NBC Universal A scene from “Farrah’s Story.”“Farrah’s Story” was awful.
It was awful not because it was a harrowing portrait of Farrah Fawcett‘s fight with cancer; it was awful because it was an exploitative portrait of a celebrity’s fight with cancer.
On Friday, NBC took Ms. Fawcett’s candid video diary and allowed it to be packaged as a generic VH1 “Behind the Music” biography – – maudlin music, gauzy slow-motion film, and pseudo-revealing interviews with friends, coworkers, doctors and hairdressers reminiscing about a former star.
Ryan O’Neal, Ms. Fawcett’s longtime companion, is devotedly at her side for much of the time, but his preening actor’s vanity keeps creeping into the frame. At one point, after one German doctor gives Ms. Fawcett good news (shortlived, as it turned out), a relieved Mr. O’Neal says, “I thought I was in another ‘Love Story’ movie.”
It was brave of Ms. Fawcett, 62, to invite cameras into her exam rooms, surgical procedures and her struggles with nausea, pain and hair loss. She wears eye makeup even when receiving painful laser treatments for her liver, but doesn’t hesitate to take off her wool cap and reveal her shaved head after radiation destroyed her famous blond mane. In one of the final scenes, her son Redmond, who is in prison on drug charges, shuffles into her bedroom wearing his L.A. County prison shirt and climbs on to her bed beside her to say goodbye.
It was clear that Ms. Fawcett wanted to take back her story from the paparazzi and the celebrity magazines and have some control over its telling. Yet sadly, her film stylistically mirrors some of the worst excesses of our tabloid culture.
And like many cancer patients, she says she wants to find larger purpose to her suffering.
At the end of the program, the actress says she made the film to alert public attention to an overlooked disease. “Why isn’t there more research done on certain types of cancer?” she asks. “And why doesn’t our healthcare system embrace alternative treatments that have proven successful in other countries?”
The film isn’t as nearly as brave or as serious-minded as its cancer-stricken subject. Alana Stewart, Ms. Fawcett’s close friend, held the camera at some of the most difficult private moments, and comes off commendably as a valiant, reliable pillar of support to the actress. But none of the doctors, advisers or medical experts interviewed throughout the two-hour special explains that one of the most common risk factors for anal cancer is human papilloma virus, and that the HPV vaccine can prevent not just cervical cancer but also anal cancer.
Nobody mentions anal pap smears, which researchers increasingly cite as a way to screen for cell changes that lead to anal cancer. The film also doesn’t make clear that in many cases, anal cancer can be treated and cured. (The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 5,290 new cases of anal cancer in 2009 and 710 deaths.)
And Ms. Fawcett’s reliance on European alternative treatments is more poignant than persuasive. Her exuberant German doctors seem far too giddily invested in their visiting patient’s fame to give her realistic prognoses — or even dissuade her from flying home to Los Angeles before she was strong enough to travel.
During one painful procedure, a German doctor asks Ms. Fawcett to name her best work. The actress mentions a few of the films she made that were critically acclaimed, including “Extremities” and the television movie “The Burning Bed.” The doctor reminds her about her 1970s television show “Charlie’s Angels.” Ms. Fawcett replies weakly, “Well, I only did that for one year.”
Those trips evidently gave Ms. Fawcett hope and lots of encouragement and personal attention, but the film doesn’t shed much light on how much or whether the treatments actually helped.
“I’m the girl who always believed in change,” Ms. Fawcett says, explaining her determination to fight her disease by all and any means necessary.
She deserves a different, less exploitative television tribute.
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