Lifetime Tells the Story of a Survivor Whose Armor Was a Little Black Dress, With Shirley MacLaine – The New York Times

Although this may sound disingenuous, I was fully willing to buy Shirley MacLaine in the title role of “Coco Chanel,” a Lifetime movie clocking in at a “Titanic” length of three hours and sinking all the way. The casting held the potential for a marriage of spirits. New Age-ists and fashion matriarchs share a tendency to speak in airy proclamations; both seem to vaccinate themselves against linear thinking.

Ms. MacLaine herself even seems to be in the accessories business now. Chakra jewelry is for sale on her personal Web site. (Coco Chanel once said that “elegance is refusal.” I think if she had seen a particular necklace available on shirleymaclaine.com she might have added, “Elegance is refusing to wear a $286 Spirit Steering Pendant that looks like a windmill.”)

Ms. MacLaine, who in recent years has found a niche deliciously playing grandmother to addled thirtyish women in romantic crisis (“In Her Shoes,” “Rumor Has It …”), here tells us just where we are going, in an opening shot, as she plasters the palm of her hand to her face and draws on a cigarette as if it were a respirator. It is of no advantage that she is forced to reproduce a greatest-hits list of Chanel aphorisms: “To be irreplaceable you have to be different.” “The poetry of fashion lies in the creation of illusion.” “Dresses should both crawl and fly.” (Really? Crawl and fly?) At a certain point we begin to wonder if we’re watching not the life story of a singular designer but a long corporate image ad for General Electric: “Failed innovation is painful. A revival of it is sinister.”

The film, to be shown Saturday, begins with Gabrielle Chanel at 71, during her critically disastrous 1954 comeback show, and recounts her life in a series of flashbacks that portray it as one long, continuous attempt to travel to the other side of the velvet rope.