“Loving Highsmith” assumes that you are familiar, to some degree, with the work of author Patricia Highsmith — or at least the numerous screen adaptations of her novels, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” (1951), Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999), and Todd Haynes’ “Carol” (2015). Instead of primarily focusing on her writing process and how she broke into the literary world, this documentary from writer-director Eva Vitija is more interested in Highsmith’s identity as a lesbian, and how it intersected with her upbringing, her career, and the time in which she lived.
Highsmith was born in 1921 and died in 1995, so her formative years and the bulk of her adult life took place in a period that isn’t known for its open-mindedness or tolerance for non-conformity. Perhaps that is why she inhabited so many contradictions. As a child, she was intensely devoted to her bullying mother, who berated Highsmith for dressing like a “lez.” As a grown woman, Highsmith was somewhat open about her sexuality, but she struggled to accept it, trying to force herself to like sex with men and seeking treatment to “cure” herself of lesbianism. She was interested in gender and sexual fluidity and explored those themes in her books, the “Ripley” series in particular. Yet she initially published the groundbreaking lesbian novel “The Price of Salt,” aka “Carol,” under a pseudonym. She loved women in her personal life but mostly didn’t care to center them in her stories.
Vitija explores Highsmith’s very human incongruity via archival footage, journal entries brought to life by the voice of Gwendoline Christie, and interviews with members of Highsmith’s family as well as several of her close friends/former lovers. As such, watching the doc, the viewer gets to know Highsmith the person, as opposed to Highsmith the literary legend. Instead of making extensive arguments about her genius and talent — which, let’s face it, has been done to death in documentary filmmaking — Vitija creates a true biography with “Loving Highsmith”: a work of non-fiction that is concerned with who its subject was, and what she accomplished, in equal measure.
“Loving Highsmith” arrives in theaters tomorrow, September 2.
