Ah, the glitz and glamour of Hollywood!
This relatively small piece of real estate in southern California has risen from the early days of silent pictures in the first decades of the twentieth century to have a cultural clout that continues for better or ill to bestride the globe.
But away from the stars and the parties and the movies and the awards, what was life really like for those who lived and worked here, especially those at the coalface of movie production where the vibe was less transcendent escapism and more hard graft and outrunning painful pasts which came up to catch them, anyway?
Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents, like Still Life by Sarah Winman, is a work of groundedly human beauty, a novel which delves deep into the unsettling fact that though we often reach for the stars, and surely there is no better example of this than Hollywood, we often find ourselves caught somewhere far more gritty and debased and struggling to free ourselves from the dark grasp of that which we sought to leave behind.
The central figure in Mercury Pictures Presents is Maria Lagana, an Italian-American who moved to Los Angeles with her weary mother in the years before World War Two to escape the fallout surrounding the arrest of her quietly dissident father who was caught, inadvertently through the actions of Maria, by the unyielding, uncompromising forces of Mussolini’s forces.
‘There’s something I should say before I go’, Maria said.
‘No, there isn’t’.
‘There is.’
Annuniziata hung her head, resigned to whatever Maria needed to confess.
‘You’ve done a good job, Mamma.’
Annunziata laughed. ‘You’re so full of shit.’ (P. 60)
Far from her homeland, now in the grip of violently divisive Fascists and forced to craft a life from the bottom up in a world, Maria, like so many immigrants before her, has to work out what to keep and what to discard in this new world that Marra refers to as a “sunny Siberia”.
She finds a home at Mercury Pictures International, a second-tier film studio scrabbling to hold onto artistic and commercial relevance in an industry where you can be big one day and gone the next, and where, with the advent of World War Two, there was more propaganda and deceptive world-building than there was imaginative creation of worlds not our own or hyper-realised takes on what we know.
Maria works her way up from the typing pool to be second-in-command to co-owner to Artie Feldman, a man who Maria, in keeping with Marra’s brilliantly funny turn of phrase which percolates joyously and with sharp-edged observation through the novel, is described as a “middle-aged narcissist whose bald spot had outpaced his toupees”.
He is at loggerheads with his slightly-older twin brother Ned who is the Republican to Artie’s Democrat, the coldhearted capitalist to his brother’s more artistic soul, though Artie, to Maria’s unending frustration, also has a fine way to sculpting the world solely to his own ends too, a pursuit of self that doesn’t end up well before him despite his grand ambitions.
Set before, during and to a small extent after World War Two, and focusing on the influx of immigrants from places like Germany and Italy who were both embraced and exiled in equal measure depending on their usefulness to American society and later the war effort, Mercury Pictures Presents is a gloriously funny and yet searingly honest portrait of humanity caught in both aspirational longing and grimly unrealised reality.
For all of its soberingly serious insights, and they run the gamut from the way totalitarianism distorts the human experience in ways twisted, gross and violent to how families can be both sanctuary and torturous prison depending on the circumstance, Mercury Pictures Presents is a fiendishly funny book.
With a turn of phrase that one interview with Marra describes as riffing off Golden Age classic His Girl Friday with Maria firmly in the Rosalind Russell role (“just ‘a lot more Italian’, notes the author), Mercury Pictures Presents injects comedic insightfulness into each and every page, evident even in the most pressingly real of conversations.
‘How’d Himmler look?’
Nino chooses his adjective carefully. ‘Unpleasant’.
‘Most murderers are.’
That one short pithy exchange, admittedly shorn of its context but bitingly funny nonetheless, shows ow beautifully uses artfully-expressed humour to amuse, of course, but also as a way of bringing down the sledgehammer of truth upon a thousand vexing and complicated situations.
Though Maria, her family and a figure from her past who arrives in Hollywood to upset the new life she has fought to build are up to their necks in a lot of grim truth, there is a farcical cleverness everywhere in how their wholly engaging story is told, a Woody Allen-esque use of words and witty observance that illuminates the narrative, making it even more impactful than it might otherwise be.
For weeks, she rooted through the story department for a piece of intellectual property not yer drained of its intelligence by the studio’s contract writers. She jotted ideas at Vick’s Formica counter while Eddie voiced skepticism [sic] for the fare of a diner that sold stool softener by the pound. She found a short story about a Chinese railway worker who becomes a vigilante, righting the wrongs committed by a rapacious railroad magnate, but its potential for appalling publicity copy—This year’s most thrilling Western is Eastern!—made her shelve it.
Nothing was right. Nothing was real. (P. 283)
Like many of the writing greats, Marra seamlessly brings together great humour and glaringly intense truth-telling in a way that weaves a story you simply can’t turn away from, its epic expansiveness made enduringly and affectingly intimate by the closeness of the characters to the dark reality of what it means to be human.
For all of its depictions of the very worst of times and the worst of people, and it doesn’t get much worse than World War Two and its horror chamber of villains, Mercury Pictures Presents is also a song of hope, kindness, forgiveness and the glorious heights the human spirit can reach, even in the face of brutality and incessant terribleness.
Time and again we bear witness to the ripping of families, the killing of innocent souls and the destruction of a once-certain status quo, and yet Marra understands how marvellously, fulsomely and humourously adaptable people are, pouring it all into a story that is as moving as they come even as you laughing, yet again, at writing that induces laughs just before a knowing wince of truthful insight.
Making no bones about the fact that we crave glamour and glory but end up swimming in the sewer far more than we’d like to, Mercury Pictures Presents is nevertheless, thanks to Marra’s sublimely clever and achingly funny writing, which soars even as its characters often do not despite their best efforts, brimming with the hopeful tenacity of the human spirit which somehow survives despite everything thrown at it, and which is funny and wittily observational even in the face of a reality that is anything but and which may never be what the aspirational gods ordered.