Screen Gem
by Molly HaskellSource: Town and Country
Date: 5//2009IN A TRANSFORMATION so remarkable it amounts to a reincarnation, Jessica Lange ages forty years and acquires bad teeth, papery skin, a shriveled body and a patrician turn-of-the-century accent to become Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale in the new HBO film Grey Gardens. While Drew Barrymore, equally uncanny as "Little Edie," may have the more flamboyant part, Lange's evocation of a bygone beauty with a fierce attachment to memory not only reproduces in exact phrasing and intonations the icon of the Maysles brothers' 1975 documentary but goes beyond to create something more complete and mysterious: a portrait that draws on the actress's unique combination of fragility and strength. Beneath the gray-haired crone with the steely eyes of a grande dame, I still see the tawny blonde who captured the hearts of audiences (and ensnared a whole generation of heterosexual males) as the shy, insecure soap-opera star of Tootsie in 1982. And that's as it should be, because Edith Beale was herself a knockout and a belle.
For Lange, the invitation to star in a fictionalization of the documentary Grey Gardens has provided the kind of challenge she loves -- and the dazzling display of talent we've come to expect.
"She was the top of the top, the toast of New York," says Lange. The actress thoroughly studied the life of Beale, who as a Bouvier was the aunt of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. "Edith was married in 1917 at a huge wedding in St. Patrick's Cathedral, and crowds jammed the sidewalks along Fifth Avenue outside. The East Hampton house was filled with servants and had this spectacular garden." It was the present-day version of that "grey" garden, now breathtakingly restored, that awed the actress when she and some fellow cast members visited the Long Island property during the making of the movie.
Unforgettable in front of a camera, Lange is now finding joy on the other side of it as well; her first book of photography was published last fall.
Lange and I meet at a cozy Italian restaurant in New York City's SoHo, within walking distance of her apartment in the West Village, and resume a conversation begun back in 1976. It was the eve of her movie debut, in King Kong, and the occasion was a memorably exuberant, star-studded dinner party in downtown Manhattan. Sitting between Czech director Milos Forman and "Misha" (Mikhail Baryshnikov, her beau at the time) was this exquisite creature, improbably fresh, her beauty made all the more tantalizing by something withheld, a slight curling of the lips, eyes sparkling with mischief.
We saw each other again, at various points in her career, when we talked in public and in private about women's film roles in general and hers in particular. How rich and complicated those '80s and '90s movies look compared with the glitzy chick-flick vehicles for women today. Lange played the manic and self-destructive star in Frances; the slatternly adulteress in The Postman Always Rings Twice; the wild, touching army wife in Blue Sky; the vengeful Tamora in Julie Taymor's Titus; the legendary Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams; the shrewd, lying spinster in the underrated Cousin Bette; a lawyer defending a father accused of war crimes in Music Box. And then there are the movies she made with her then-and-now partner Sam Shepard (as if Baryshnikov weren't enough to be jealous of!). Varied as her roles were, the consistent threads were women who lived on the edge and a recklessness that came out of the actress's own willingness to take risks.
As Big Edie Beale, the family matriarch, Lange manages to be seductive and insufferable, protective and viperish.
This love of challenge has never been more in evidence. Last fall Lange published a book of photography (50 Photographs, PowerHouse Books) -- a splendid and idiosyncratic collection of images taken on family trips, which had a Midtown gallery exhibition this past winter. And in her biggest recent gamble on-camera, she plays the arthritic octogenarian Big Edie Beale, icon of the documentary that shocked audiences in 1975 as it exposed, through the derelict lives of a well-born mother and daughter, a worm in the woodpile of the lushly discreet, manicured enclave of old-money East Hampton. The movie became an instant cult classic: a touchstone for outsider eccentricity (Little Edie drawling on about the village fashion police) and a magnet for gays, fashionistas and Kennedy worshippers.
The new film, by writer-director Michael Sucsy, not only gives us key moments so close to the original you think you're watching the documentary but ingeniously utilizes flashbacks and imaginary scenes to fill in the blanks. We get to see Little Edie as a debutante misfit: lovely, hopeful, ambitious, but with a conviction of her showbiz future already bordering on the delusional. We see her mother in her true element, singing alongside her beloved accompanist, creating a bohemian sanctuary from which her banker husband (Ken Howard) flees. As things deteriorate, it's like watching a car wreck in slow motion, two women falling off a cliff.
Lange and I can't stop analyzing the enigma of how this privileged mother and daughter could have fallen so far. We're not talking thrift shop and takeout but squalor and isolation, sharing the premises with rats, cats and raccoons. The smells! There are superficial explanations: the two women simply didn't know how to keep house without servants; antiestablishment Little Edie scorned East Hampton punctilios and refused to pay a fee for garbage pickup. But essentially it's a mad mother-daughter love story, a folie à deux: two women living in their own fantasy world.
"I wanted to preserve the mystery," says Lange. "That was the most important thing for me, not to have a pat explanation." And that is what's most mesmerizing in her performance: the eyes -- penetrating, determined and so like those in the portrait of a once-beautiful Edie that hovers over the proceedings, hanging on the bedroom wall -- and the way we feel Edie knows more than she's saying, but we're not sure what.
In flashbacks, we see Little Edie trying to make it in New York and Big Edie pulling her back to East Hampton -- out of selfishness? Or out of love, protecting her daughter from an inevitable humiliation? And does Little Edie really loathe the house that imprisons her, or does she exult in its summertime glory, the haven it provides and the dreams it protects? Some of both, it seems, since there is both love and hate, resistance and nurturing, lying and truth telling, in the complex and endlessly resourceful drama that mother and daughter enact in their rich shared world, one spun out of imagination and denial. Of course, the house itself, stage setting and cocoon, is the third character in the love triangle.
Lange didn't see the Maysles brothers' film until long after it first came out. Several years ago she went to her agent with the idea of doing a fictional version in which she would play Little Edie; she was in her midfifties, the right age. She hadn't yet hired a writer to develop a script when Sucsy, whom she'd never met, came to her with his concept for a narrative that would move back and forth in time, with her playing Big Edie in middle age and beyond. It was several years and many hours of coaching before she finally stood before the camera.
"It was one of the most difficult roles I've ever tackled," she says. "I drove the makeup person insane, spent hours getting the prosthetics right -- the aquiline nose and the thin face, so unlike my squashed-in one, reducing the jawbone, making the chin more pointed."
"But it's the voice," I interrupt, "even more than the face. That's what's truly amazing." She agrees. "I knew that if I could find the voice, I had the character. Drew and I would watch the documentary over and over, plus some footage that never got into the original. Watch, listen and practice."
We both agree that a face can be arranged, like a mask, but a voice gets at the essence of a person. I ask her about the scene in which, standing at the piano and surrounded by friends, Big Edie sings "Tea for Two."
"We talked at first about dubbing it, but I decided I wanted to do it myself. I don't have a professionally trained voice, as Edie did, but I wanted to try to capture how she felt." And capture it she does, in a rapturous expression (and commemoration) of a woman doing the one thing on earth that she loves.
"It was the scariest part of the whole film, but I just decided to go for broke," says the actress, once again seeking out risk -- and finding a shattering emotional truth in the balance.