UNCOMMON VALOR
KENT JONES SALUTES THE FEARLESS SCREEN PRESENCE OF JESSICA LANGE
Source: Film Comment
Date: March/April 2006 issue
IT'S FASCINATING TO WATCH THE CAREERS OF TODAY'S FEMALE stars,
notable for their managerial savvy and self-protective skills.
Witherspoon, Parker, Barrymore, and Diaz are quite a talented
lot, and given the fact that they're in a business known for
wasting its talent, especially its women, you can't blame them
for controlling every square inch of their careers on screen
and off. Each project, if not each move, seems to have been
vetted and re-vetted, and they always seem to know precisely
where they're going to land and exactly how hard. Witherspoon's
justifiably vaunted performance in Walk the Line
is a marvel of mental and physical engineering, but there are
no ragged edges or gray areas-she's terrific on June Carter
Cash's humility and righteousness, and she adds her patented
spunkiness to good effect, but there's an overtone that has
less to do with acting per se than with career management, a
feeling of efficiency, containment, and economy of means.
With all due allowance to the differences between the people
they're playing, Witherspoon's performance makes a fascinating
contrast with Jessica Lange's Patsy Cline. Like any good I.ange
creation, her Patsy plays like a bullet fired with her first
appearance (on the bandstand) that hits the target only with
her exit from the action. Come to think of it, a plane crashing
into a mountain and exploding into a beautiful ball of smoke
and flame is the perfect ending to a Jessica Lange performance:
pure energy and movement that can only be stopped by brute force-a
frontal lobotomy, for instance, or a knife plunged into the
neck-or, in this case, an act of God. Of all the soul sisters
who came into their own during the Seventies and Eighties-Winger,
Spacek, clayburgh, Keaton-Lange is the most fearless, the most
physical and the least cerebral. Not to imply that she's all
about intuition, because Lange is a fiercely intelligent artist,
but her method seems antithetical to that of the supremely meticulous
Meryl Streep. Where Streep works point by point, Lange works
from a basic vocabulary of moves that is retooled and modulated
for every character: hand movements for emphasis that are sometimes
sweeping, sometimes delicate, never less than exquisite; a penchant
for quick change-ups in speed, lunges forward, and wounded withdrawals;
an equally physical use of voice, which makes any given line
reading a musical event; a fully dimensional sense of her own
body and a very unusual if not singular feeling for line and
volume. And then, of course, there are the eyes-hypnotically
entrancing and always locked in, facing down errant husbands,
domineering mothers, a father who might be a war criminal, even
De Niro's blazing Cape Fear sociopath,
with tangible self-possession.
"YOU'RE MAX CADY...AREN'T YOU?" SHE SAYS TO THE goofy
lunatic who's pulled up outside her house in his convertible.
Her slightly sneering diction, her lightly creased smile (more
quietly and believably lethal than anything in De Niro's broadly
entertaining turn), and, most of all, her game presence, standing
destruction down, make for a typically electric, voluptuous
moment. Lange is finally the secret heart of Scorsese's underrated
remake. The tension in Cape Fear (91)
doesn't build as much as it mutates-mother-daughter, husband-potential
girlfriend, husband-wife, husband-assailant, family-assailant.
A short-haired, alert, discreetly middleaged Lange puts muscle
and bone into a portrait of a marriage gone sour, along with
her equally fearless director and co-actor (Nick Nolte), and
the domestic scenes-raw, tightly coiled, filled with a thousand
little domestic irritations-stay in the memory for longer than
anything that happens on the river.
