Linda Stasi
Anna Nicole
Saturday, 8 pm, Lifetime
Anna Nicole Smith dreamed of living large. She dreamed of being Marilyn Monroe. What Smith probably never understood is that her tragic idol wanted to live smaller — or at least smaller than the creation she became.
Yet both women suffered the same fate — OD'ing on pills and booze and misery. The big difference is that Monroe only hurt herself, while Smith hurt her children, particularly her son, who died shortly before she did — in the same horrible way.
On Saturday night, Lifetime blows out the doors with "Anna Nicole," a true-life movie so good, so well-written and yet sleazy enough to satisfy even the cheesiest viewers among us. Yes, that would be me.
Bob Mahoney (2)
ANYTHING FOR STARDOM: Agnes Bruckner is Anna Nicole Smith, who died at age 39.
It begins when she was a little girl in the dysfunctional home of her mother (Virginia Madsen), a four-times married cop who wasn't opposed to taking pot shots at her husbands.
While still a teen, Anna (then Vickie Lynn) married the fry cook at a local fast food joint, had a son, Danny, left the fry cook and tried to move back home with the baby, whereupon her mother turned them both away so she could screw around with her latest live-in.
Vickie Lynn (Agnes Bruckner) gets a job at a sleazy local topless joint, dyes her hair platinum, asks a plastic surgeon for implants the size of bowling balls and begins raking in the tips.
The movie follows Smith's rise, beginning with having a local photog snap racy pix of her when she hears a scout for Playboy is in the area.
But before Playboy comes knocking, billionaire octogenarian, J. Howard Marshall (Martin Landau) is taken to the club by his male nurse and falls madly in love with her.
After sh e becomes Playmate of the Year, Guess jeans came knocking and she became the iconic face — and body — of the company until they fired her for being so publicly drunk and slutty. So, she married the old man.
But this is more than a tale of the rise of an American goddess. It's also about the fall of a substance abusing cheap trick who was a worse mother than her own mother ever was, humiliating her son Danny throughout his life with her boozing and whoring around.
When Marshall's son shows his father photos of her making out with another woman, Marshall says, "She's some good- looking woman!"
Enter weirdo lawyer Howard K. Stern (Adam Goldberg — a dead ringer) who enables her constantly — from her weight gain to the drugs and booze. He even made the deal for "The Anna Nicole Show," the horrorreality show where she totally imploded on national TV.
Stern then takes Smith, pregnant with another man's child, to the Bahamas where she drugged and boozed herself into a stupor.
Watching her in the hospital room with her new baby girl (who amazingly wasn't born impaired), and knowing that her son will die within hours in that same room from his mother's pills, is sad and tragic.
Landau is positively perfect as Marshall, Bruckner nails Anna Nicole, Goldberg is eerily spot-on as Stern, and even all the tragic Dannys — Graham Patrick Martin is the teen Danny — get it right.
No, it ain't rocket science, but it is, for a TV biopic, just right for a steamy summer night.
Follow Linda on Twitter @lindastasi
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