hey deanie

BERENICE BEJO, THE ARTIST

2012-01-05T23:45:00.002-05:00

Berenice Bejo does not capture my imagination in The Artist. The role requires her to be charming and compassionate, and she has these qualities in spades. But Bejo coasts on her charisma; she barely invents. She does not have the tools to consistently make these states of feeling seem interesting, fresh, and genuine. Her look is too contemporary for this role. That is a weird case to hold against her, especially considering Bejo is an incredibly beautiful woman, but her beauty does not have the classic force or authority of an actress I imagine could ignite popular opinion in her favor. (Kind of like how I felt about Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love – likable enough girl, hardly enough to inspire furious dramaturgical passion) This ultimately reveals the limitations of the way Hazanavicius conceives his world and his characters. Peppy, like all other characters, is a mere accessory to George. She is a narrative device ultimately in service of influencing his trajectory; she barely changes herself. The role could have been more complex. Though the writer and director are understandably to blame, a more expressive actress could have added shades of vanity to this character. There is a potentially rich power dynamic and role reversal between George and Peppy that isn't explored. As it stands, Peppy is merely the little girl who could. The film world barely corrupts her sense of morals; she is angelic and idealized in a way that tires quickly.

Still, I don't remember a smile as wide as the one I had when I saw her dance. Her charm does accomplish quite a lot. The Artist is a benign film and I don't mind that. We shouldn't expect it to contain some abstruse thesis just because of its high concept. Hazanavicius possesses uncommon grace in the way he structures the film. It is given weight because I feel the film's "happy ending" has a palpable sense of sadness – hearing those clinical human voices readying for the next take is, to put it bluntly, less than wondrous, and I love this subtle cynicism. But for a film whose central conceit, and claim to fame, is invention and challenge to convention, Bejo disappoints, and the ruse is uncovered. She's lost at sea in this role, a gorgeous talent from 2011 placed unwittingly in 1927. I don't really buy it.

SHAILENE WOODLEY, THE DESCENDANTS

2012-01-05T15:30:00.003-05:00

Shailene Woodley is not yet a very fluid actress, but she remains for me one of the few vaguely insightful elements of a film I otherwise found painfully lacking in a basic understanding of human relationships. She cannot handle some terrible lines given to her (I don't ever want to hear her say the word "twat" again), and the way she handles her character's pottymouth is sometimes too awkward to really affect. But Woodley suggests the contradictions and complexities of that period in any teenager's life, particularly when one is forced to juggle impulses and duties against each other. She is ambivalent, wounded, and moody.

I was particularly impressed by the physical expressiveness of her turn. Whereas Clooney's body language suggests an uncomfortable tension (a polite way of saying that he's just not right for the role), Woodley's captures the combination of brashness and defensiveness of her character. Part of me wants to give her this role at the hands of a better writer and director and say, "try again"; she could knock this one out of the park. But I'm slightly interested to see what she's capable of doing. As it stands, this is the kind of "nice start; come back with more later" work from an ingenue. An Oscar nomination would be too much, but there have been worse performances recognized. Like I said on Twitter, it'd be a little odd if that girl from The Secret Life of the American Teenager got a nomination instead of Vanessa Redgrave. In a movie full of characters who cast contemplative, grieving stares into the distance, though, Woodley's ring true. Maybe there's a career here.

LIZZIE OLSEN

2012-01-05T14:48:00.008-05:00

I don't know what to say. This must have been how people felt when they saw Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights or Meryl Streep in The Deer Hunter or James Dean in East of Eden. To know that you're seeing a major career forming in front of your eyes is overwhelming. I certainly didn't "get it" about Carey Mulligan (I still don't), and even if Lawrence bowled me over last year I didn't think she'd be much of a versatile actress. It's been months since I've seen this movie and I still can't get Olsen out of my head. I'm continually astounded by the imagination she brought to this role. It is a performance in which Olsen primarily reacts. She is intuitive, and her interactions with her fellow actors plumb the depths of human relationships that run the risk of seeming superficial on paper. This could've turned into a role full of ersatz emotionalism but Olsen expresses empathy for her character. It is enough to silence critics of the film who decry Durkin for not giving Martha a clear-cut "backstory". She is moody, full of spontaneity, and free of affect. Her outbursts are not method experiments, but, rather, genuine expressions of human suffering. You feel her longing to connect. Between Olsen and Jessica Chastain, I feel like American movies have finally been revitalized. Elizabeth Olsen has the kind of face that can inspire, arouse, and motivate directors. She makes me hope that this generation can produce cinema of thought and feeling.

A DANGEROUS METHOD

2011-12-21T19:08:00.001-05:00

A DANGEROUS METHOD (CRONENBERG 2011)

Disappointed. I thought this was impressively misguided. At best, it is an interesting failure, though interesting is too strong a word. It was "deep" only under the pretenses of its expository dialogue; the relationships between the three principals are absolutely devoid of the complexity this material deserves. Cronenberg wants to arouse and complicate this narrative with titillation. But all that ends up doing is cheapening the richness of this history to a spank-and-bang-me love story – dare I say Hollywood romance – where psychoanalytic theory is an afterthought (a tad similar to how Juno just happens to be pregnant). Nothing affects.

Knightley was so the wrong actress for this role. She obviously isn't proficient on a technical level (dreadful accent), but she also projects no sense of being. She is all physical mannerisms and surface-level displays of emotion. Before one chimes in that, oh, such was hysteria in the early 20th century, raw and animalistic and unexplored, a new phenomenon – fine, but we cannot simply call upon our actress to inform her characterization merely through grotesque expressionism. Knightley has no soul. Furthermore, she and Fassbender have no chemistry; Fassbender's characterization is entirely wrongheaded, so suppressed that he does not even register, and he certainly doesn't even begin to suggest the arousal and fascination Spielrein ignited within him. Taste is taste, but seeing so much of the blogosphere (and, strangely, so many critics – take a look at the IndieWire and Village Voice polls) fawning over Knightley's performance makes me question how far our definition of what constitutes skillful screen acting has regressed. I really wonder what a more soulful actress could've done with this role. All of this is just such a missed opportunity, and I feel like Cronenberg's directorial obsessions have become diluted over the past few years.

I MISS YOU, JANE

2011-11-30T19:59:00.000-05:00

Jane Fonda had raw talent. There was an earnestness that characterized her early performances, but it served her well. If she lacked technical proficiency, she more than made up for it with her presence. Her nervousness gave you a reason to root for her. She was wanting. You could tell she wasn’t quite there yet, that she hadn’t reached the state of eloquence and mastery of craft that she would later, and you wanted her to pull through. You could see an actress trying very hard, yet she was the kind of ingenue with whom you could empathize.

I think she is delicate and lovely in Barefoot in the Park. Her comic timing is off, but she fills her lines with such cadence and light humor that she affects anyway. In Roger Vadim’s films, especially La Ronde and La Curee, she is treated as mere window-dressing, yet she is capable of expressing passion. She is unexpectedly sexual and slightly dangerous. You could not predict what she would do, how she would twist a line or use her body. I love her even more in her early films. Joy House, Sunday in New York, The Chapman Report, Any Wednesday. She is so game and quite funny. It was clear that she treated acting as an art. She tries, tries, tries in her early performances. We see her trying. For this reason, we connect with her. She invests us in what she does.

She had reached a level of technical proficiency by the time of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, a performance that left me, if I'm allowed to hyperbolic, at a loss for words upon first viewing. Even though the character was frighteningly damaged, she rattled off her lines with confidence. There was an eloquence to her acting I hadn’t seen before. Her voice was changing, and she used its husky, guttural qualities to inform the character’s self-contempt and history of trauma. We could see an emotionally dilapidated soul lurking beneath upon first meeting Gloria, but Fonda carefully (though, also, seemingly, without much effort) revealed her character’s hurt as the film progressed. She had somehow managed to make her vulnerability so palpable, so affecting, even when the character seemed abrasive and defensive.

I don’t need to talk much about Klute. It is both her finest performance and, I believe, one of the finest of its medium. She calculates everything, but it flows organically from her. Though her movements, diction, and mannerisms are studied, she makes them feel natural. They are in character, and this works because the character feels full. Fonda is expunging personal demons with the performance. You can tell that she is exposing us to truths she has not come to terms with herself. Even if the performance is a showcase for her technical achievements, it is also an exploration of her obsessions. She trusts the audience, and she asks us to move forward with her. Even when the performance feels too calculated, such as in the oft-praised and improvisatory psych scenes, she projects a sense of being. The minor flaws in her performance do not matter because Fonda has internalized, and thus projected, such a complete sense of who the character is, what she feels, and what disturbs her. She is self-aware, but not offensively so. Klute was her peak.

She was there in Julia, but you could tell something was amiss. It wasn’t the same Fonda. The Fonda we knew could be forthright, daring, and vulnerable without having to think about it. Fonda’s life was so rich, complex, and contradictory in her early years that she did not need to try so hard. What she gave us in her early performances was an extension of her baggage and persona. She suddenly began to calculate her feelings; nothing seemed to emerge naturally. She developed a number of unmistakable, trademark affectations that made it difficult to see her in character. Sally Hyde was never the naive, apolitical housewife Fonda, Ashby, and the screenwriters wanted us to believe; she was Jane Fonda, deep voice and careful diction and all. She brings considerable feeling to the role, but she cannot overcome the fundamental deficiencies in her casting. This can be interesting to some – an unorthodox way of playing this sort of role. For me, it is a performance one can appreciate only upon second, third, and fourth viewings, only after one has developed a full appreciation for Fonda the artist and woman. Otherwise, she is miscast. You can tell she is actively playing against her mannerisms and the wised-up type she has excelled at, and you can see the effort, yet there is an element of self-congratulation in what she does. We no longer root for her. We merely see Jane Fonda, the proud actress who has achieved mainstream satisfaction, the one who has already won an Academy Award and expects to win her second. And we see her trying. She thinks she is there, but she isn’t; she is damagingly self-aware. She uses the character to further her political agenda (a political agenda I quite admire, mind you), yet she invests it with little feeling, passion, or conviction. Her expression of political awakening is half-hearted. She is so nuanced that she barely registers.

She is quite fine in The China Syndrome, yet that performance is more the type we expect to see from Meryl Streep today – a technically accomplished, highly acclaimed turn that is more dependable or serviceable than anything. It is of rote and nothing of major consequence: minor Fonda.

The nadir of her career is, of course, the distressing On Golden Pond, an embarrassment for just about everyone involved. (At least Henry is not terrible in it.) Fonda does not ground her character. She overflows and overemotes. This performance is also, as she and many others have reminded us time and time again, a personal exorcism for Fonda with regards to her father. Yet she overburdens the simplistic source material. It cannot carry the weight of this lifelong struggle she has weathered with her father. The film borders on the unwatchable, and it is largely because of her unmodulated work.

I know I have praised her performance in The Morning After on parts of this blog before, but, truth be told, I now find her too earnest in that role. She relies on affectations that seem out of character. She has too much self-awareness. Nothing flows from her. Everything is contained and deliberate.

Fonda’s career is interesting to study, and, for this reason, she is one of the most endlessly fascinating figures of her era. The seamless, yet also contradictory, convergence of politics, public persona, and a highly personal sense of vulnerability has made her my chief inspiration over the years. I love her because I connect with her, even when she condescends to her roles or tries in earnest.

But, objectively I have always hesitated before putting her on the same level as Redgrave, Stanwyck, or Magnani. These actresses, even when wrong for a role, are consistently fascinating and skilled. They possess an authority that intrigues. Redgrave has a similar political history to Fonda, yet I am simply in awe of her each time I see her. She has such a dazzling, wondrous quality. I do not see the Redgrave of the Workers Revolutionary Party, the Redgrave who protests on Trafalgar Square, or the Redgrave who supports PLO when I watch Julia. Such readings could enrich her performances, but I simply find myself trying to sift through her puzzling, quixotic qualities whenever she appears on screen. Fonda is fascinating when she is miscast for other reasons, ones that have more to do with her well-established public persona than for the complexity and breadth of her screen presence. Watch Fonda doing a backflip for her dad and, well, you might understand why I have some problems.

SHELLEY LONG IS THE BEE'S KNEES

2011-09-19T13:07:00.006-04:00

Shelley Long's been on my mind these days. A little channel around these parts called ReelzChannel has been syndicating Cheers lately. Historically, Cheers was a show I hadn't seen but didn't imagine I'd much care for, and this had much to do with my (grossly misinformed) preconceived notions of it. I thought it was one of those tired sitcoms with the stock humor American television has in spades today. But I happened to catch an episode of it just weeks ago, and I was stunned. I understood the hoopla. It's a brilliant show. I find it a humanist, profoundly sensitive piece of work. The first episode I saw, actually, was from the show's Kirstie Alley days. I was totally taken with her. Mind you, my view of Ms. Alley had been limited to her Jenny Craig commercials and ads for Fat Actress I caught in middle school, but I felt, watching that episode, as if I'd discovered in her a totally captivating, striking screen presence. She reminded me of Kathleen Turner, only one who was slightly less put-on – her voice, her hair, her eyes. I want her to read the phone book to me. It'd be fascinating. She's ravishing in a non-lewd way, in the vein of those careerist types Hepburn and Russell played in the forties. The kind of woman who wishes she was turned on more by work than sex, and one who wears that bearing, but is really vulnerable to the bone.

A few days later, though, I caught episodes of the Shelley Long seasons. Kirstie Alley may have gotten me hooked on the show, but she isn't Shelley Long. I'd never before heard of this actress (or, rather, I had only heard of her in passing), and I regret that. That shows that she hasn't had the career she, and her talents, probably deserved; my generation hasn't been properly exposed to her, save Modern Family (which I don't watch). And it's a shame. I hate superlatives like this, but I firmly believe that Diane Chambers is one of the finest pieces of acting committed to television.

Only after seeing the first five seasons do I realize how much Cheers regressed in quality. Rebecca Howe was an interesting creation but the writers didn't know what to do with her. She just sort of drifted in and out of each episode, and the interactions between her and the rest of the cast were limited and, quite frankly, not very interesting. Alley projected a sense of self-loathing and wounded pride that was in service of a character who was progressively becoming more and more of a non-entity. The dynamics between Rebecca and the rest of the group weren't well-defined. Kirstie Alley certainly had talent and presence but she didn't have what Shelley Long had. What made Cheers just a little more special than the other sitcoms of its era, I think, was the careful, witty banter between Sam and Diane. (I heard that Lisa Eichhorn, an actress I like, was almost cast as Diane until the casting directors realized how wonderful the chemistry between Danson and Long was.) On a show whose basic asset was, in its glory days, its ability to carefully sketch out complex, nuanced human connections, I'm afraid that Cheers ultimately began to wane on that level.