Staring down the monster-this is the keynote of many Lange
performances. One might say that it comes with the territory
of the official cultural emergence of the Strong Independent
Woman, but in Lange's case it's not a rhetorical gambit or a
"statement" but an internally generated reflex. "I
always have to find the simplest line, the most organic emotional
thread," the actress has said, and it strikes me that locating
the threat must be at the heart of her process. Lange hones
in on her characters' conflicts, within and without, and each
resulting performance is an ongoing, dynamic struggle to right
the balance, resolve the tension. Much more than an aria of
madness, her Frances Farmer is a soldier fighting battles on
multiple fronts: against her mother, her straitlaced community,
her professional exploiters, her doctors and attendants, her
own unruly neural impulses, and finally-and so, so sadly and
eloquently-her own mental containment. Carly Marshall in Blue
Sky (94) is less agonized and more vivacious,
a bright flag flying in the breeze, fighting her wildest urges
and compulsions. Similarly, her highly enteraining duels with
Sam Shepard's returning cowboy star in the shaggy Don't
Come Knocking (05) become face-offs with her own
past vulnerability. To look closely at Lange's full-frontal
career is to realize how many other actors, even the good ones,
make an art of retreating, or digging in.
The legend goes that Lange, a Minnesota girl of Polish-Finnish
extraction, was so entranced by a screening of Children
of Paradise in the early Seventies that she left
SoHo and her boyfriend behind and headed for Paris to study
with the great mime Etienne Decroux. Did miming bring the physicality
out of Lange, or had she found a discipline that allowed her
to hone and refine what already came naturally? It certainly
came in handy when she was playing to a blue screen for most
of her debut in the 1976 discoid remake of King
Kong. To revisit this entertaining de Laurentiis
tinker toy is quite a jolt-was there really a time when moviemakers
made comic book extravaganzas this unpretentious? Lange's Dwan
("I rearranged the letters in 'Dawn'") is, on paper,
a funny variation on the ditzy chorus girl (she arrives on an
inflatable raft, having escaped the explosion of a luxury yacht
because she refused to watch Deep Throat
with the rest of the passengers). The young Lange brings the
role a lot extra, spilling out of the smutty AW magazine conception
in much the same way that Dwan keeps spilling out of her rhinestone
dresses. If, say, Goldie Hawn had played Dwan, then the full
comic potential of a line like, "Put me down, you male
chauvinist ape!" might have been realized. As Lange delivers
it, you get the feeling that she really means it. Broad comedy
is not her strong suit.
I will assume the minority opinion and say that The
Postman Always Rings Twice (81) was another false
start. Not that Lange is bad in the film-it's a formidable performance
and a fascinatingly imploded one, emphasizing the wounded hurt
and devastation in Cora, the discomfort, the pockets of darkness.
But she has no room to breathe, let alone move, and neither
does the audience. This Postman is over-art-directed and overcomposed,
the tempo too rigidly set, the tone too uniformly downbeat,
and Nicholson, aside from the fact that he's too old for the
part, seems like he's conducting a secret acting experiment
and reporting back to Kubrick. Lange certainly had the equipment
to pull off a good Cora, but both the actress and her character
needed a little more room to stretch out. Which she got plenty
of in both Frances (82) and Tootsie
(82), the latter earning her an Academy Award for Best Supporting
Actress.
ALLOW ME, FOR A MOMENT, TO step back and remember myself at
22, plunking down my $4.50 and coming out dazed by Lange and
her extraordinary power in these two very different movies.
And by her beauty. The adjective "luminous" is employed
way too often to describe actresses-critics use it as liberally
as the customers at Nathan's use ketchup. In Lange's case, it's
just. Liberated from King Kong's airbrushed
light and Postman's sallow compositions-and
leaving behind all the scrims and fancy angles of All
That Jazz (79)-Lange revealed herself in full,
and it was a shock. Who had skin so soft and glowing eyes so
blue, a smile so big? Her joy was as overpowering as her waves
of sadness, and her physical eloquence delivered the killer
blow. I remember sitting in the audience, gazing up at the screen,
and silently vocalizing what was surely a collective sentiment
shared by young men across the country if not the world: "I
surrender..."
Lange is about as captivating in Tootsie
as it's possible for an actor to be-self-assured, effortlessly
winning, going about the business of playing a charmingly naive
character with an ease and a self-assurance that acts as a balm
on the hardworking tone and relentless pace set by the star.
