Call Me Kate

Call Me Kate is a mostly satisfying addition to the many existing examinations of Hepburn's life. Numerous scholarly and popular biographies as well as her own obfuscating memoir, "Me," have detailed much of the information offered here. But director Lorna Tucker has access to newly available audio tapes, home movies, and other footage of the actress at play, mugging, tumbling, skating, swimming, playing tennis, and enjoying friends. This is mostly a criticism-free tribute but some weaknesses are mentioned. Hepburn frequently referred to herself as egotistical and, though not in the film, she once declared, "I would have been a terrible mother because I'm basically a very selfish human being." Occasionally Tucker inserts puzzling visuals that don't match or enhance the subject matter -- a busy man negotiating library stacks and an unidentified woman doing a fan dance.

What feels glaringly absent is an acknowledgment of a fundamental contradiction scholars rarely remark on. Though Hepburn made a career of playing the role model for self-actualized women who live independently, stand up for themselves, and do it without deferring to men, in an important part of her life she was the opposite. Her primary love relationship with the alcoholic and abusive Spencer Tracy, as the legend goes, seems to echo her admiration for a man who turns out to have been an adored, abusive father. The nephew says the father was "really tough on his kids, harsh and abusive by today's standards," and that abuse may have been a reason his eldest son and Katharine's revered older brother, Tom, committed suicide as a teenager. After that, the stoic father insisted the family pretend Tom never existed. No connection is made between her father's meanness and her choice to devote herself for 30 years to an abusive alcoholic. In a telling but undeveloped moment, actor Jane Fonda recounts that during the On Golden Pond shoot, Hepburn noticed actor Henry Fonda mocking Jane, a co-star and producer on the film. Hepburn advised Jane not to take her father's denigration to heart. "Spencer used to do that to me all the time," Hepburn confides, a bombshell that is just brushed aside. The woman who made a public show of professional strength and agency, mostly playing women who had no patience for domineering men, actually chose to live a private life of self-imposed subjugation. She was a flawed human being, like the rest of us. The story of that dichotomy would make a great movie.