But the first five seasons are golden. The way the show is written, the way it's directed, especially the way it's acted – it is all so sensitive. The camera seems to probe into every character. It's interested in each one of them. Flaws become virtues. The director is compassionately invested in everyone's reactions, and the actors deliver. Another sitcom would've limited these people to individual quirks and idiosyncrasies, but Cheers goes a step further. Each character has so many shortcomings, but these shortcomings are painfully human. They possess hateful qualities – Carla's dismissiveness towards Diane, Sam's misogyny, Frasier's neuroses – but I never dislike any one of them. They're such sympathetic, complex creatures, and they're treated with warmth and respect. Just think of the unabashed schmaltz-fest "I Do, Adieu" could've become had it not been pulled off with such honesty by that cast.

And I feel that Shelley Long was the one whose presence illuminates the flaws, hopes, and desires of these other characters. Shelley Long had charisma. Look, for example, at the way she raises and lowers her voice with each sentence, or how her lower lip quivers – she somehow reveals the profound insecurities and false self-estimations of her character. And through subtle, telling glances, she projects a basic sincerity that makes her character's vulnerability tremendously affecting. It helps, of course, that her comic timing is genius. Her intelligence is luminous. Diane Chambers is a character of excess. She's kind of full of shit and she knows it. I don't doubt that she has a genuine love and passion for the arts, literature, philosophy, what have you, but you know that she uses it all as a crutch. No matter what her hoity-toity pretensions and literati leanings may suggest, she was just going to end up as unhappy and lonely as everyone else.

This is what I love about the show – the very subtle, and astonishingly unsentimental sense of sadness that runs through each episode. It's pretty much an accepted axiom that life doesn't turn out the way anyone wants to in that world (much like real life, of course). Nothing works out for anyone. And the characters have all seemed to tacitly, quietly accept that. I'm glad that the writers didn't betray the show's basic thesis with that finale. Diane and Sam weren't supposed to end up together; it shouldn't have been that easy.

Bottom line is, I have a huge crush on Shelley Long. I'm not hetero but I do. She brought controlled emotionalism and boundless charisma to a show, and a cast, that worked well with an anchor. Cheers was a pretty damn good show without her but it was astonishingly harmonious when she was around. Some see her as obnoxious and maddeningly neurotic and I don't get it. Just looking at her, I think Woody Allen could've done wonders with her neurotic urban persona. Everyone gives Shelley flack for leaving Cheers but I don't really care. Her subsequent mild success in films just shows that the show's thesis had firm roots in reality – shit falls into place for some of us; most of us aren't that lucky. I just watch this show and think that this woman didn't get the roles she deserved in cinema. Though I wasn't alive in the eighties, I'm guessing that she brought a lot of people joy when they watched that show. Diane Chambers was a beautiful, enchanting creation – passionate, graceful, sensuous, caring, a little dangerous, and sad as hell. I am discovering this character for the first time and I am captivated.

UPDATE

2011-08-11T09:50:00.000-04:00

Wow, sorry all – I've kind of fallen off track with my blogging. I apologize. A very small part of this is because I have unresolved feelings about Susan Tyrrell in Fat City, haha, but the primary reason is because I've been busy working away at my internship for the past few months!

For the summer, I've been writing for Artlog.com, an arts magazine based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It's been pretty awesome thus far, because the internship basically involves me going to different galleries and openings around New York City, interviewing artists about their newest work, and, then, writing features on them. I've talked to a bunch of amazing, talented people with rich histories and lives and career trajectories, some of them legends even (Dara Birnbaum was a highlight). Let's just say that I hope to ingratiate myself with the city's art world for a long time. I've also written features on a bunch of film screenings going on around in the city, especially those that aren't talked about too much – Sidney Lumet's The Sea Gull (1968) was screened recently as part of a Lumet retrospective recently, for example, and I was able to write about it (and Vanessa Redgrave's beautiful, nuanced performance), I've also written on Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953), the list goes on. Anyway, you can keep up with my posts for Artlog right here.

I plan to begin blogging again very soon. I have no desire to discontinue this blog, trust me – the whole "pick a year, review every performance" thing is indeed rather tiring sometimes, particularly when it's difficult to work up any enthusiasm about a certain performance (and the enthusiasm needed to write about it), and so you may just be seeing a few random posts from me about a performer, a film, whatever's been on my mind or captured my imagination. After I finish 1972 up I may move over to Best Supporting Actress 1991 because I love Kate Nelligan and Jessica Tandy, but we'll figure it out when the time comes.

For those of you still here and still reading after so long – I imagine many of you have dropped off, no worries, I would've given up on me a long time ago – thanks.

Mayukh

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS 1972: JEANNIE BERLIN IN THE HEARTBREAK KID

2011-06-17T18:57:00.001-04:00

The Heartbreak Kid should've been a cultural phenomenon. Opening five years after The Graduate, it had all the makings of a classic. To my mind, it is a classic, though most people don't even know about it, or Elaine May's talents as a filmmaker, these days. It's a perfect film. I can't say anything bad about it. It's a masterpiece in satire and emotion, effectively picking up on a certain zeitgeist while also commenting on it with a sense of spontaneity, mercilessness, quickness that The Graduate, a masterpiece in its own right, couldn't capture.   (May and Nichols were, after all, a comedy team, and it's interesting to compare how their careers seemed to end up in two different places.) May's cast is phenomenal. Charles Grodin brilliantly humanizes a slightly despicable human being, coming off as less of a scumbag and more of a seventies-child-in-crisis. The angelic Cybill Shepherd – I wish this wonderful actress had an Oscar nomination to her name, but alas – is perfect as Grodin's WASP of a fever dream, always keeping her feelings toward Grodin ambivalent – is she attracted or simply bemused? Eddie Albert, Oscar-nominated for his role as the obsessive and oppressive father of Shepherd, is devastating – charming, funny, stone-cold. Anyone who can make Neil Simon sound tolerable must be a magician – May seems to unearth some sad, sardonic bite beneath Simon's one-liners, saving the film from descending into the claptrap seriocomedy something like, say, The Goodbye Girl was.

At the crux of May's perfect film, though, is her daughter. It's a shame Jeannie Berlin didn't become a bigger star. I haven't seen Sheila Devine is Dead and Living in New York, which was apparently something of a minor catastrophe, but she's just phenomenal here. A filmmaker like Paul Mazursky, I think, really could've shaped her talent into something special, particularly because he, too, is one of those directors who prided himself upon ethnocomedies. It's everything you'd want from a perfect supporting performance – hell, it's everything you'd want from a perfect comedy performance, equal parts hilarious, tragic, and satirical. Her mere presence in the film is therapeutic. Berlin plays Lila, Charles Grodin's trainwreck of a first wife. Lila's a bit like Fran Fine – loud, whiny, lumpy, and certainly bordering on, if not surpassing, the grotesque. She chews with her mouth open. In bed, she gnaws on chocolate bars. Egg salad gets stuck on her chin during lunch. Grodin's realization that this Yiddische-mama-to-be isn't really the love of his life drives him away from her, culminating in a hilariously tragic divorce scene.

Here, in this scene in particular, Berlin is so dynamic, so spontaneous that she becomes a comic spectacle. She seems to have a kind of comic intelligence that she translates into spontaneity. Compare this, for example, to Goldie Hawn – one of the finest American comediennes, in my eyes, but one who nevertheless calibrates her performances a bit too perfectly, too neatly. Before Grodin breaks the news to her (that is, the news that he'd like to break up with her), the two characters have a hilarious row about ordering pecan pie, during which Berlin's nervous gestures beautifully communicate her character's impulsiveness and neurosis. What follows, though, is at once both heartbreaking and hilarious – her character's slow, steady progression from obliviousness to her keen awareness at her husband's sleazy proceedings is magnificent.

I've heard the role of Lila described as an actor-hostile role (compare this, say, to Susan Tyrrell's enormously actor-friendly role). The magic of May's film is that she allows us to understand, though not necessarily like, characters who ought to be repulsive. She presents them with a kind of sincerity that few directors have been able to find in Neil Simon pictures. May directs and frames her actors in such a way that they're never aggressively annoying; Berlin, miraculously, seems to have inherited her mother's talent for balancing pathos with the excessive. Her character – aloof, frustratingly unaware of her surroundings, yet subtly perceptive – forms the film's emotional backbone. Only after the Grodin character, clearly unhappy, marries Shepherd do we understand what a huge mistake he made in divorcing Lila in the first place. Berlin's presence hovers over the remaining hour of the film – she disappears after the first half – as both a constant reminder of Grodin's moral backwardness and as a prophecy of what may even befall him. I can't help but think, perhaps even fear, that Grodin will suffer Lila's same fate at the hands of Shepherd. Shepherd fetishizes Grodin as much as he does her, yet, even by the end, it isn't quite clear whether she's still puppeteering him or if she's developed any true, palpable romantic feelings for him.

The Heartbreak Kid is as much a tragedy as it is a comedy. Berlin never shies away from commenting upon the archetype she's playing, refusing to downplay how inherently annoying or pathetic Lila is. Yet in doing so, she manages to find a sense of humanity in this, on the page, obnoxious soul – one who's more than a little lonely, sad, broken. What's perhaps most brilliant about Berlin's performance is that she works beyond this, subtly hinting at Lila's self-growth. Her increasing sense of self-awareness, disillusionment with her Jewish fantasy of a husband, and, ultimately, her intelligence usurp Lila's measured self-loathing, her indulgent neediness, her cluelessness. Her speaking voice, by turns a little vulgar and whispery, is so evocative – cloying but also palpably tragic, as if she's constantly on the verge of tears. Berlin's nuanced, unaffected work here is a masterpiece of social commentary, emotion, and comedy I hope I'll never forget.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS 1972: SHELLEY WINTERS IN THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE

2011-06-14T13:01:00.001-04:00

Famously gaining thirty pounds for her unbelievably ludicrous role, Shelley Winters is a hoot in Ronald Neame’s The Poseidon Adventure. Winters, in the later stages of her career, developed into a very interesting character actress – though two Oscars is, admittedly, a bit too many even for her, she was alluringly grotesque in some of her better performances. This is a quality she miraculously possesses in The Poseidon Adventure, one of those tiresome disaster flicks of the same ilk as Airport and Earthquake. The film is absurd, the epitome of stunt Hollywood filmmaking. Yet it is, somehow, totally winning; it depends upon stars like Gene Hackman who must believably play such characters as a rebellious preacher. The whole affair feels so parodic, so farcical, but the actors proceed through the framework with a tired earnestness that never rises above the shoddy source material.

Winters’ role smells a lot like bait. As Belle Rosen, the Olympic swimmer-turned-overweight-Yiddische-mama, she reeks of easy pathos. How tragic – she and her husband were on their way to Israel to meet their young grandson. She is the fat lady exalted to martyrdom, swimming to her death in order to save the others trapped in the ship. Winters navigates these trappings with incredible, unforgiving charisma – as Damien Bona noted, it’s impossible to take your eyes off her whenever she’s on screen. She has considerably more verve than most of the castmembers, magnetic in a way that so many of the actors surrounding her are not. Winters is so entrancing that she somehow makes us believe in, or at least feel for, her character’s absurdist tragedy.

This is not a subtle characterization. The nomination itself – what, for such a clearly Hollywood film and a bout of heroic stunt casting – is silly. It is the kind of facile “acting” that Oscar votes usually fall for – look, the woman from A Place in the Sun gained so much weight for just one role! But it is not without its considerable merits, for Winters beautifully does what a true supporting player should do in an otherwise dreary film. She injects life into it, charming, defensive, vulnerable, and sympathetic in the same moment. Winters is clearly very committed to her character. She constantly seems so organic, so full of life, that she rises above the level of mere competence. Given the tire of her material, that is a considerable feat. But the notion of considering this film, or anything associated with it, worthy of awards doesn't quite sit well with me.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS 1972: EILEEN HECKART IN BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE

2011-06-13T18:44:00.001-04:00

Conceived in the time of flower-child politics, Butterflies are Free feels like nothing more than a very un-cinematic filmic play. The characters assail us with lines so contrived, so forced, that we can almost picture ourselves reading them off the page. Katselas’ film itself, set in the Shangri-La of San Francisco, feels like nothing more than an artificial preach play. The handicapped young man, “blind” in that he sees past silly confines of class and race, longs for the freedom that his pain, stick-up-the-ass mother cannot grant him. Helping him along the way is Jill Tanner, the spritely hippie next door. A carefree little bubble of energy, Jill eases Don’s transition from dependence to autonomy, of course falling for him along the way. The whole film feels like a play – the actors, the camera move around the space as if stuck inside a Playhouse 90 setpiece. As usual, Goldie Hawn, playing the role that won Blythe Danner a Tony (if only, if only I could've seen her in that role), is spectacular, full of charismatic, nuanced spontaneity. Even when she rattles off lines that were clearly meant for the stage and for the stage only, she is fresh and colorful. This marked the point in her career during which she seemed to still be “finding” herself as a screen actress – she had talent, so much talent, but it seemed unformed. Edward Albert, in the lead role, is at once both appropriately detached and expressive, at times a bit bland but still an entirely capable leading man.

Eileen Heckart plays the kind of role Jack Lemmon played in Missing – the protagonist’s smarmy, old-timer of a parent who just doesn’t understand what those crazy old kids are up to these days. Her trajectory is the most obvious of the three characters. She goes from uptight, rigid mother deluded by her love to the one who gradually learns to let her son enjoy his independence. Pragmatic, no-nonsense, and, well, very “American” in the way she thinks, Mrs. Baker is an archetype of the highest order, just waiting for her conservatism to come undone. Showing up an hour into the film, Heckart infuses the film with a palpable stoicism that contrasts well with Hawn’s sunny, jolly expressivity. She is, after all, the foil to Hawn’s character. Her hard-edged, bitter voice has a sense of melancholy, of world-weariness. Mrs. Baker has seen it all. Jill Tanner believes herself capable of anything; she is unexplored. The two actresses play off each other nicely, particularly because Heckart does exactly what a supporting actress should do – she breathes some new life into the film.

Beyond the refreshing power of her presence, though, Heckart miscalculates her performance horribly. The ideological change forced upon her character, as she must become effectively “radicalized” (or, at the very least, “sobered” to the new youth of the seventies), is too pronounced to be believable. Like Page, Heckart is too methodical in her approach to the role. She is too self-aware a stage actress to pull this kind of change off with subtlety. We understand that she has played this character countless times before, on stage, and Heckart goes through the proceedings with rote-like precision. Something about seeing Heckart dejected at the end of the film, now understanding that she is no longer needed, rings terribly hollow. I find this whole affair to be somewhat didactic, and Heckart’s performance, so perfectly-calibrated that it ends up being detrimental to the film, highlights the tedium of the material.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS 1972: GERALDINE PAGE IN PETE 'N' TILLIE

2011-06-13T14:12:00.001-04:00

Geraldine Page is anathema to celluloid. She is mannered, fussy, and slightly schizophrenic. The Academy decided to saddle her with eight nominations – who knows why – and a few rank among some of the most ludicrous the supporting category has ever seen. Her nomination for Pete ‘N’ Tillie, an otherwise affecting film, is absurd. I prefer Geraldine Page in her leading roles (she was fantastic in Sweet Bird of Youth, and I imagine I would've adored her on stage) simply because her self-conscious tics seem so wrong for supporting roles in film acting – she does not know the definition of the word “support”. She seems insistent on acting showily, so much that she forgets what it truly means to support, which is, in such small cases as these, to infuse it with a sort of ephemera.

