A tale of two divas: Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning match wits in Uptown Girls
There’s no more joyous nine minutes on the internet than the clip of a 24-year-old Brittany Murphy, all cartoon eyes and razor-cut blond bob, giving MTV a tour of a midtown Manhattan Blockbuster store in the summer of 2002.
She cartwheels and crashes into shelves. She waxes lyrical about Drew Barrymore, Shrek and Bob Fosse. She executes an absurdist runway walk with a pucker that would make Derek Zoolander blush. It’s a whirligig of giddy, deranged exuberance – the ideal show reel, in other words, for a screwball superstar in waiting.
By the early aughts, Murphy – already something of a generational talent, thanks to scene-stealing performances in Clueless, Girl, Interrupted, and 8 Mile – seemed primed for leading role stardom. And what better way to achieve it than to team up with – sorry to Nicole Kidman and her fellow Oscar strivers – another of the era’s other great actors: the pint-sized old soul Dakota Fanning?
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A fizzy comedy of duelling divas that wields a surprising emotional kick, 2003’s Uptown Girls stars Murphy as Molly Gunn, a New York City party princess whose frivolous existence unravels when she loses her late rock star daddy’s fortune, forcing her to take a job nannying Fanning’s Lorraine “Ray” Schleine: a fun-hating eight-year-old coping with her own absent parent issues.
“I’m miss proletariat now,” Molly announces, with all the conviction of an heiress who has just been evicted from her Upper West Side penthouse. “Mop the floors, spank the brat, pick up the paycheque on Friday.”
Molly’s fall from grace proves the perfect showcase for Murphy’s manic energy and knack for physical comedy, her unswerving optimism matched only by her ability to collapse on a broken heel, slip on a tide of laundry suds or yank her adorable miniature pig across town.
As the precocious pill-popper with the Anna Wintour haircut and withering put-downs, Fanning is the straight-talking counterpoint to Murphy’s loopy paroxysms, and a delight for anyone – like me – for whom watching children tyrannise adults remains one of cinema’s great pleasures. “It’s a harsh world,” Fanning deadpans in the movie’s funniest line, her guileless face lit like a noir villain as she tilts her shades.
Murphy, who could go as dark as she was goofy, complicates Molly’s ditzy mien with a mounting sense of anxiety and loss. Her humanity cracks Ray’s hostile front, and Fanning – a preternaturally gifted child actor with a heavy emotional arc here – seems to relish the newfound sense of play. Beneath the film’s frothy exterior lies a tale of two lost souls. A sisterhood forged in the face of grief.
Though dismissed as formulaic fluff by contemporary critics (though Roger Ebert got it), Uptown Girls would eventually find favour with a younger audience connecting with its charismatic, tender performances – to say nothing of its fairytale vision of post-9/11 Manhattan, nor Murphy’s talismanic Blumarine dress; there are entire articles devoted to the film’s fashion.
The director, Boaz Yakin, whose urban drama Fresh surveyed the flipside of the city’s class divide, leans into this perky fantasy of his home town. It’s all captured with beguiling spark by the veteran cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, a man who knew his way around blondes in emotional distress. Long before his famous work with Martin Scorsese – with whom he eventually shot seven films, including Goodfellas and Gangs of New York – he was behind the camera on many of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tangled melodramas, including 1972’s landmark The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
Ballhaus brings his expressive camerawork to Uptown Girls in a climactic sequence set on the Coney Island teacup ride, a moment of shared catharsis between Molly and Ray that hits hard for anyone lost in young adulthood – or forced to grow up before their time.
Of course, the knowledge of Murphy’s short life – she died in December 2009, at age 32 – can’t help but haunt the film. Near the end of that 2002 MTV clip, the actor checks out her rentals and hops up on the store counter, in defiance of Blockbuster etiquette: “Because I can,” she giggles, “and I’ll never be able to do this again.” Moments later she’s gone forever, reprising her catwalk strut as she exits the store and dissolves into daylight.
Uptown Girls is available to rent in Australia and the UK, and streaming on Max in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
