‘Loving Highsmith’ Review: The Patricia You Didn’t Know
nytimes.com“Loving Highsmith,” a constrained documentary by the filmmaker Eva Vitija, tries to make the case that author Patricia Highsmith was prodigious in both writing and romance.
When Highsmith died in 1995 at the age of 74, she left behind several lifetimes-worth of words, according to her biographer: 22 novels, including the best-sellers “Strangers on a Train,” “The Talented Mr.
Ripley,” and “Carol” (originally titled “The Price of Salt”), plus over 200 unpublished manuscripts and over 8,000 pages of personal journals.
Her handwritten entries, snippets read aloud here by the actress Gwendoline Christie, burn with the grievances — class, racial, familial, romantic, professional — that fed her fictional characters’ homicidal impulses and the public’s image of Highsmith as a coldblooded loner who preferred the company of her pet snail, Hortense.