Here, the “Greatest Actress in the English Language” (goodness, F. Murray Abraham), plays Gertrude, an obnoxious, aging, hippy-dippy socialite who fancies herself ageless. During one of her house parties, she introduces Tillie, the lovely Carol Burnett, to Walter Matthau’s sleazy curmudgeon, Pete. The film’s narrative is concerned with a rather dire topic – loss of a child, to leukemia nonetheless – and the inability of the titular couple to cope with this reality. Martin Ritt, an affecting actor’s director but also a very subtle visualist, struggles to find the right tone for the film. It falls somewhere in between understated drama and high comedy, the latter, of course, being what Geraldine Page fulfills rather tiredly. Gertrude represents that antiquated, delusional angle of decadence entirely out of step with reality. Cozily couched in her little bougie fantasy, she harbors an outlook on life that does not have to deal with such horrors as those Tillie has to endure.

Before she became as baity and obnoxious as she was in The Trip to Bountiful, Page didn’t seem to understand the concept of pathos. Everything she does is out of step with the film. She constantly strains for comic effect, not once infusing this rather insufferable character with any sympathy. There is an aggressively unfunny scene in which she, upon being asked to disclose her age, faints. She handles this scene all wrong, for Page – in all her mannered, overdrawn, garish glory – has no spontaneity. Following this scene is a terrible catfight between Gertrude and Tillie, as farcical and phony as The Turning Point’s infamously campy scene. Yet Page’s performance does not even work on the level of camp. I can understand her performance being so uncompromisingly decadent that she somehow nails the vapid, moral degeneration of the aristocratic type she plays. But I can’t help but imagine other actresses doing this with more liveliness, spunk, and naturalism than Page.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS 1972

2011-06-11T14:06:00.000-04:00

Susan Tyrrell, Fat City

Shelley Winters, The Poseidon Adventure

Jeannie Berlin, The Heartbreak Kid

Geraldine Page, Pete 'N' Tillie

Eileen Heckart, Butterflies are Free

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION/FIRST LOVE/THE GREAT SANTINI

2011-06-11T13:35:00.000-04:00

I've been fortunate enough to see a bunch of very interesting films over the course of the past few months, many of them little-seen and even a bit obscure, so I just wanted to share some of my thoughts on some of these films. In between my bouts of actressing, I'm going to briefly cover/review a few movies that have made an impression on me (good, bad, or otherwise):

Prima della rivoluzione (Bertolucci, 1964)

I am fascinated by Bernardo Bertolucci for many reasons – too many reasons, really (I’m obsessed). But what fascinates me most about him, I think, is his camera – mobile, fluid, and poetic. He has a way of mirroring the interiority of his complex, confused protagonists through sweeping, agile long takes that survey interiors; rapid jump cuts that create a sense of anxiety; extreme close-ups that reveal more about a character’s inner feelings than any dialogue could ever express. Though he would, I feel, perfect this practice six years later with Il Conformista, undoubtedly his masterwork, Prima della rivioluzione, or Before the Revolution, has a feeling of cinematic rawness, of something undiscovered that works entirely for the film’s protagonist. A confused, even tortured young man, Francesco Barilli's Fabrizio is a creature of paradox, Marxist on the surface but aggressively bourgeoisie at heart, having no political gall of his own. For him, as one character in the film puts it, ideology was “just a vacation”; the character’s own Marxist leanings were simply a fever dream he entertained. Another product of this desire to break from bourgeois confines comes with a non-normative, incestuous affair with his aunt, played with an Antonioni-esque neurosis by Adriana Asti. She's simply brilliant in this film, effectively telegraphing the confusion, the passion, and ultimate turn toward devilish control her character undergoes. Bertolucci’s film feels like a balletic, semi-autobiographical opera – beautiful, lush, but also tense and uneasy, suggesting a sense of impending chaos.

Erste Liebe (Schell, 1970)

Though I saw this German-language Swedish film, nominated for the 1970 Best Foreign Film Oscar, in its English dubbed version, I still can’t imagine having liked it much more in its original language. I was primarily intrigued by Schell’s directorial efforts – he seems to have directed quite a few interesting films, most notably 1984‘s Marlene, and I assumed that the Academy, whose foreign-language branch seemed to have some sense in those days (The Battle of Algiers, Tristana, Turkish Delight), nominated his film based on quality rather than Schell’s celebrity status. Schell’s film is one of those endless, banal exercises in style, like Lelouch’s vapid but much-loved A Man and a Woman (don’t even get me started on that little pissbomb of a film), that the Americans just fall for immediately because it reeks of a false European “sophistication”. They mistake the lyrical, fluid camera for philosophical and emotional depth, a trap that is especially evident here. Based on one of Ivan Turgenev's short stories, the film doesn’t even sort of seem as if it is set in Russia – Schell’s pastoral utopia does not even seem to remotely resemble the time, the place, or the politics of the Tsarist period (I wasn’t alive at that time, of course, but once one sees the flower-child visuals this film reeks with, I think he or she will agree). Dominique Sanda was once, I imagine, one of most beautiful women in the world. Her beauty here is distracting – she is too beautiful, especially under Schell’s gauze, and one has to wonder what she is doing even thinking about this young pubescent-looking boy. She is usually fantastic at communicating sexual tension – those lips! – but, here, she is . The film’s cinematography is its at once Schell’s best friend and worst enemy. His film is beautiful to look at, but the film is too lyrical, too contrived in its “poetics” to even register as anything more than a headache.

The Great Santini (Carlino, 1979)

The Great Santini is not a great film, though it certainly could’ve been – regardless, it’s one of the best I’ve seen in quite a while. I can’t help but comparing this beautifully-handled, subtle work to what is essentially another domestic drama, Ordinary People, that sentimental hack of a film whose Timothy Hutton undeservedly beat out Michael O’Keefe for in that year’s Best Supporting Actor race. The central performances are astonishing. Duvall has never been better – though he unnecessarily sounds too much like, as Stanley Kauffmann noted, a city tough instead of a suburban army lieutenant, he gets everything else right. His loud, caricaturish approach to the role works in the same brilliant way Shirley MacLaine’s performance in Terms of Endearment would – he manages to find a sense of humanity behind this volume, suggesting a lifetime of regret, personal failure, and even a crisis of masculinity. Michael O’Keefe is simply sensational – I’m not sure why he didn’t become a bigger star. His approach to the role is, I think, diametrically opposed to Duvall’s stylism – O’Keeffe’s performance is an exercise in subtlety. He effectively communicates his own character’s frustrations in a totally accessible, but still complex, manner. Compare his work to Timothy Hutton’s embarrassing over-emoting – there’s no comparison. Towering above all, however, is the exquisite, lush Blythe Danner, who can express more in a matter of seconds than most actresses can in a whole film. She is brilliant here, conveying how this woman has weathered years of suffering, terror, and personal sacrifice and learned to hide this under the veneer of warmth, kindness, piety. Though Danner is – or, at least, was for a time – known as one of the great American ladies of the stage, she should’ve been a star on film, too, and seeing this film merely pains me that Hollywood hasn’t given her her share. Her lissome, nymphlike beauty; her soft, aching voice; and her searching, empty eyes have stayed with me long after the film ended.

BEST ACTRESS 1982: THE RESOLUTION (FINALLY)

2011-06-11T13:24:00.005-04:00

I don't even know why this took so long – sorry about that! I'm going to move onto another year right after this.

5. Julie Andrews, Victor Victoria

As usual, Julie Andrews gives a heartwarmingly bland performance – full of air, lightness, and such obviously constructed wit that, quite frankly, isn't the least bit funny. Her dignified, grande-dame persona is completely out-of-touch with those loony performers around her. Though this clearly could've worked to Andrews' advantage – making her that sort of cool, calm, placid being of calm in the eye of the storm – she barely registers. Her theatrics and seeming perfect comic timing are uninspired, flavorless; she is, as Pauline Kael (with whom I don't always agree) so beautifully put it, "infuriatingly sane".

4. Meryl Streep, Sophie's Choice

I don't think I can begin to describe how much I want to like this performance. Meryl Streep is one of our greatest artists – so intelligent, so entrancingly beautiful – but I find her work here, quite frankly, so self-aware that it borders on the offensive. It is more suited for theater than for the cinematic framework it should fit into, and, as a result, these grand, overdrawn tendencies result in a performance that is all wrong for celluloid. Streep is simply too obviously, mechanically intellectualized for this kind of role that calls for high emotionalism, letting this very tortured, complex woman's life reveal itself in a way that is so methodical, so rote-like and planned out, that it simply becomes an embarrassing celluloid rehash of William Styron's beautifully nuanced, complex characterization. I certainly don't recoil when I detect coldness in art – quite the opposite, actually – but Streep's work here is so icy, so devoid of anything remotely resembling human feeling, that it is grotesque in a lurid, exploitative way.

3. Jessica Lange, Frances

Jessica Lange gives herself to this role with such an all-out, ultimately winning physicality – she plays the character with an intriguing ambiguity that never asks for sympathy even when we do, in the end, sympathize with her. Her performance is an exercise in tragedy precisely because Frances seems to ride that blurred, gauzy line between sanity and madness, intelligence and naivete, allowing Lange performance to function as that comment on Hollywood's sexual politics I imagine the film desperately wants to make.

2. Sissy Spacek, Missing

Here, Spacek plays an extension of the persona that has defined her career – that of the all-American misfit, this time in the form of a staunchly liberal, slightly inarticulate hippy child-woman – and she does it brilliantly. Spacek's face, with its wear and evidence of tire, shows the character's own self-awareness that she occupies a time (a post Reagan-era framework, that is) that she, particularly in her mode of political thought, doesn't necessarily belong to. She is like that radical leftist waiting to be awaken within all of us – feeling herself capable of anything, able to see herself as part of a grander social fabric that extends beyond the confines of America's individualistic, capitalist ideologies. You truly get the sense that this woman was once young, idealistic, politically impressionable. But time has softened her. Her face has a sense of failure, dejection. Spacek palpably telegraphs her character's gradual, growing sense of disillusionment, and it results in a performance that is, I think, masterclass in subtlety.

1. Debra Winger, An Officer and a Gentleman

I'm alone in thinking this, I know, but Debra Winger's downtrodden, hardened paper mill worker is one of the most subtle, affecting characterizations in 80s American cinema. Her combination of cynicism and hope reminds me of Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria – hardened, embittered, but also more than a little optimistic. Like Spacek, she has this ability to suggest at this woman's more complex and somewhat tortured inner life, and this mere suggestion within the span of, say, thirty minutes trumps anything Streep is able to do in her two hours. It's a performance I will never forget.

OMISSIONS
PERSONAL BALLOT:
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Debra Winger, An Officer and a Gentleman

Nathalie Baye, The Return of Martin Guerre

Diane Keaton, Shoot the Moon

Rosel Zech, Veronika Voss

BEST ACTRESS 1982: JESSICA LANGE IN FRANCES

2011-03-26T03:07:00.001-04:00

In Frances, Jessica Lange is a bit like Werner Herzog – wildly spontaneous, unpredictable, off-kilter, bordering on the perverse. She is filled with the kind of energy that is desperately, crudely in search of form. Lange gives herself to the role of the impetuous, stubbornly dignified Frances Farmer – the actress whose rather tragic private life seamlessly blended into her splintered public persona – with such an all-out physicality that her performance is a monument. In this case, that's a rather good thing. With her impishly lewd smile and delicate, airy voice, Lange is capable of seeming weightless at one moment, devilishly forceful the next. We are terrified by her; we are excited by her. We don't know what she'll do next. Was this what attracted people to Frances Farmer herself – this dizzying, unpredictably brash quality that signaled her presence, that drew people to her even if it should have repelled them? I doubt we'll ever know. Chances are that Farmer was, most likely, not t he highly dramatized tornado-giantess of a woman Lange interprets her as. Indeed, Lange does not so much play Farmer as she comments upon her with a grand sense of emotional battery – evoking her memory, her tragedy, her haunt through that ghost-like, death-whisper of a voice; that all-too characteristic head tilt; that wailing, banshee-esque listlessness that has now become a trademark of the actress.

I view Frances as a grand, dexterously ambiguous elegy for one of Hollywood's eternal losers. Perhaps I'll never understand the vitriol thrown at it so readily – director Clifford, whose editing work for Nicolas Roeg I have found brilliant, precisely evokes what is so difficult to pinpoint, even now, about the figure. Should we love Frances? To what extent is she a put-upon martyr, or is she really one at all? Can we blame her for the fate that has befallen her? That Clifford does not seem to take some sort of concrete stance on such a view of his subject is, to me, a dangerously bold filmmaking decision, for it is so easy to engage in harmless, didactic biopic portraiture in which our subject is deified to the point of oblivion.

Clifford's film is ripe with morally contrarian views of its subject, and in Jessica Lange – what, with her slightly detached, not-always-quite-there sort of charisma – he has found the perfect idealization of this vision. In the span of one moment, her head tilts one way, her body another. She grins gently; seconds later, a forceful, domineering roar erupts from her mouth. Lange refuses to let us be charmed or disgusted by her spritely, pixie-esque victim. She lures us in with the sheer power of her gaze – which, more than often, seems to evoke a sense of innocence, of guilt – and then deconstructs the general harmlessness we've coated her with, manipulating our trust, giving us reason to hate her. Yet she never loses us. I don't know how she does it. Lange's presence has such sympathetic force that I just can't take my eyes off her, even when her character annoys the hell out of me. Ricocheting between different moods almost constantly, Lange astonishingly seems to keep a palpable sense of something that resembles a soul underneath that mercurial exterior – and she, too, telegraphs the tragedy of this soul's slow, methodical, gradual disappearance.

Lange's highly visceral, stylized approach to acting seems grounded, I think, in deep emotionalism – a point many disagree with, regarding her performance as hamola of the highest order. Yes – truth be told, Frances' passionate, heavily politicized candor often externalizes itself in the form of loud, uncontrollable fits of rage, shouting, anger. This is, indeed, a case of actressing. But why shouldn't it be? Jessica Lange's work in Frances is far from camp – though I will admit that I thoroughly take pleasure in watching her performance, it is simply because I find her one of the more interesting artists of her generation, working from what always seems like instinct to create women who are a little surprising, not always believable, but still wholly fascinating. Lange is playing an actress, after all, and though I don't forgive obvious overacting by commenting that "she's playing an actress, so it's justified", Lange's performance does, to an extent, function as a critique of the rather sordid historical position of the female actor in Hollywood. Her performance is meant to shock us into sanity, consciousness. It has a deep, almost buoyant sense of emotional anchoring – equal parts disturbing, moving; grand, finely-tuned; impulsive, meticulous.

