Reframes Patricia Highsmith as a gay icon – and ignores her anti-Semitism: Loving Highsmith reviewed

I first discovered writer Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Carol, the five Ripley novels) as a young teenager working my way through Golders Green Library. I guess she came shortly after Georgette Heyer, and I was hooked. I only later became aware of her virulent anti-Semitism, and on this count she was not half-hearted – she called the Holocaust ‘the semicaust’ as it failed to fully deliver – yet I still could not look away. I’m the same with the spiders at the zoo: horrified, but also mesmerised. We must, I suppose, separate the art from the artist as not everyone can be Paul McCartney, but any Highsmith documentary should surely indicate that she was as disquieting and difficult and complex as the people she invented, yet Loving Highsmith refuses to go there, alas.

This documentary film is by the Swiss filmmaker Eva Vitija who wants, I think, to reframe Highsmith as a gay icon, and a romantic, with a soft side as a counterpoint to, say, the editor Otto Penzler who once described her as ‘a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being’. Vitija sets up her stall immediately by saying as the film opens: ‘Like many other filmmakers, I was drawn to her writing and when I read her unpublished diaries I fell in love with Highsmith herself.’ Not that unlovable, then..

The story is told via excerpts from her diaries (read by Gwendoline Christie), archive footage, clips from the best-known Hollywood screen adaptations, and a visit to extended family still living in Texas where Highsmith was born, even if they seemed to know little. Mostly, it’s Vitija telling them things while they exclaim: ‘Oh, shut up!’ The main talking heads are Highsmith’s lovers, like the writer Marijane Meaker, who is particularly good on Highsmith’s mother, Mary, a sinister narcissist and ‘bitch’ who was appalled at having a child and told her daughter she’d tried to abort her by drinking turpentine when pregnant.