The next morning, her body was found a mile from the boat, near an inflatable dinghy. On the evening of November 28th, Wood, who was forty-three, somehow wound up in the water. Then, with half an hour to go, the film returns to the inescapable subject: that fateful, foggy weekend in late November, 1981, when Wood, Robert Wagner, and her latest co-star, Christopher Walken, took off in a yacht called Splendour to Catalina Island, off the California coast. (She chose “West Side Story.”) And, as it’s told from a daughter’s perspective, there are fond recollections of Wood’s ability to host fabulous birthday parties and New Year’s Eve bashes, backed up by home movies and family photos.
There’s a brief but intriguing sequence about Wood’s rebellion against the studio system, when she battled Jack Warner for the right to choose her own projects. There are interviews with friends and co-stars, including Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Elliott Gould, who attest to Wood’s fortitude and heart. The documentary then weaves through the story of Wood’s life and career: her child stardom, in movies such as “ Miracle on 34th Street” her breakthrough adult roles in “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Splendor in the Grass,” and “West Side Story” her unusual romance with the actor Robert Wagner, whom she married twice, with another marriage, to the producer Richard Gregson, in between and her struggle to balance domesticity and work later in her career.
“Since then, there’s been so much speculation and focus on how she died that it’s overshadowed her life’s work and who she was as a person,” says Gregson Wagner, who is a producer of the film, and whose memoir about her mother coincides with the film’s release. At the beginning of the film, directed by Laurent Bouzereau, Wood’s older daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, describes hearing, at age eleven, of her mother’s shocking and mysterious death, in 1981. It takes a little more than an hour to discover what the new HBO documentary “ Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind” is really about, if only because we’ve been thrown off the scent. Natalie Wood with her daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, in Hawaii, 1978.
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