BEST ACTRESS 1982: DEBRA WINGER IN AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN

2011-03-20T03:17:00.000-04:00

Debra Winger’s eyes contain such a beautifully pained, sad lifetime in Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) that she transcends the otherwise hackneyed, misogynistic film she inhabits. The actress’ downtrodden, sub-proletariat paper mill worker is perhaps her greatest creation in a depressingly small oeuvre – full of aching, brutal pathos and stark realism. It reminds me of some of the greatest performances from the British Kitchen Sink films of Richardson and Reisz, for she communicates such a palpable, fully-realized malaise with the banalities of her character’s working class trappings. She is terrified that her life will amount to a nondescript mediocrity. Paula is not just a woman who wants love. She is something of a retrograde character, for she desires to escape the unending, cyclical fate of doom she feels herself destined to, and she views social mobility as the only way out of this.

As she exhibited with her cameo in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (2008), Winger’s naturalistic, plucky screen presence seems enough to breathe life into any dreary film. Her emotionally forthright, direct approach to screen acting seems entirely unstudied. Of course this is true of her here – we can only take so much of Richard Gere’s strained, tense approach to what should probably be a complex character before Winger appears. She provides the emotional gravitas of this film. Her initially tough, no-nonsense exterior gradually wears away to reveal a deep, longstanding insecurity she holds about her own future. Winger’s performance is one that is full of contradictions, and, miraculously, they all seem to fall into place perfectly. Her Paula is by turns insolent and emotionally delicate, naive and beguiling, idealistic and invariably level-headed.

Winger’s role is of course hilariously underwritten (underlining the militaristic and chauvinist leanings of Hackford’s film, for she is relegated to the love interest) but never once does she strike me as limited by the confines her script provides her. Her prickly, spirited screen persona allows her to establish such a forceful sense of rapport with the audience, so much that she becomes perhaps the only reason to watch the film. Though practically every scene in Winger’s performance is marvelously fleshed out, there is one in particular, near the end of the movie, that strikes me as a brilliant piece of film acting. As Zack sits inside a bar, Dire Straits’ “Tunnel of Love” humming away on a jukebox in the background, he notices Paula with another man – the quiet, almost neurotic sense of self-awareness Winger conveys in this scene, underlining both her desire to make Zack jealous and her palpable sense of longing for him, is one of the most perfect displays of human emotion I’ve ever seen on film. That Paula is so desperate for Zack’s love is grounded in the fact that she knows she is “right” for him – she is a character who possesses such agency, for it is she who is ultimately rescuing him from the annals of his emotional frigidity. So many notions about this film strike me as absurd and disagreeable – Paula sees a man as her ticket to changing herself – but Winger presents these in a way that seems so genuine, so sincere, that it is tremendously moving. It's a great performance.

BEST ACTRESS 1982: JULIE ANDREWS IN VICTOR VICTORIA

2011-03-20T02:19:00.001-04:00

To refer to Julie Andrews as some sort of axiom of cinema seems a gross overstatement, for she typifies everything I find so wrong, so conventional about American filmmaking. Is there anything more harmless than her overly genteel, nun-full-of-pleasantries Maria von Trapp? The general infatuation with her work, along with that of many American musicals, seems grounded in the luridly campy pleasure she brings to an audience who seeks joy through instant, sensory gratification. This isn’t to say, though, that I don’t enjoy musicals – I just prefer them to be a bit probing, perhaps even as politically incisive as Fosse’s masterpiece Cabaret (1972), rather than providing a quaintly escapist, unchallenging revision of the world we live in. Though I can’t say I have much affection for her, Andrews is a performer I admire. She surely possesses an undeniable onscreen charisma that is enough to ignite the even the coldest of viewerships. This generally agreeable, gracious screen presence is, like Edith Wharton’s May Welland, tempered by a palpable undercurrent of cold, unforgiving steeliness. What made her Mary Poppins so fascinating was the reality that she was, in fact, much more of a harridan than she initially let on.

What you think of Victor Victoria (1982) may have less to do with Blake Edwards’ filmmaking – which I find technically polished but a bit soulless when it comes to presenting new, edgy ideas about sexuality – than with how much you like Julie Andrews. The Julie Andrews I speak of here, of course, is not the one who possesses this fascinating melding of inoffensiveness and resolve. It is the Julie Andrews who puts forth this benign, innocuously amiable view of the human condition. With her generally placid demeanor, Andrews somehow seems completely out of place in the zany, slightly madcap filmic framework Edwards creates for her. Her Victoria is a woman surrounded by a constant state of chaos, frenzy. Yet she doesn’t quite fit in the camp all around her – I suspect this element of the film, the awkwardness of seeing queen Julie amongst madmen, is supposed to be comic. Our heroine is one who, upon first sight, just isn’t quite game enough. She must constantly reconcile her own self-conceptions of identity as she slips between different veneers and environments.

There is no denying that Andrews is charming in this part. Of course she is charming, in a gamine, lightly playful sort of way. She possesses such charisma that she, at times, even seems to glow. “Le Jazz Hot” is something of a minor masterpiece, presenting an artist at the apex of her beguiling craft. It's rousing to watch Andrews gradually, throughout the course of the song, find within herself these small reserves of wit and conviviality she had previously never let on to the public.

Watching Andrews‘ slightly regal, distanced screen presence interacting with the other nutty players is interesting, yet I’m not sure it entirely works. Her mix of aloofness and pep comes across as somewhat stale, and the performance is ultimately tedious to sit through. Something about Andrews’ approach to this role strikes me as a bit too entitled, a bit too rehearsed and noncommittal, as if she seeks to coast on what she knows will bring her viewership easy satisfaction. I’d probably be more invested in watching this film if I shared the general enthusiasm so many seem to hold about Andrews. She is charismatic, but not so charismatic that she invests me in her movie, let alone in her character. Her performance here is a case, I’m afraid, of Julie Andrews just being Julie Andrews – a blessing for some, a bore for me.

BEST ACTRESS 2010: A QUICKIE

2011-02-26T14:38:00.007-05:00

BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE, 2010

Greetings, denizens! This quarter has been so taxing both academically and otherwise that I haven't gotten a chance to finish 1982, a year I love. I don't anticipate finishing it for the next few weeks, to be honest, but I did at least want to chime in with my minimal thoughts on this Sunday's race. Unfortunately, I still haven't gotten a chance to catch Cianfrance's Blue Valentine, a film I've been anticipating for months now. This may just be one of the strongest there's been in recent memory for actresses, and, for once, that's wholly apparent when you look at this roster. It's a fantastic lineup. Given the strength and quality of the field, each of the nominees I've seen is generally head and shoulders above the standard fare each year gives us, which may explain why I'm a little harsh on my fourth place finisher.

NATALIE PORTMAN, BLACK SWAN

Though it's far, far from the masterpiece people have practically deified it to, Black Swan is an interesting experiment in filmmaking – we have a generally innovative director who often takes familiar narratives and glosses over them, giving them seeming new inner life. I'm not quite sure if Arronofsky knew what he wanted to say – striving for perfection as an artist, women's subjugation within a patriarchal framework – as much as he threw any ideas he could find from Polanski, De Palma, and others and hoped some of would stick. We can employ multiple readings of the film because it's practically five films in one. Still, it's directed compellingly, with the kind of conviction that makes for a story that's engaging enough to mask a rather banal, trite melding of ideas. I was just wild about it when I first saw it, but the film just doesn't have much in the way of lasting power. Arronofsky seems to be in love with Natalie Portman, and, as he did with Ellen Burstyn and Mickey Rourke, he pushes her to the limits of her physicality – he frames her so beautifully, with such passion and proximity, that her skin feels closer than our own. The film's replete with rather obvious meta-readings – Nina's own physical and psychological travails mirror Portman's own in losing herself in this role, for example – and, when we view Portman's performance with this in mind, it becomes an interesting, if not entirely successful, experiment. In any other year, I'd be all for this performance winning – like Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence or Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman, hers is a case of an actress exploring the art of acting in itself, and it's certainly unique compared to the performances the Academy usually recognizes.

But so much of the discourse surrounding her performance has struck me as a tad effusive, at times even terribly facile. Compared to the other performances, how vivid a character does Portman create? We're so aware, at every step, of Arronofsky's careful orchestration of Portman's performance that she becomes more a tool in fulfilling Arronofsky's auteuristic vision. Portman is certainly effective. She does what is asked of her (and, yes, that's quite a lot). Yet it's a brilliant coup of casting – there are few actresses as perfect for Nina as the naifish, timid, perpetually-nervous Portman, an actress who has considerable charisma but not too much depth – not a brilliant performance. Arronofsky seems acutely aware of her limitations as an actress, and, as a result, he works within those confines to orchestrate this performance.

ANNETTE BENING, THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Annette Bening is an actress I've always seen as giving half-full performances – I've generally admired her more for her class and rather composed public demeanor than her actual performances, which strike me as artificial. But she's just brilliant here. It's a remarkable, pitch-perfect characterization of a very specific type of American person. Nic is a character who's spent her whole life constructing her life on a rational, ordered set of principles that she just can't bear to see anyone challenge. Once these very traditional, archaic morals come under attack, she's forced to reconsider her whole life and what she's based it upon. For the first time in her life, Nic realizes that she possesses that all-too human capacity for weakness. Bening communicates this slow, growing disillusionment with the kind of ease and nuance that would lead many to think her role wasn't all that challenging. Bening, an actress who I often say goes no deeper than surface-level, is perfect for a role like this, for Nic is essentially a character who asks her to push beyond pretenses and undergo a process of self-reflection. She's just heartbreaking here. I could easily dissect this performance scene-by-scene – who can forget the Joni Mitchell "All I Want" tour-de-force, one of the best acted scenes this category's ever seen? – because each one is so perfectly crafted. Yet Bening also creates such a grounded through-line to her character, and she succeeds in giving this rather unlikeable woman palpable traces of sympathy. And she serves as the perfect foil to Julianne Moore's beautifully neurotic Jules, another one of this year's great performances. Out of the two frontrunners, Bening's subtle, nuanced is practically echelons above Portman's overdrawn emoting. It's a career-best performance, and a win would be both richly deserved and a perfect topping to this superb career.

JENNIFER LAWRENCE, WINTER'S BONE

But it's impossible for me to reward Bening's rich, textured characterization in the face of, quite simply, two of the greatest performances I've seen in recent American cinema. I'm usually not this taken with performances, but Jennifer Lawrence and Nicole Kidman give us two very different, beautifully etched looks at what it's like to keep our lives afloat when everything around us is decaying. Lawrence creates a modern-day Antigone. Her Ree Dolly (isn't that just a perfect name?) seems to spring from the earth, a sort of bruised saint whose attachment to the home runs so deep, so true, that she ultimately cannot abandon it. It is fascinating to watch her traverse this territory and realize it will be the only one she will ever know her whole life. She shows us a woman coming to form, with traces of resolve that mask her deeper, more inherent shortcomings. Ree presents to us a kind of heroic anomaly – a character who is at once both world-wise and incredibly naive – that is all but absent in most great American films these days. It's a remarkably lived-in performance. Like the film she is in, Lawrence's performance is a tightly-wound lid that never allows itself to boil over – always so carefully contained, giving us traces of the inner turmoil brewing within her yet never straining, keeping them hidden under the calm pain of her face. So much of the discussion surrounding her performance is absurd (stemming from what seems to be a lack of interest people have grown for those who do not hail from privileged, upper-middle class backgrounds), as if to suggest that we have come to look for overdrawn, and, quite frankly, exaggerated versions of ourselves in art.

NICOLE KIDMAN, RABBIT HOLE

Unlike many of this category's recent winners, Nicole Kidman's selection of roles has been relatively daring. Yet I've more admired her for these nonconformist career choices than truly enjoyed her work in them, for she often strikes me as a little too mannered, a little too cold in her approach. But her Becca is such a carefully-sketched masterpiece of human grief. Like Bening, Kidman layers an unsympathetic character with aching, brilliant pathos. Her Becca is stubborn, controlling, headstrong, and selfish. You keep a distance from her because you don't want to be around anyone this obnoxious, this overbearingly standoffish. She can't reconcile these splintered, fragmented parts of a life she previously saw as so put-together, so ordered. Becca has come to inhabit an imagined reality so separate from that of everyday life, and so she has forgotten how to communicate with others. She is plagued by both a need to distance herself from everyone around her and a realization that she simply can't carry on this way for much longer. Kidman makes this duality palpable in every single frame of the film, teeming with disdain in one while agonizing over her misanthropy in the next. She traverses the potentially hammy trappings of Hare's fantastic script with such precision, such dignity, that she convinces us that this is a woman who just can't see herself moving forward yet knows, at every moment, that she must. The slightly exalted, distanced, even cold vanity of Kidman's star persona works in perfect tandem with Becca's detachment. It's a perfect marriage of what we associate with Kidman's holier-than-thou public image and a character. With Williams sight unseen, my vote oscillates between Lawrence and Kidman. It's one of the category's one-two punches (like 1963's Neal/Roberts, 1969's Fonda/Minnelli, 1976's Spacek/Barrault, among others) in which each actress projects a lifetime of pain, hurt, and grief so beautifully. All is suggested, implied, yet so carefully orchestrated that neither actress strains for emotional effect. Today, just before the ceremony, Kidman narrowly gets my vote. It's a great performance.

BEST ACTRESS 1982: Sissy Spacek in Missing

2010-12-28T23:26:00.001-05:00

With Badlands, Sissy Spacek personified the remnants of sixties counterculture. She was very much a “hip”, transgressive child of the Warhol era. Yet after Coal Miner’s Daughter, Sissy Spacek began to embody a much more all-American, down-home aesthetic, with that unmistakable country twang, strawberry blonde tresses, alabaster freckles. It is this combination of pseudo-liberalism and earthiness that makes Spacek’s Beth Horman, in Costa-Gavras' Missing, a more fascinating character than she should be. She is a perplexing study of a certain kind of American: someone whose political convictions run deep, yet occupy a time and space in which they cannot be expressed. Her commitments are too big for her body.

Ms. Spacek’s Beth is a flower child whose soul lived on through the seventies. Dressed like a hippy librarian, she wades through the film with her long, sinewy hair and raggedy, messy clothes. Gradually, people like her became artifacts of their time, possessing ways of thinking that became wildly anachronistic and out of touch with Reagan-era politics. Beth has lost her footing. She has courage, but she cannot express herself with civility. Her viewpoints come only in the form of tiny explosions: during conversation, she wells up with anger and spouts her tenets of progressivism, frustrated that no one else understands her. She is a collection of ideas that can never find true, articulate form.

With the disappearance of her husband, Beth’s worldview is eclipsed by a new sort of consciousness. Her life, which she had previously lived as a sort of political firebrand’s dream, becomes dangerously moment-to-moment. Ms. Spacek conveys this shift with the exact sort of nervous, fast-paced tension the role needs. It’s in the way that her leg jitters uncontrollably when other people mutter non-truths about her husband during conversation. The brilliance of Spacek's performance reveals itself in these small, detailed pockets – characteristics that are needed when the writing works against her.

Many critics argue that, unlike Lemmon’s politically-awakened father, Spacek’s Beth does not change. This is perhaps due to the nature of the character, who often takes a backseat to Lemmon’s. I will admit that the role is very much that of “the girlfriend”, and it is painfully underwritten. Ms. Spacek, as brilliant an actress as she is, cannot escape the limitations of this role. Yet only now do I realize that the underplaying she employs merely attests to Ms. Spacek’s talents. She is the film’s emotional backbone.

