous wit of a David Sedaris essay with the laid-back chuckles of a Spalding Gray monologue. That's his goal, at least, and if Reilly doesn't always reach it, he gets close enough often enough to draw us into his emotional orbit.

Consider, for example, the sharply etched scene of his arrival as a teenager into 1950 New York. The acting bug had bitten, and three dollars a session brought him to Uta Hagen's Tuesday-morning class. Pulling a yellowed list from his pocket, Reilly reads out the names of his fellow students – Jack Lemmon, Steve McQueen, Hal Holbrook, Geraldine Page among them – pauses a half-second for their fame to impress us, and then delivers another kicker: “We had one thing in common: All of us couldn't act for shit.” There's more. Turns out that Holbrook would come to class toting a brown paper bag containing a cheap white wig and, when asked why, would answer: “That's my Mark Twain costume.” Yes, Holbrook was already resurrecting Twain, playing him at the local public schools for 25 bucks a pop.

On the subject of his homosexuality, Reilly doesn't say much but makes his few words count. Like that time, also in the fifties, when his big break came. Or so he thought when NBC called, and none other than the network president himself, who, from behind his mahogany desk, took one look at the actor and barked: “They don't let queers on television.” Another pause, then: “It was a very short interview.” And a very short-sighted pronouncement. Two decades later, after his Broadway kudos, Reilly was not only on television but, by his own frank admission, was on it way too much – a cartoon is born.

As often with autobiographical tales, the moral seems a little slim (bromides on the order of “Laughter is the same in any language”), and the musical sweeteners are more than a little saccharine. Yet even these failings work to enhance the emerging portrait of the trouper as an old man. And the life of a working actor can be tough, at the end no less than the beginning. So, after the last line is spoken, and the bows taken, and the applause died down, the camera follows our tired star back through the wings to a cramped and dingy dressing room, where, trading in his prop drink for a real one, he slumps deep into a chair, sipping from the intoxicant of his small success.