By itself, her Julie Nichols is a nice comic performance. In
tandem with her Frances Farmer, which came out the same year,
it's astonishing. Lange is ferocious in Frances, and very, very
scary. She commits herself to her character's instability and
unpredictability as fully as her Tamora pledges revenge in Julie
Taymor's Titus (99)-it's her character's
best defense in a hostile universe. Her scenes with the clinic
director (Lane Smith) are probably the most terrifying in the
movie, and they are remarkable for the fact that Lange the actress
is embodying Farmer the actress exercising her own cunning,
playing mind games with the obtuse doctor, hovering near physical
violence, and, once she's cornered, retreating. Many actors
have "done" madness, but few have understood its underlying
logic and imperatives or described its contours so well.
Lange's Frances overwhelms and finally dwarfs the filmmakers'
Frances, and she is far more powerful
and fully realized than the modish, lazy movie around her (on
the other hand, someone was smart enough to turn the movie over
to her in the first place). The same is true of many of Lange's
movies, and it doesn't strike me as a result of vanity or excessive
self-admiration (as it is with, for instance, Warren Beatty
or Harrison Ford). Lange always works in tandem with her fellow
actors, and never steps aside from the movie around her. In
the end, this is a directorial problem-few have been up for
the challenges she throws down without even trying. Blue
Sky is finally as ungainly as Frances,
and Sweet Dreams (85) now seems disappointingly
monotonous, moving dutifully from one biopic chapter to the
next just as Lange and Harris are getting started. Sam Shepard
was smart enough to build the underrated Far North
(88) around her, but it's a modest, homemade enterprise. Lange
met her match in Scorsese, but Cape Fear
is not her movie, as hard as she and Nolte work with their director
to turn the genre setup inside out. She has done wonderful and
more self-effacing work in the air-filled 1986 adaptation of
Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart
(probably her sexiest performance), Men Don't Leave
(90), and A Thousand Acres (97), and
she's hilariously uptight and buttoned down in Jarmusch's Broken
Flowers (05). Arguably, her shining hour thus
far came in 1989 with Music Box. "She
has the will and the technique to take a role that's really
no more than a function of melodrama and turn this movie into
a cello concerto," wrote Pauline Kael, ever so aptly. Music
Box is a fairly solid example of the late Eighties/early
Nineties subgenre of the career woman under threat, her vulnerability
located and her mettle tested. Remember Cher as a crack criminal
lawyer? Sissy Spacek as a whistleblower? Or (God help us) Melanie
Griffith's 1992 doubleheader as a WWII super-spy and an undercover
cop? Probably not, but Lange's haunted Ann Talbot is hard to
shake.
"The only thing I know about this film is that it's a
love story. It's about this woman's devotion and love and commitment
to her family and to her father," Lange said of Costa-Gavras
and Joe Eszterhas's riff on the John Demjanjuk affair. Casting
Armin Mueller-Stahl as the beloved father, a man who in all
probability is a Nazi war criminal and who has asked his daughter
to defend him in court, was a canny move. He is motionless,
intransigent, unyielding; she is in constant motion, searching
for the one vantage point that will allow her to see into her
father's past. Lange doesn't exactly try to bend the film to
her will, but the genre allows her to, and Costa-Gavras in turn
allows her enough time and space to turn his issue movie into
Kael's cello concerto. Thus, a moment that might have been tossed
out of any other movie-Ann sitting on the stairs, the weight
of middle age and the weight of the awful task before her all
but inseparable, opening her robe and studying her body-becomes
a central event. The then-topical issues-the not-so-veiled anti-Semitism
of the Lake Forest set, the ethical traps and dilemmas of lawyering,
the presence of ex-Nazis in the heartland-are finally so many
stops on one woman's painful sentimental education and psychological
readjustment.
This is, finally, one of the bravest and most naturally expressive
actors who ever stepped in front of a camera. Let's hope she
gets to work with more directors who are up for the challenge.
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