Beth does indeed undergo a much more subtle change, I think. She must learn how to understand people whose worldviews are very different from her own. Gradually, she changes. This manifests itself most prominently in the warmth Spacek radiates, almost effortlessly, in the later scenes when she interacts with the Lemmon character. The once-fiery, fierce arguments that tempered this father-daughter-in-law relationship have turned into quiet moments of mutual understanding. Perhaps she sees inside him traces of the man with whom she fell in love. Beth has discovered inside herself a sort of unexpected humanity, a ability to communicate her own ideals in ways she had never found possible before if only due to her own bullheadedness. For the first time in her life, she has found herself in a position to craft her own opinions, independent of her now-deceased husband. Spacek’s performance is a rhythmic, low-key portrait of a woman who is forced to reconsider her own ideals. It is a fascinating, refreshing look at a certain type of American citizen – politically passionate but without the tact to express those beliefs – and how she, so quietly, overcomes these limitations.

BEST ACTRESS 1982: Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice

2010-12-28T15:07:00.001-05:00

Meryl Streep is an actress of incredible beauty, and this quality alone gives her Sophie a sort of grand, tragic luminosity. Who would want to see such a pure soul decay? Streep seems to find some secret joy in taking us through her voyeuristic trip through hell, as if she wants us to simultaneously revel in her skill and be moved, and therein lies the problem with her performance. Her Sophie is not the complex character Mr. Styron wrote of. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice is a gross oversimplification, and at the heart of this oversimplification is Ms. Streep’s turgid, mechanically-polished demolition of William Styron’s tragic heroine.

Perhaps I should divorce my deep-seated love for William Styron’s novel – one of my all-time favorites – from its film adaptation, for they are entirely different creations. It is impossible to encompass the universality and complexity of Styron’s story on film. His Sophie is a rich, humanized creation, not simply a victim of her own circumstances. Some argue that a character this complex and daunting requires an actress of a vast, wide set of technical skills to fill its space. From the moment she appears on the screen, Streep tells us we are in the presence of a monument. Her performance is, in many respects, one of our finest living artists realizing she is at the apex of her craft, continually discovering something new about her art as she moves forward.

However, the casting of Streep in this role is something I find problematic in and of itself. Though Streep is, as I said, a woman of incredible beauty, it is a kind of beauty that is non-traditional, at times a bit jarring. Streep – made to look pallid, wearing torture on her face so readily – is nothing like the buxom, slightly hypersexualized nymph Styron wrote of (he imagined Ursula Andress in this role). This eliminates one of Styron's Sophie’s most interesting traits – that she is the seductress, whose unspeakable tragedy folds itself into tempestuous allure. Furthermore, Streep's approach to acting seems to rely on externalization of a role – she works from the outside in. As many of her detractors point out, Streep is often disconnected, cold, and overly-technical. Yet Sophie is not merely an accent, nor is she a collection of faux-plaintive looks and gazes that are supposed to communicate lifelong emotional torture. Streep reduces her to these elements. Her performance becomes, in many ways, a cop-out to what could have been a tremendously affecting characterization.

So many of the subtleties in Styron’s text are lost in translation. There is something mildly absurd, even sensationalistic, about Streep’s performance. She has bastardized this uncommonly complex woman to a series of tics, mannerisms, and face-touches – as if the film is a masterclass in acting. I find that her performance has very little of the finer subtext Styron’s Sophie had – the constant struggle for redemption, the deadened morality that resides within her, the psychosexual ambiguities that shroud Sophie in even more mystery. Rather, Streep interprets Sophie in an almost academic, rote-like sense, giving the film a sickening sense of historical exploitation.

There are occasional moments of brilliance in Streep’s performance. But they are few. Just one glacial close-up of Streep carries hints of the dark, psychosexual recesses hidden within Sophie; the parts of her own identity she is unwilling to face herself, no less to show to others; her compulsive need for joy, whether through sex or companionship, that allows her to escape the numbness that colors her life and, for a moment, live through someone else.

BEST ACTRESS 1982

2010-12-27T19:15:00.000-05:00

Julie Andrews, Victor/Victoria
Jessica Lange, Frances
Sissy Spacek, Missing
Meryl Streep, Sophie's Choice
Debra Winger, An Officer and a Gentleman

I can tell you right now my thoughts on this year diverge far from that of public opinion. To say the least. Haha.

BEST ACTRESS 1976: The Resolution

2010-12-26T21:12:00.089-05:00

Faye Dunaway in Network

Dunaway’s serpentine, career-driven gorgon is a remarkable creation – at once fearless, sexual, unforgiving, and vulnerable. She has removed herself so totally from the world of human emotion that she has forgotten how to love, to feel. Her whole life orbits around her understanding of what will entertain the masses. Because we are surely not meant to sympathize with Diana until the very end, Dunaway's performance relies, appropriately, more on technical skill than appeal to emotion. This is perhaps why I have ranked her so low – something about her seems more serviceable to the film than genuinely memorable. Still, with amazing dexterity, she crafts Diana into a post-apocalyptic vision of new American media.

4.

Talia Shire in Rocky

There is something incredibly endearing about the image of Talia Shire mousily peeking at us from behind her thick glasses, as if she traps herself in this world yet begs us to come inside. Yet Shire does not relax on this appeal to easy pathos – through her rather unorthodox screen presence, she crafts Adrian into a woman who is in some respects tortured, tragic, and, more than anything, warm. She remains the most moving part of a film that practically requires us to be moved by this man’s cheapened rags-to-riches trajectory.

3.

Liv Ullmann in Face to Face

(Thanks to imagenes y palabras for the screengrab)

Like few performances ever have, Ullmann’s work here captures emotional shatter while bringing tremendous audience empathy to the situation. Ullmann has the ability to communicate lifelong emotional torture with the blink of an eye. Even if the cyclical drear of Bergman’s overdirection works against her, Ullmann never lets down, constantly keeping our sympathies in line with Jenny. In some respects, it is even a life-affirming performance – Ullmann shows us this woman’s subtle, gradual realization that we, as humans, must keep trudging through our lives even when we feel we cannot go any further.

2.

Marie-Christine Barrault in Cousin, Cousine

It is not often that this category sees portrayals of “normal”, everyday people. Yet there is something about Barrault that is so rapturous, so low-key, that I want to root for her candidacy even more. Her performance is one unfettered by the conventional trappings of “screen acting” and its need to aggrandize every emotion. So many critics talk about actresses and their ability to layer characters, yet I have never seen it done with such charismatic effortlessness as with Barrault. Under no pretense whatsoever, she keys us into Marthe's low-key sadness, her fear that domesticity will be all that life will offer her. Yet Marthe's quiet rebellion allows her to find beauty in her life. It is a performance equal parts sadness, quite possibly the most beautifully depressing performance I have ever seen, and uplifting, joyous lyricism.

Sissy Spacek in Carrie

Something is to be said for a performance that is iconic. Yet Spacek’s performance is part of cinematic history. It represents the bridging between horror – a genre built upon gimmickry and manipulation of the human psyche – and genuine, true human emotion. Never mind that Spacek was nearly thirty when she got in touch with these post-adolescent emotions – she captures so beautifully the horror and grief of trying to come of age, both as a woman in America and in a world where certain expectations are held of you. Her restructuring of the female body is a transcendent piece of work in itself. It is an incredible performance, full of deep, aching pathos. Who can forget the image of Carrie staring nervously at her mother’s Christ-like corpse, her eyes wandering like banshees as she contemplates her actions? I certainly cannot. To my mind, Spacek’s performance is the best performance nominated in this category that did not go on to snag the trophy.

OMISSIONS

The fact that AMPAS had room to squeeze in two (amazing) foreign-language performances probably indicates that domestic pickings were slim. That said, I haven't seen, nor am I too interested in seeing, Barbra Streisand in her remake of A Star is Born, which practically swept the Globes that year; the oft-mentioned Audrey Hepburn in Robin and Marian; the perplexingly vapid Sarah Miles in The Sailor Who Fell with Grace from the Sea; Glenda Jackson in The Incredible Sarah; the brilliant Goldie Hawn in The Duchess and Dirtwater Fox; Maggie Smith in Murder by Death; Ingrid Bergman in A Matter of Time; Rita Moreno in The Ritz; or Lauren Bacall in The Shootist.

Looking further, I am more intrigued by Margaux Hemingway in Lipstick; my love Karen Black in either Family Plot or Burnt Offerings; Jessica Harper for Inserts; Best Supporting Actress nominee Jodie Foster in either Freaky Friday or The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane; Barbara Harris in either of her Globe-nominated performances in Hitchcock's Family Plot or Freaky Friday; the always fascinating Genevieve Bujold in de Palma's other 1976 film, Obsession; and Isabelle Adjani in The Tenant.

Still, I'm pretty in love with the ladies in my lineup:

Marie-Christine Barrault, Cousin, cousine

Sonia Braga, Dona Flor e seus maridos

Geraldine Chaplin, Cria Cuervos...

Sissy Spacek, Carrie

Liv Ullmann, Ansikte mot Ansikte

BEST ACTRESS 1976: Talia Shire in Rocky

2010-12-26T01:10:00.000-05:00

If there is one family in Hollywood derided for riding on the nepotistic coattails of its patriarch, it is the Coppolas. Practically every claim of Sofia Coppola’s perceived ‘talentlessness’ has struck me as downright lazy, and my feelings toward Talia Shire are, by effect, similar. She has always seemed to me an actress who possesses an incredibly intriguing screen presence, capable of at once being forceful, steely, vulnerable, and sympathetic. Her lead actress nomination for Rocky (1976), a fantastic film that nonetheless probably shouldn't have won Best Picture over the likes of Taxi Driver, is often perceived as a fluke. Not only is Shire’s role essentially a supporting one, but it is, on the written page, a rather thankless fulfillment of “the girlfriend” archetype.

I must have a weakness for this archetype, then. Every Sarah Packard or Paula Pokrifki or Margaret Hammond, all similar typifications that nonetheless brought their actresses well-deserved nominations, has struck me as a performance of intense beauty. Each of the actresses who filled the aforementioned roles was able to bring a sense of vibrant, emotional tragedy to the “girlfriend” stock. In this vein, Talia Shire’s Adrian is a fascinating, remarkable creation. Shire’s approach to screen acting, peculiarly studied and premeditated, is perfectly suited to this role. A woman who internalizes every emotion with careful, meticulous precision, Adrian is the perfect match to Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, a gorilla of a man who feels everything on the most visceral, guttal level possible.

Adrian is worn down, and you can read it on the wrinkles of Shire's face, pregnant with tire. It seems she has no purpose, no function in her life but to nurture. All she does is nurture – her pets, her brother, and, eventually, Rocky. She has lived her whole life nurturing only by circumstance. This colors her with a sort of world-weariness tempered only by Rocky, this man who cares for her so genuinely that her nurturing is given a new sort of energy. “She fills gaps,” Rocky says of her in one scene. What gaps does she fill? There is something vaguely maternalistic about Adrian’s passivity. One can easily misinterpret Rocky and Adrian’s relationship as the coming together of two lost, tortured souls who find solace in each other; when together, they bloom.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Shire’s characterization, however, is that we cannot so easily label Adrian a “late bloomer”. She never really blooms. Although her sexual awakening comes at the hands of Rocky (a scene that Shire handles with beauty and precision), Adrian never wholly escapes this mousy, reserved shell. I think Shire uses this to make Adrian into a character of complex intrigue. That she never makes the conscious decision to define Adrian’s trajectory as so clearly-delineated as Rocky's is incredibly brave. Hers is a performance full of risks, some of which may seem overwhelmingly heavy-handed or even embarrassing to some. Yet I find these risks hold a fantastic emotional payoff. Shire brings tremendous empathy to this role, the most genuinely moving element of this film. Her child-woman trapped in spinsterhood is a compelling, confusing creation – at once funny, melancholy, and strangely uplifting.

BEST ACTRESS 1976: Sissy Spacek in Carrie

2010-12-23T01:19:00.004-05:00

As Carrie White, the eponymous hero-villain of Brian de Palma’s masterful Carrie, Sissy Spacek typifies a pocket of the human – or, more specifically, the post-pubescent female – experience. Here, the bullied, victimized female becomes the spectacle. After enduring poison, she, in literally assuming a stage, becomes the object of the gaze, taking on a sort of grand, feminized power. Ms. Spacek's characterization has solidified its place in pop culture, and with good reason. Through the deer-whimper of a voice that turns into a silent stare of death, she gives a face to every tortured adolescent sufferer, capturing what is so difficult about coming into the skin of a woman in a space so governed by traditionalist constructs.

Even if she isn’t the dumpy, pimple-faced demon Stephen King wrote about, Ms. Spacek, doe eyes peering through her mousy blonde hair, is the quintessential wallflower. Her gangly, contorted wire-frame, almost romanticized in the film’s brilliant opening scene, communicates her inability to fit into a world that is so manufactured that it is hostile. Carrie White oscillates between two settings, both of which are governed by rather constricting narratives – the school and the home. The home, in particular, is a place that serves as King's post-apocalyptic vision of institutionalized religion's capacity to corrupt Middle American suburbia. Ms. Spacek's scenes against Piper Laurie are, appropriately, operatic in their intensity. The actresses are two Neapolitan figures who seem to emerge from a painting, grounded at once in both theatrical histrionics and in humanistic realism. Ms. Spacek walks a remarkably fine line between too much and too little throughout this whole performance, by turns over-the-top and subtle.

She strikes a perfect balance, seeming at once both calculated and fluid. Devoid of any Bergmanesque pretense whatsoever, Ms. Spacek slips between different personae from one scene to the next. She morphs sinuously from sullen, spritely mink to enraged, wild-eyed ferret to pious soul in search of forgiveness, washing away her sins in a final gesture of atonement. Amazingly, she interprets the female body politic as capable of reaching near-catatonia in its ultimate state of power.

Though hers is an incredibly brave performance, Ms. Spacek never makes us acutely aware of the painstaking, meticulous craft she has put in to her characterization (unlike, say, Natalie Portman in this year's Black Swan). Instead, with harmonious ease, she takes us into the mind of every young, tortured victim and makes us realize, so deeply, the reasons why one would just need to lash out against the world. There is nothing she feels that we do not feel. As De Palma’s camera spins around her endlessly, Ms. Spacek, merely through the power of her gaze, reminds us how, on occasion, real time expands to an eternity.

BEST ACTRESS 1976: Liv Ullmann in Face to Face

2010-12-16T02:46:00.036-05:00

Liv Ullmann has a face built for emotional fracture, and it has never been more naked than in Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face. Bergman strips her bare of her characteristic luminosity and coats her with shapelessness. She must give form to an abstract process – that of the human soul becoming soulless, a woman's societally-constructed self-perception collapsing on itself. As Dr. Jenny Isaakson, the psychiatrist who carries as much baggage as do her patients, Ullmann bares herself with such abandon that her unending, cyclical trauma becomes a merry-go-round through hell.

