“Jess Like A Woman”
By Richard Corliss
Source: TIME
Date: 4/10/1995
Why can't a movie be more like a woman? How is it that Hollywood
films are usually built like Arnold Schwarzenegger--big and
burly, with way more muscle power than is needed? Much rarer
is the notion that a film can address the subtleties of emotion,
that it can have curve and contour, beauty and heart. In the
'90s, alas, the Oscar category of Best Actress has become a
chic, sparse ghetto. It's hard to find five films in which women
have exciting, dominant roles.
So there was little surprise last week when the Academy Award
went to Jessica Lange for her role as a blowsy Army wife in
Blue Sky--a film made four years
ago, shelved when its distributor went bankrupt, then released
last year to a paltry $2.4 million box-office take. The award
was a tribute not just to Lange, a six-time nominee and a winner
as Supporting Actress in 1983 for Tootsie,
but to the endangered species of women's movies.
"There are always fewer films for women than for men,
across the board," says Lange, 45, who scooted back to
her farm in central Virginia the day after her triumph. "Good
scripts are as rare as hen's teeth." And for actresses
in their 40s, she notes, "the opportunities are thinning
out even more."
To see what she has made of her opportunities, visit a theater
near you. Nearly 20 years after fighting off a big gorilla's
advances in King Kong, Lange is a
one-woman cottage industry. The Oscar win has brought Blue
Sky back into limited release, prior to an April
18 debut in video stores. In Losing Isaiah,
she stars as an adoptive mother in a custody battle. And beginning
this Friday she can be seen in Rob Roy,
Michael Caton-Jones' epic of a legendary Scotsman (Liam Neeson)
and the woman who shared his pain and cheered him on.
There's not a lot for audiences to cheer about in Rob
Roy; it's a muddy, bloody slog through 18th century
agrarian politics. Lange was attracted to Alan Sharp's script
("an amazingly beautiful piece of writing"), which
contains some sonorous orations and choice epithets. Lange brings
that signal gift, sexual intelligence, to the role of Mary MacGregor;
the light in her eyes catches fire when she stares at Neeson.
But Mary is not part of the film's main conflict, between Neeson
and villain Tim Roth. Despite Lange's efforts, Mary is a mature
version of that macho-movie ornament, the Girl--victim, inspiration,
trophy.
The trophy in Losing Isaiah, written
by Naomi Foner and directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal, is a black
child whose drug-addict mother (Halle Berry) dumped him in a
garbage can shortly after his birth. Now he is two-and the point
of contention in a tug-of-love between the mother and the family
that raised him. Isaiah plays as a court case, with evidence
and arguments for each side. But in movie terms, the case is
stacked against Lange: next to Berry's radiant youth, she looks
sere and exhausted. It is one of those dares a maturing female
star likes to take: stripping off her glamour to reveal bone,
sinew, despair.
All these are on display in Blue Sky.
Flesh too, for Carly Marshall is a wild thing, a would-be film
star, erotic and erratic. Her career-Army husband (Tommy Lee
Jones, in a wonderfully implosive, sympathetic turn) doesn't
know what to do but love her. She tosses confetti around; he
wears it like dandruff and wonders who will clean up the mess.
Toward the end, Blue Sky trots out
the p.c. placards and sends Carly on horseback into a nuclear-test
area. But most of the film (directed by Tony Richardson, who
died of aids in 1991) has an acuity, rare in Hollywood pictures,
about the heroic compromises that marriage entails and about
the fragility of trust. Lange plays it high and true. It is
a performance perfectly pitched in the key of shrill.
"What I felt worked best," she says, "was the
complex portrayal of the relationship." As a private woman
in the public eye, Lange has endured tabloid scrutiny of her
complex relationships with Mikhail Baryshnikov and, for the
past 12 years, playwright-actor Sam Shepard. Gossips meticulously
parsed her Oscar thank-you speech for confirmation of a rumored
rift with her beau, whom she didn't mention. But according to
Lange's publicist, Shepard was back home playing host to an
Oscar-night slumber party (including a screening of Blue
Sky) for one of their children. Things with Sam
are fine, Lange says briskly.
After a busy year in front of the camera, she is eager to
get back to work behind it, honing her skills at black-and-white
photography. And with her family "out here on the farm,"
she says, "it's not hard for me to get into a relaxation
mode." Soon, though, Jessica Lange is bound to get a call
for another strong woman's role. It's a tough job, and a rare
one, but somebody's got to do it.
Close Window and Return
to Media Menu