Patsy & Loretta (2019)

By Peter McGinn

This movie seems to me to be exactly what it sets out to be: an old fashion Lifetime channel woman’s biopic movie. Not a lot of swearing, violence or sex, and that is fine. I don’t require that trio of shock material when I watch a production. The two leads did a fine job in my opinion, both in the acting and singing. (The woman playing Loretta has won a Tony award, so singing is definitely in her wheelhouse.) The supporting cast is fairly invisible but not from a lack of trying. The guys playing the rotten husbands are stuck in the rut of the cliche role they play and do the best they can under those circumstances. If you have watched programs or movies about these singers, some of this seems repetitious, nothing remarkable done with details of their lives. What is it about husbands of wildly successful women that they feel it their duty to submerge into drinking, sleeping around and being abusive to their meal tickets? I dare say I could have done better in their place. But the ladies’ eyes probably would have passed right over regular guys in favor of these brash outgoing cads. So the film held my interest, though as a novel writer I did find some of it oh so familiar. It would have been nice if they had shuffled the husbands more into the background and focused on other stuff: their children, the details of their songwriting, or whatever. But is was a Lifetime movie, and rotten husbands do make good melodrama I suppose.