Some actresses work through material so steadfastly that they transcend it. Face to Face is one of Bergman’s more earnest, and therefore more overwrought, efforts. With its laughably literal symbolism and overwrought trips through hokey subconscious dreamland, it lacks the clarity of the director's better works. On paper, Ullmann’s role is the kind of tour-de-force stamped with the seal of the Academy, replete with emotional breakdowns of every sort. There is a point in the film, I think, at which Bergman almost singlehandedly numbs us. After the twentieth or so Freudian acid trip through Jenny's psyche, we almost stop feeling for her.

Yet it is Ullmann who commands us to never stop feeling. She carries the film on her back with such bravery, such strength, that it is difficult to imagine what a much lesser actress would have done with this histrionic-laden material. If not Ullmann – whom I feel is the greatest living actress, next to Jane Fonda – then who?

Perhaps a great performance should not be measured by its level of commitment. What Ullmann does here is, indeed, something of intense personal commitment, and her rather deft handling of Bergman’s sensationalisms is reason enough to label this one of the great performances of cinema. It is as if Bergman summoned all of Ullmann’s resources, as a performer, and tried to pack them into one film. But Ullmann's performance is not a slaphappy collection of individually well-acted, exhaustive scenes. It is the trajectory of a woman’s death and the slow, painful pregnancy of her soul, all the way to its eventual rebirth.

I agree that Ullmann's is truly one of the best performances ever captured on film, but not for the reason that Ullmann provides a masterclass in technicality. She does so while bringing to this role an incredible amount of empathy, such poetic but wholly honest feeling. Ullmann plays this rather unbelievable role with disarming believability. Her performance is, I should add, one of immense beauty. Ullmann's vocal intonations have such a gentle, lulling fascination to them, and her face itself is an incomparable work of craftsmanship. Jenny's malaise takes on a form of artistry – she has gracefully come to accept the fact that we must trudge forward, even when what we have repressed comes floating back to the surface. Ullmann's mere ability to capture a dozen human feelings within a simple stare, even, allows us to feel Jenny’s pain. We grudgingly, but understandingly, accept it as our own.

BEST ACTRESS 1976: Faye Dunaway in Network

2010-12-13T02:03:00.003-05:00

To call Diana Christensen a careerist is to put it lightly. The wicked, villainous television incarnate of Sidney Lumet’s flawed masterstroke, Network, Diana is Paddy Chayefsky’s prophetic vision of American broadcast landscape. Spewing her media-soaked rhetoric even when she beds someone, Diana, played with moribund deftness by Faye Dunaway, has no capacity for human feeling. The only pleasure she finds in life comes through human exploitation. She has traveled so far down this road of gorgonian degeneration that she no longer seems human. Very much like the goddess of hunt she was named after, Diana speaks as if her words are venom, always on the cusp of verbal overflow. Her mind, constantly awash with thoughts of ratings-consciousness, has overtaken her. She is a body living without a soul.

Dunaway’s physicality seems perfect for a role like this. Her physique falls somewhere in between being shapely and skeletal. The contours of her face at once both strikingly beautiful and harsh; her eyes are simultaneously full of energy and dulled. These assets, as they did with her Evelyn Mulwray, evoke a sort of inherent duality to Dunaway’s character. Even when Diana is repulsive, we are drawn to her. Diana, like the medium of television itself, manipulates us. She can make the world – any world, whether it is the world of television, Max’s (William Holden) world, or even our very own – revolve around her.

Inevitably, in fulfilling Chayefsky’s prophecy, this world collapses in on itself. Only after Max breaks off his affair with Diana do we receive some suggestion of greater, deeper inner emotional life within her. Dunaway communicates this complete surrender of self-identity to human feeling with hilarious, tragic devastation. A woman who once prided herself in her ability to manipulate the human soul, Diana’s self-conception has now been thrown into total flux. In realizing her capacity for human emotion, she becomes like these exact people she has exerted power over for so long.

Dunaway’s straightforward, no-nonsense approach to this character is solid – at times even brilliant – but there is something slightly serviceable about the performance. Perhaps this boils down to the rather unsympathetic nature of the character itself. Diana is by no means a relatable person (something a similar media-drenched career woman, Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig, seems to be, albeit in a much more pathos-laden film), but a humanoid. Though I cannot hold this against her, Dunaway is such a caricature – what else should she be in a film like this? – that it becomes hard to generate genuine enthusiasm for the actual performance. One can, as I do, admire Dunaway’s rather impressive, technically accomplished work rather than be excited by it.

BEST ACTRESS 1976: Marie-Christine Barrault in Cousin, Cousine

2010-12-12T19:47:00.005-05:00

There is a scene in Jean-Charles Tacchella’s Cousin, Cousine in which Marie-Christine Barrault mutters, “A year ago I wanted to die. All I thought about was suicide.” In this moment alone, Barrault, a performer of transcendent charisma (that was, sadly, never capitalized upon further than Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories), manages to map out one woman’s whole life in a matter of words. If there is anything extraordinary about her characterization of Marthe – this docile, slightly cheeky housewife whose life finds purpose again when she falls in love – it is that Barrault manages to find beauty in what is so ordinary, something poetic in what we deem mundane. With her flushed cheeks, watchful gaze, and hushed way of speaking, she illuminates what is so joyous about the act of living in itself, giving form to something so shapeless as everyday life.

Ms. Barrault is a woman of exceptional beauty, but what is beautiful about her performance is how deeply-rooted it is in normalcy. Even against Tacchella’s distanced, objective camera, a sort of inherent luminosity seems to burst from within her relaxed, unassuming screen presence. Wafting through each scene, she holds a certain glow that takes on its own form of quiet, placid music. It is a performance not unlike Cher’s brilliant turn years later in Moonstruck – Marthe, like Loretta, is a woman who is slowly discovering her own self-worth, her own capacity to share in this greater human experience of love she had previously written off. She is, in essence, a woman who has taken on a completely different way of looking at the world, absorbed a more all-encompassing outlook on life. Barrault communicates this shift with such soft, graceful sensitivity that this performance can – and has too often been – very lazily be written off as a sort of non-challenge. Instead, though, Barrault takes the banality of this cyclical, routine life Marthe leads and exalts it, lifting it to a higher and symphonious plane.

If there is not one, sole moment that serves as the highlight of Barrault’s performance, it is because every moment is stellar. Barrault is so emotionally enveloping, so fresh and rapturous in her charisma, that what she does here transcends the act of the performance. It is a walk through someone else’s life.

(So I'm basically going to try out this whole "express yourself in as few words as possible" thing, which is why I'll be aiming for much shorter lengths for my next mini-reviews.)

BEST ACTRESS 1976

2010-12-12T01:38:00.000-05:00

BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE, 1976

Marie-Christine Barrault, Cousin Cousine

Faye Dunaway, Network

Talia Shire, Rocky

Sissy Spacek, Carrie

Liv Ullmann, Face to Face

Now that I'm off for three weeks, back to blogging! There's a chance I'll continue with 1979 after this.

DELAY SORRY SORRY

2010-09-26T13:47:00.002-04:00

Okay, kids. Sorry for the huge delay – I've been swamped up in collegiate life and whatnot. I'm contemplating either finishing up 1979 or beginning anew with 1976, especially because some otherworldly saints put both "Ansikte mot Ansikte" and "Cousin, Cousine" up on Youtube (with English subtitles, no less), and I've been itching to write about Sissy in "Carrie" for so long.

BEST ACTRESS 1979

2010-09-05T10:12:00.001-04:00

This will probably be the last year I'll cover before I go off to college (!) in a few days, after which I'll be posting pretty infrequently. I really wanted to cover 1966 or 1976, though, so if anyone knows where I can find "Morgan!" or "Cousin, Cousine"...let me know ;-)

Jill Clayburgh, "Starting Over"

Jane Fonda, "The China Syndrome"

Sally Field, "Norma Rae"

Marsha Mason, "Chapter Two"

Bette Midler, "The Rose"

BEST ACTRESS 1974: THE RESULTS

2010-09-04T02:09:00.000-04:00

Ellen Burstyn, "Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore"

La Burstyn’s glorious ad-libbing (“goodness Wanda Fay, take a fan with you!”) and almost natural capacity for delight make this a difficult performance to disparage in any way, but what mars this performance is an almost flailing, upsetting lack of centralized character. Her chemically natural rapport with her son is too striking a contrast with Alice’s knack for finding herself in tearful breakdowns, as if two different souls are inhabiting Alice; it’s a very actorly performance, both larger-than-life and understated, two ends that never seem to meet and form a cohesive whole. Burstyn is one of the few actresses who can appear totally bereft with emotion — melancholy, fury, complacency, shyness, insecurity — while still seeming utterly appealing to the audience, so much that she becomes incredible to behold. But Burstyn's fantastic ability to keep the audience entertained can only go so far; what’s behind all these hilarious one-liners, these water fights, these absurd bathroom breakdowns? Neither Robert Getchell nor Ellen Burstyn seems quite sure; by the end, this journey of "self-discovery" (ugh) we’ve invested so much in feels strangely like more of a disappointment than a relief.

Gena Rowlands, "A Woman Under the Influence"

Rowlands is occasionally a bit more than self-indulgent in her approach to this character, as if she’s acting to show us how amazing she can be; it’s a self-conscious tour-de-force. But behind all these fussy, mannered affectations is a woman who, either voluntarily or subconsciously, may be reacting against the established patriarchal order she’s so used to; Mabel has her own way of looking at the world, different from the rest of us, and so our immediate diagnosis is to call her crazy. This performance shouldn’t be admired because of Rowlands’ knack for erratic finger-snaps and couch-top dances; it should be admired because she gives form to what is formless, beauty to what we seem so quick to vilify as ugly. She is marvelous.

Faye Dunaway, "Chinatown"

Behind Dunaway’s steely, distanced retroism is more than a black widow — there’s a woman who’s completely dead inside, cowering behind her well-drawn frame as she lives with the day-to-day horrors of her own tragedy. The rape of her body, and her soul, is a stand-in for the rape of a land and its morals; what makes Dunaway’s characterization especially perplexing, and often even haunting, isn't in her spidery, carefully precise diction, though. It’s the quiver in her voice, the ambiguity of her glances, that show us the inner psychological complexities that are associated with the horror of abuse; it not only destroys the soul, it tatters the mind — does Evelyn regard her liaisons with her father as that backward, or has she reconciled with the horror of it? Dunaway’s approach to this character is terribly complex, and therefore so ambiguous that she becomes a perverse being of her own; if Chinatown’s a land in which evil spreads like wildfire, then Evelyn herself is a testament to how quickly twisted morals can corrupt the human soul. She is one of those tragic characters who, gradually, seeps into our overall filmgoing conscience.

(I seemed especially nitpicky in my review of Dunaway, but I think that has more to do with the fact that I hold this performance in such high esteem already and, as a result, was being particularly harsh toward it.)

Valerie Perrine, "Lenny"

Valerie Perrine attacks her role with such reckless emotional abandon that it seems she isn’t even aware that cameras are filming her; she has dazzling, total freedom on the screen. There’s a pulse to her line readings that makes her incredibly exciting to watch, overwhelming us with her uncouth, angelic sexiness; her lush, coquettish charm; and her ability to build deep emotional reserves all at once. On the written page, Honey’s just that broad who exists only to help guide us, in all our ignorant glory, toward realizing the kind of martyr her now-dead lover was. But Perrine doesn’t just typify “the girlfriend”, she transcends it — she imbues this stock plot device with so much humanity that it doesn’t even seem she’s trying. She embodies about fifteen different emotions all at once by sheer virtue of her charismatic screen presence; she inhabits this role so well that the line between acting and behaving seems blurred. Perrine’s incredibly empathic performance lets us know how this god-like Lenny may have affected us mere mortals, telling us exactly why a woman like her would love Lenny, how deep that love would run, and how those feelings would linger on and dissipate long after his passing. Not only does she survive incredibly prosaic dialogue, she gives it a rhythm and makes it utterly charming; her mere presence is so relaxed, so naturally sexual and appealing, that she lifts the film onto a whole other plane altogether whenever she’s on the screen. Perrine gives the kind of cathartic performance that isn’t captured on film nowadays — it transcends description.

Diahann Carroll, "Claudine"

Though Carroll is a very glamorous star, what makes this a true star’s performance is Carroll’s ability to lure us into Claudine’s way of viewing the world even when the film around her shouldn’t allow us to; she has a deep understanding of what mass audiences respond to. What is beautiful about her here is the sort of actorly command of a situation that seems to radiate from her whenever she’s on the screen; she is warm, hilarious, poignant, and touching without ever suggesting she’s slipped out of character. Her star persona could’ve been used to detrimentally phony effect here, but Carroll, instead, is noble without being too regal, theatrical without being too larger-than-life for this scenario; the film she’s in seems like some afterschool special that wants to make some overtly politicized message about the welfare system, but it is Carroll, with her quick-witted candor and incapacity for nonsense, who ultimately ends up communicating this message. Claudine always seems on the verge of exploding, bursting at the seams, but she’s learned to control all of these bubbling feelings under a calmed, if slightly tense, exterior; the mockery with which she treats her own dire situation masks Claudine’s deeply-felt need for the kind of fulfillment she’s left herself without in making a life for caring for so many others but herself. Carroll moves with free-form spunk and dignity from situation to situation in this seriocomedy, inviting comparisons to Almodovar and Carmen Maura’s greatest screen creations; but to even liken Diahann Carroll’s work here to anything else is absurd, because what Carroll has is a total gift of her own that should be celebrated more than it is.

OMISSIONS

Jacqueline Bisset used her cocooned movie star persona to great nervous effect in Truffaut’s masterful “Day for Night”; her commentary on the ‘movie star’ is all at once haunting, precise, mysterious, and tragic. Brigitte Mira was both fearlessly restrained and gloriously moving in Fassbinder’s masterpiece, “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul”, possessing an ability to personify the zeitgeist running through postwar German society that was as fearless as her director’s take on the world they lived in. (Some say she was a sort of stand-in for how Fassbinder viewed himself.)

In a similarly fearless look at postwar society, Charlotte Rampling’s limp, Stockholm Syndrome-laden, sadomasochistic lush in “The Night Porter” was only further proof of the actress’s great talent; she laces her character with catatonic nuance that seems to come almost naturally from her. Comedy/Musical Globe winner Raquel Welch perhaps came as close as she ever would to being nominated for an Oscar for “The Three Musketeers”. Looking through archived news articles, Julie Andrews was sometimes cited as a contender for “The Tamarind Seed”, as was the always fabulous Genevieve Bujold for "Earthquake". But the year’s most egregious snub — and, possibly, the most egregious snub in Oscar history, causing a number of high-profile actresses to campaign on her behalf — was, of course, Liv Ullmann’s for “Scenes from a Marriage”, a breathtaking display of human emotion that of course belongs at the top of any list of the greatest female performances ever committed to film.

BEST ACTRESS 1974: VALERIE PERRINE IN "LENNY"

2010-09-03T12:40:00.005-04:00

When J Lo claimed she should’ve been a Best Actress nominee for her work in “El Cantante”, all of us sighed a collective, “what the hell?” It’s a film in which she plays Puchi, Hector Lavoe’s junkie overexploited ex-lover, and I don’t think I have to explain further — we all know this role. It’s “The Girlfriend”, the woman who plays second fiddle to the more important leading man who the story’s really about, and all that’s required of her is to reminisce and ruminate throughout much of the film as she recalls her past lover’s virtues. But who’s ever done it better than Valerie Perrine, that sinuously sexy, Hawnesque kitten who remains one of the only reasons to watch Bob Fosse’s disastrous “Lenny”? I can see exactly why the Cannes jury, headlined by Jeanne Moreau that year, would go for this performance over Ellen Burstyn’s towering but disparagingly uneven achievement; Perrine’s blase, swinging sexiness is something that isn’t unlike that cool, bad-girl hip verve emitted almost naturally by every Anna Karina or Jean Seberg of the New Wave. (All of these heroines, in one way or another, were women who practically sunbathed in their fun-loving, carefree drifter lifestyles until reality hit and sobered them, and that’s essentially what Honey is made out to be, however tenuous Fosse’s grasp on this material is.) “Lenny” is an absurdist piece of hogwash on Bob Fosse’s part — it’s a film that pretends to be about Lenny Bruce but, like Julian Schnabel’s vacuous “Before Night Falls”, is so self-indulgent in its stylistic approach that it doesn’t really end up saying much at all. Fosse seems to overly concerned with making his film appealing on a sensory visual level that his message, assuming there ever was one, is muddled in the cesspool of his cinema-verite bullshit. He tries to bury Perrine under this, too — and he comes dangerously close to succeeding — but Perrine’s mere screen presence, in all its honesty and openness, has so much lasting power that she’s able to rise above this; she must be an angel. Fosse doesn’t ever define Lenny Bruce with a clear vision — in some scenes, he’s portrayed as a good boy who occasionally slipped up, while, in others, Lenny's almost likened to a revolutionary political activist who made a name skirting social constructs — and he doesn’t really define Perrine’s Honey as much more than a cipher, either. Of course an icon such as Lenny Bruce would’ve made a huge impact on the people he touched — that should be taken for granted — yet, for the most part, Fosse just keeps us wondering why we should even care about him at all.

But there’s a reason why we should care, and Honey — Lenny’s drugged-up stripper of an ex-wife, with that croaky, ducklike squeak of a voice — gives us that reason. Fosse’s just crying out for some sort of storytelling device to frame this ravishingly structureless film, and he’s found it in Perrine — she’s our Lenny-conduit, our chronicler who’s guiding us through the chapters of his life. She’s in the film from the first frame – the camera gasps over her lips, thin and fatigued, as she’s being interviewed by an unknown man, a sort of stand-in for the filmmaker. She speaks with a cool, mellow humility, as if resigned, sighing heavily between sentences with continual tire; it’s the same kind of shtick employed in “Leaving Las Vegas” (which also drew so much from “Klute”), only, here, it really works – these interview scenes call for a huge level of improvisation on Perrine’s part, and a flimsy understanding of this character could’ve proved Perrine’s undoing. She could've easily veered into the territory of self-indulgence, as many an actress could overdo mannerisms in such scenes, but you can feel Perrine’s playing off of instinct — there seems to be a sort of hypnotic, snap-snap rhythm that lives inside her; the way she flirts through her lines fools us into thinking she’s lived through Honey Bruce her whole life. Her face wears the wear-and-tear look of a has-been – it’s filled with quiet wrinkles, dimmed flickers of once-beauty that hasn’t totally disappeared but certainly isn’t as pronounced as it once was. But she carries the same unconscious, sexy charge Debra Winger had ten years later in “Mike’s Murder”, too – her sentences trail, her words trip over each other, and she bites onto the bottom of her lip, giggling, as if she’s always on the verge of collapsing into a daydream.

This slow, pulsating poetry in her speech somehow makes her exciting to watch and daringly appealing, even in the dreariest of scenes — what Perrine has here is what few other actresses have ever shown these days: a willingness to attack a role with such unstudied spontaneity that the line between acting and behaving somehow blurs. She’s so relaxed on the screen that even when she’s running the gamut of every palpable, possible human feeling right in front of us, she refuses to make it so overbearing that it's Bergmanesque (it’s more like Bergman-lite). This is no Liv Ullmann in “Face to Face” scenario, where the actress is expected to cry, giggle, cough, and snort all in one fell swoop; it’s the kind of microchameleonic performance that requires its performer to accrue small, minute changes in psychology that show themselves only in a matter of a few seconds, some brief moments. Perrine becomes a mercurial creature of her own in these scenes, communicating not only this woman’s deep love for Lenny but her attachment to him, too — she makes us understand how a woman like her would be attracted to Lenny, how their relationship seems a union of two wounded souls who’d go on to wound each other even more, how deeply she’d fall in love with him, and how this kind of love would linger on twenty years later, long after his departure. Viewed in this context, Honey becomes the tragic character I think Julian Barry wanted her to be — that bouncy shiksa wife we see in flashbacks (there’s one dazzling striptease scene near the beginning of the film that is pure Fosse) is a far cry from the more reserved, melancholy woman we’re speaking to. The present-day Honey is a fascinatingly cryptic entity herself — is she still in love with him, or isn’t she? Was she ever jealous of him? Resentful? Or has she reconciled all these feelings? Perrine leaves it terribly ambiguous, but this is perfect — we aren’t supposed to know. Her work here seems to transcend traditional characterization; she’s so flesh-and-blood that she’s lifted beyond the confines of the written page and seems to fold ambiguities into her character almost naturally, without conscious awareness of it. Even her way of speaking suggests multifacetedness, a thousand different colors flying out of her mouth all at once.

But Fosse’s so concerned with all his cinema-verite mish-mashing that style takes precedence over characterization, and that’s what I think Perrine suffers from, if only a bit — Pauline Kael referred to this performance as “affecting but limited”, and that’s probably the best way to describe it. How much more can anyone take of Valerie Perrine casually tossing her head, sighing, “you know, Lenny and I,”, and crying? Her mere presence is like a relief to us, but, even then, there’s one point near the end of the film during which it almost seems she’s hitting the same notes all over again. Perrine obviously — clearly — has the capacity to go much deeper, but Fosse limits her so much that she’s never able to, and so we’re left with something that feels terribly one-note; Honey ends up feeling like more of an artifact, a plot device who’s only meant to advance our sense of martyrdom for Lenny. There are only suggestions of a much deeper, emotionally complicated (or even tortured) woman inside of her — there’s one scene in which Lenny ridicules her for having affairs with other women (Honey’s bisexuality was apparently a very well-known part of what caused the two to separate), and there are other hints of low self-worth (one character refers to her as Lenny’s “no-talent wife”). I feel like there may have been some sort of marvelously tragic has-been of her own buried behind all of this, but Julian Barry never lets this pan out. In this sense, her performance almost naturally becomes a supporting one, if only because Barry, on the written page, never lets Honey become a true entity of her own.

This has almost nothing to do with Perrine, though, because she does everything she can in her power to imbue this sketch with humanity; she does it so well that she lives and breathes on the screen. Perrine’s work here, in my mind, remains one of the best performances ever lensed on film. It’s a difficult performance to describe because it doesn’t even seem like a performance — it’s unadorned by typical trappings of screen acting; she inhabits this character in such a non-decorative, inviting way that she’s a continual delight to watch, even in those morose scenes. There’s a draw to her that is so strange that it’s difficult to verbalize; she’s perfect for this role in the same way Diane Keaton would be three years later in “Annie Hall” — so perfect that the actress and the role seem to be one and the same. Her affectations never reek of self-indulgence, they reek of humanity — and even when she’s dealing with the most banally sentimental, carefully prosaic dialogue, Perrine still has a way of making all of this seem so alluring, so real. There’s one horrible line she’s stuck with near the end of the film in which she recalls Lenny as being “just so damn funny” — I think Fosse wanted to underline how tragically pathetic a figure Honey herself had become through this one line, but didn't quite get it. But no matter, because Perrine’s reading of it seems to erase any of the claim’s inherent absurdity. This is the kind of performance today’s actresses should try to duplicate — there’s nothing on the screen like this anymore. It's intensely plaintive, meditative work, and Perrine throws herself into this role with such easy emotional abandon that it doesn’t seem like she’s acting at all.

BEST ACTRESS 1974: GENA ROWLANDS IN "A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE"

2010-09-02T00:38:00.006-04:00

What better way to show your love for your spouse than to create a tour-de-force, anti-Hollywood film for her? John Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under the Influence” is rightfully regarded as a masterwork these days, and its reputation owes much, of course, to the work of wife Gena Rowlands; her tour-de-force is now considered legendary, shattering every preconceived notion of screen acting in the same way Marlon Brando did two years earlier in “Last Tango in Paris”. The great Pauline Kael, certainly not one of Cassavetes’ fans, criticized him for what she saw as his way of embarrassing his audience into embracing his so-called realism, which was really just as pretension-ridden as any shameless highbrow arthouse hit. In her mind, he’d guilt the audience into showing them “real life” — in this case, his romantic view of domestic turmoil — with unflinching fearlessness; I think her criticism of the director seems to sum up what many of our gut reactions to Gena Rowlands are. She charts such unfamiliar, generally unexplored territory with her work here that she makes us feel uncomfortable, and as a result we call it great art because that’s our knee-jerk reaction to what we don’t understand or may feel a little ashamed by; her performance is essentially Oscar-bait cleverly hidden behind layer upon layer of Cassavetes’ seedy depiction of reality, so much that the sensationalist starts to feel a little honest, the absurd a little more familiar.

Here, Rowlands is Mabel Longhetti, part of a blue collar social fabric that’s slowly coming undone; she’s the kind of woman whose weird, idiosyncratic mannerisms you nervously play along with because you don’t know what else to do. This is exactly what a man who Mabel meets does one night, when she wanders into a bar in her half-not-really-there stupor; he’s just like us, drawn to her incredible beauty as he denies her impulsive neuroses, brushing them off as a mere afterthought. Yet when she wakes up in bed with this man the next morning, she yells and refers to him as Nick, her husband’s name — of course she would. She doesn’t know anything beyond her husband and her children; her mind’s a pop-up horror storybook on the cult of domesticity. In truth, Mabel is presented as a woman who's rocking back and forth between two commitments — commitment to her family and commitment to herself. It seems she’s spent so much time caring for and loving her children that she’s lost sight of herself; this manifests itself in the form of Rowlands’ crinkly nose-scrunches, tornado hand gestures, erratic eye-blinks. She lapses into birdlike trances, cloud-drifts that seem to last forever, finger-flicks and claws at dust that isn’t really there. She mocks the way people speak in child-voices; she'd be absurdly crude if not for her astonishing, incandescent beauty. To us, she has gone crazy.

But Cassavetes has insisted that Mabel isn’t crazy at all. By this, Rowlands' performance shouldn't be viewed as some unflinchingly honest look at insanity or how a psychotic woman materializes in a lower-middle class household; rather, Mabel is a woman who's slowly descending into her own worldview. Cassavetes doesn't necessarily present Mabel as psychotic, but rather as a woman who prefers to reject normalcy and view the world in her own way; our knee-jerk reaction, especially with our limited societal view, is to call her insane. On the one hand, she may seem like an exaggeration of domestic complicity gone horribly wrong. Her working-class husband asks, “This woman cooks, sews, makes the bed, washes the bathroom. What the hell is crazy about that?” In fact, every other performer — Peter Falk’s overcontrolling macho madman Nick, Nick’s passionately zany mother — can be called crazy in a way that we’re familiar with, because they’re so far down the road of viewing her as the docile housewife; Mabel’s “craziness”, though, is unlike anything we’ve ever seen, so our sympathies fall on her side because we don’t quite understand her even though we want to. What Rowlands does is reshape madness into something else — madness isn't madness to Mabel, it’s a thought process. She’s so impenetrable that we never see the wheels turning in her head; there could be a fucking horse derby taking place inside her mind, but she’s never so transparent that we’d know: her head operates on a playing field of its own.

Cassavetes created this role for Rowlands after she wanted him to show the struggles of women in their era, so it's no wonder that he depicts Mabel as a victim of patriarchy. Mabel is a feminist heroine in the finest sense of the phrase because she’s portrayed as a reaction against this social order; she’s been so confined to the house, it seems, that she has lost sight of normalcy. And who can blame her? She seemingly has little else to do with her time but wait for her kids or wait her husband to come back home from work, so of course she’d find this subconscious way of rejecting it. Rowlands is acting knowing that we’re watching her — we never lose much sympathy with Mabel, even when we lose sight of what the hell she’s doing with her banshee movements and bunny hops; we realize she has a right to her feelings, her “madness”, because she’s a helpless victim of a life she hasn't had the chance to live. This is perhaps most evident in the scenes after Mabel comes back from being institutionalized, when our sympathies directly shift toward her; we’re no longer embarrassed by her, we’re embarrassed for her and the way she’s blatantly misunderstood by her well-meaning family. No one sees what she sees except us (and her children); when she helplessly asks her father to stand up for her, we want to stand up for her instead.

But Rowlands is acting knowing that the Academy’s watching her, too. Even if Cassavettes himself was curiously anti-Hollywood in his directorial approach, this is a performance that’s practically begging for Hollywood’s approval; Rowlands is occasionally a bit more than self-indulgent in her approach to this character — there’s a point near the middle of the film, right before Mabel’s institutionalized, where it seems she’s occasionally playing more of an experiment than a person. Where Peter Falk gives a bravura performance as Rowlands’ very flawed husband, making it clear exactly where this man’s flaws come from, it’s as if Rowlands is holding us by the throat and commanding us to stand back and admire at how great a technician she is. (We shouldn’t forgive her for all her zany, twisted affectations with the excuse that Mabel is “crazy”, and that it’s okay for her to do whatever the hell she wants.) This is not a great performance because of it’s a so-called ‘experiment in the craft’ that rejects everything we’ve ever known about screen acting; it’s a great performance because Rowlands almost always refuses to play an idea rather than a character. Mabel isn’t some stand-in for all the neuroses of lower middle-class Americana untangling itself with the torturous, unsure rhythm of a disastrous Bach concerto; she’s a woman of her own, a unique one, something that Rowlands seems to recognize and take pride in. Rowlands’ clawing animalism and jerky fearlessness in communicating this woman’s mind could’ve twaddled into something completely insufferable, but, for the most part, it doesn’t — she's fascinatingly sympathetic, particularly in the scenes that show her almost natural rapport with her children (there’s a fabulously moving sequence in which she bids her children goodnight near the end of the film, one of the best scenes ever captured on film in the seventies). The performance is so draining that it’s difficult to pinpoint individual moments like these (the cumulative effect is so hollow), but there’s another fabulous scene that seems to encapsulate what I think Rowlands wants us to take away from her interpretation. Early on in the film, she impersonates a dying swan, flapping her imaginary wings and pointing her imaginary beak to the tune of Swan Lake; in this moment, Mabel is all at once ravishingly beautiful, incomprehensibly unstable, and mesmerizing. We, like everyone else, are drawn to her because of her harrowing beauty; the pieces, jagged as they are, shouldn’t fit together, but somehow they do — Rowlands shapes Mabel’s shapeless view of the world into something of incredible beauty.

BEST ACTRESS 1974: ELLEN BURSTYN IN "ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE"

2010-08-31T03:02:00.004-04:00

If we classify “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” as a road movie — which, by conventional standards, it isn’t really — Ellen Burstyn’s brazenly uneven characterization may really just work. Most road movies are defined by the main character’s need for some sort fulfillment of personal identity, and that’s exactly what Burstyn’s Alice wants: she’s a woman who’s always defined herself in terms of every man in her life, and, once her husband dies, that already flimsy self-perception of herself’s thrown into flux. So of course she’d chase her childhood dream of going to Monterrey and becoming a singer — her worldview's been so stifled by the wiles of the American man that she’s never gotten to develop her sensibilities further than what she wanted when she was younger. Burstyn’s Oscar win is unabashedly one of the category’s high points — she has the ability to bring out so much pleasure from her viewers, taking us under her wing and lifting us into this place that’s both strangely familiar and cathartically unknown; it’s a glorious performance in a glorious film. (Her achievement can't even touch her otherworldly career-best turn in "Resurrection", though, living proof that Burstyn's one of the finest cinematic actresses of her generation.) But there’s so much to fault with Burstyn’s work here, too, and that’s because the film’s message itself is unclear and muddled even when it’s abnormally absorbing.

Burstyn herself was in the final stages of a divorce during filming, and she, like Alice, was forced to go through some deep introspection; she was struggling to find herself after abandoning so much of what she modeled her life around. Her rapport with this character is palpable, but that doesn’t alleviate the fact that Getchell’s view of Alice seems a little unclear, even from the start — she’s sharp-tongued and witty when she’s with her son, but she’s Nora Helmer around her husband. This contradiction alone seems a little implausible — how can we honestly believe a woman so snappily impertinent and sarcastic as Alice can play second fiddle to her husband? I just don’t buy that she’d be the vulnerably docile wife who bows down to her hubby's every word; Alice’s personality seems too stubbornly eccentric for that. Still, there’s something charming about Alice’s lack of character here that’s incredible to behold — in one early scene, when she’s sitting at a silent dinner table with her son and husband, she pretend-talks to herself, acting out the conversation as if someone’s actually listening on the other end. The title of the film itself suggests a total break from the domesticity she’s been so used to, and the film presents Alice as a woman who’s just itching to burst out of this domestic shell — and that’s what she gets, inadvertently, when her husband dies unexpectedly in a car crash. From this point on, Burstyn makes the shrewd decision of interpreting the film as a tragicomedy; there’s something intentionally ironic about the way she slips from wandering grief to bullheaded independence in one fell swoop, and her breakneck comic timing in these scenes just couldn't be better. (There's one glorious line in which Burstyn ad-libs, "Don't be rude to your mother, she just bought you a cheeseburger!") I feel the same way about her as I do about Debra Winger in “Terms of Endearment” — she plucks such offbeat, unknown emotions in this film that she becomes a marvel before our very eyes, working off of feelings I’ve never known I had; she’s exhilarating to watch.

But Winger’s downfall in “Terms” is Burstyn’s, too — the writers don’t seem to know what to do with her. Alice oscillates between wailing like a banshee and being her usual snide self in such an uncharacteristically arrhythmic way that I start to lose sympathy with her; of course Alice wouldn’t know who the hell she is — we don’t have a damn clue, either. Getchell’s screenplay seems to lose Alice amidst its slice-of-life realism, attempting to whet appetites of both those who want a female empowerment picture and those who simply want to be entertained. “Feminist film” my ass — the film suggests that Alice is, ultimately, still in need of a man to help her realize her own self-worth; in this case, it’s a New Age, ranch-farming hippie played by Kris Kristofferson. The film’s rhetoric itself is contradictory, and, even when it’s absurdly entertaining, it doesn’t ever let Alice’s nagging insecurities calm down. So we’re left with a character who’s constantly hitting the same notes over and over again, to the point at which Alice’s seemingly down-to-earth lifestyle becomes a hyperactive fairytale; Burstyn’s the heart and soul of this picture at both its faults and its virtues. Alice is a contradiction, all right, and it’s up to Burstyn to give reality to the notion that all these contradictions can be contained in one woman’s body; she’s all at once grounded, head-in-the-clouds, naive, street-smart, cynical, optimistic, sisterly, maternal, needy, independent.

Burstyn is so winning that it’s hard to denigrate this performance in any way — she borders on occasional brilliance, particularly in ones where her usual circus of emotion comes to a temporary sleep. Burstyn has a wispy, snowflaky singing voice that Scorsese uses to perfect effect in the film’s bar scenes; Burstyn seems to whisper through her songs, providing Alice — and us, too — temporary solace from her day-to-day, manic insecurities. The camera circles round and round and round Burstyn until we’re so absorbed in her musicality that we feel exactly what singing means to her; she’s so of-the-moment that we come to recognize what this woman’s been looking for, and we think that she may have just found it. There’s a similar musicality in a scene that takes place on Kris Kristofferson’s farm when the two lovers finally kiss, probably one of the most enduring images I’ve ever encountered in any film — every single one of Burstyn's gestures and movements here is rooted in authentic romanticism, her diction so whispery and mellowed that she lifts the film onto a whole other plane in the span of this one scene. She’s so moving, so touching here that she creates an impression that’s impossible to forget; this scene alone is worth an Oscar. The scene afterwards, though — an improvisational scene in which Burstyn’s acting out her childhood in Kris Kristofferson’s kitchen while wearing a bathrobe — embodies everything that’s both phenomenally right and tragically wrong about her work here; as breathtaking as she is to watch, her performance comes dangerously close to feeling more like a masterclass in method realism than an actual, flesh-and-blood character coming to life on screen. There’s a point at which we stop seeing Alice live and start seeing Ellen Burstyn act — and, as incredible as her scene-to-scene cheekiness may be, what is she playing? There’s a character in here somewhere, but the film doesn’t ever really define who Alice is (or, more importantly, who she becomes), and that’s exactly what’s missing from Scorsese’s storytelling; by this, Burstyn isn’t playing a character. She’s playing a concept — a woman “finding herself”.

BEST ACTRESS 1974: FAYE DUNAWAY IN "CHINATOWN"

2010-08-30T02:33:00.009-04:00

After sense prevailed and Ali MacGraw’s name was detached from “Chinatown”, Jane Fonda and Faye Dunaway were both in the running for the now-iconic role of Evelyn Mulwray — and who can imagine anyone but Dunaway in the role nowadays? Evelyn Mulwray’s one of those indelible creations in 1970s American cinema, so ingrained in our public filmgoing conscience that it’s difficult to see anyone else playing her. She’s the heart and soul of this film, the sorry symbolic personification of the corruption that’s abound in this world; Evelyn’s a stand-in for Chinatown as a whole, a land that’s been so morally raped that its psychology is cornering in on itself. And yet the Fonda-obsessor in me can’t help but think what Jane would’ve done with this role — isn’t the obvious rehearsal in Fonda’s voice just perfect for a character like Evelyn, a woman who pre-screens every word in her head before she lets it out into the air? Though Polanski vehemently insisted on casting Dunaway, he got a bit more than he bargained for — the director and his leading lady were notorious for their on-set fights; for every off-screen fight Polanski had with Dunaway, though, he did come away from the project with one conclusion about her — that every fight was worth it, solely by virtue of the finished product she left him with.

Even if Evelyn seems like a total noirish heroine of the thirties and forties at first glance, she doesn’t fit the femme fatale mold at all — she’s a victim, and therefore a seventies heroine in the finest sense; she’s the root of a family tree that’s branching onto itself, and, though we don’t sense why she’s so troubled at first, we notice there’s something off-kilter about her. Everything about her seems cross-stitched with fear and fragile, skittish catatonia; there’s a layer of steeliness to the rote-like, careful precision of her diction that’s invariably masking a disturbed soul. There’s a monitor built into Evelyn’s head that gives her a layer of distance — she runs every thought through her mind before she verbalizes anything; making it through a sentence seems a relief for her. She’s the 1930s version of Carrie White — her worldview’s limited to what her parent (here, the oppressive father figure) has shown her, and, in this case, he’s shown her hell. Evelyn’s the kind of woman who’s becoming so distrusting of those around her — all of whom represent a part of the society she’s deemed oppressive — that she closes herself off and fears letting anyone in; every word she says is a lie.

Yet she’s hardly conniving — she’s a prickly icebox of trippy, acidic vulnerabilities, with twisted childlike sensibilities awkwardly trapped in a grown woman's body. Towne doesn’t make it clear whether or not Evelyn’s father had her consent in their sexual relationship, and Dunaway’s haunting precision is so in line with this moral ambiguity that Evelyn’s damaged goods take on a psychological mind of their own. Dunaway doesn’t just create a woman who’s repressed — Evelyn is so psychosomatically damaged that she, too, may just have started to adopt the same immoralities her father’s shown her; she’s so twisted that what’s normally considered ethically wrong by our standards may just seem right in her mind. Dunaway, too, always keeps herself in-check with this character’s sheltered-girl persona; even when she’s that blooming soul who finds herself flowering open at the hands of Jake Gittes, there’s still something glacial and self-consciously wary about her, even in bed. The duality to Evelyn’s view of Jake is particularly complex, because Dunaway makes clear how flimsily Evelyn seesaws between trust and distrust of this man.

There’s something incredibly distant about the way Polanski directs his actresses, though, and even if we’re not necessarily meant to probe into Evelyn’s soul — we’re seeing her through Jake’s eyes, after all — this distance is what keeps Dunaway’s near-brilliant work from reaching the highest of heights. Polanski directed Mia Farrow fantastically in “Rosemary’s Baby”, but, otherwise, I couldn’t feel too much for Catherine Deneuve in “Repulsion”, and I sure as fuck didn’t feel a damn thing for Nastassja Kinski in “Tess”. In so many of these films, Polanski’s presented his females as victims of both their situations and their subsequent psychologies, but we’re always seeing these women being victimized from afar; their skin is never our own. “Chinatown”, just like “Tess”, is a film that’s so overwhelmed by the director’s vision that everything else seems dwarflike in comparison — in this sense, Dunaway sometimes seems like that vampish, decorative prop who’s serviceably fulfilling Polanski’s vision; he seems to know exactly how to use her incredibly well within the context of his film.

But for all the insistence Polanski heaped upon this team so he’d get his way with having Dunaway in this role, there’s something that feels fundamentally wrong about her casting here. Of course the mere suggestion that she’s miscast seems like sacrilege, but Dunaway’s big-boned, skeletally colossal facial structure seems so off for a handle-with-care, mothlike broad like Evelyn. Dunaway has a Neanderthal-esque beauty here that’s fascinatingly off-kilter, so much that she seems to be growing out of herself; she seems letter-perfect as a noirish femme at first, but, the moment the light hits her cheekbones, you realize her face is really a deathly Halloween mask, hiding this woman’s near-ghost of a soul. Yet Dunaway seems intent on bringing grande-dame histrionics to a woman whose struggles are so acutely wired, and her approach to this character seems to border on the absurdist and melodramatic. It’s the kind of high-impact part that should’ve been pulled off with low-impact aplomb, but Dunaway — especially under Polanski’s very heavy directorial hand — seems so intent on registering Evelyn’s paranoia in giraffe-like, theatrical terms that she pillows the impact of her tragedy; the film’s climax, which arrives in the form of Evelyn’s revelation is brutally effective, but it’s rooted in camp, too. Stephen Schiff, while writing about Louis Malle’s fantastic “Atlantic City”, wrote that Susan Sarandon was ‘perfectly miscast’ in her role, and that’s something I’d agree with — her perpetually-stupefied, googly-eyed look is so haunting that her Sally Matthews, in all her China Doll-like delicacy, becomes one of the most indelibly rich creations I’ve ever seen in cinema. What starts out feeling strangely wrong ends up feeling so cathartically right in Sarandon's case — I think that’s what Polanski may have been trying to do with Dunaway here, but it doesn’t quite work. Malle’s auteristic style, while prominent, never overwhelmed his film like Polanski’s did “Chinatown”; it was always in balance with its performers. Evelyn Mulwray’s such an iconic cinematic character that I shouldn’t be able to imagine anyone else in this role. Sometimes, I can.

BEST ACTRESS 1974: DIAHANN CARROLL IN "CLAUDINE"

2010-08-27T00:56:00.006-04:00

In both “Julia”, the television series for which Diahann Carroll became something of a household name, and “Dynasty”, she played women who enjoyed plush suburban, conspicuously apolitical lifestyles; her Claudine, then, is a woman who’s inhabiting this exact world Julia and Dominique Deveraux skirted away from. She’s a single mother of six kids living on welfare, residing in the ghettoes of Harlem; this role was originally written with Carroll’s friend Diana Sands in mind, but when Sands dropped out due to a severe illness (and died soon after), Carroll took over. Through the early-to-mid-seventies, Carroll was very much the queen of glamour, often accused of enjoying an apolitical lifestyle herself -- she was one of those Jackie O prototypes who served as the model for the first black Barbie doll. But here, as Claudine, Carroll’s glitz doesn’t detach herself from the realism of this character; she sheds that public persona and interprets Claudine as a full-bodied, spirited victim of the treacherous welfare system. In all her de-glammed glory here, Carroll’s able to use her star quality to pull us into this woman’s psychology even when the film doesn’t really allow us to; she creates the only sense of genuine sociopolitical authenticity that the rest of the film strives for.

“Claudine” is so dated that it’s difficult to look at it as anything more than an artifact of its time, even if it’s become something of a minor classic -- it’s so insular and singularly shot that it feels like TV Land’s treatise on the 1970s welfare system. It’s plagued by the sort of episodic fragmentation that shows us everything that’s happening but never really lets us get close to it; we’re so distanced from these characters that we’re just seeing these incidents without any real rhythm. But for all the sitcom-like contrivances this film presents, Carroll, in all her goddess-like regality, is able to rise above this material and shoot right through to this woman’s soul; she’s using some of her roots in television to perfect effect here -- she knows exactly what appeals to mass audiences and how to bring feelings out of them without ever chewing the scenery. Claudine is, in many ways, like the exact character Carroll lost the Oscar to -- Burstyn’s Alice is, too, a pipe-tongued, down-on-her-luck single mother who, through very dire circumstance, realizes how quietly she’s been burning for some kind of personal fulfillment life hasn’t yet given her. In this case, personal fulfillment arrives in the form of Roop (the glorious James Earl Jones), a strapping garbage collector who’s neglected three kids of his own, and it’s through him Claudine sees some sort of happier life for herself and her children.

But this woman’s anxious, trembling fussiness with the system is channeled into controlled, vitriolic spit-vigor by Carroll; Carroll’s character is inherently more self-assured than the panicky Alice -- or, at least, she appears to be. Claudine presents herself as a headstrong woman who barges her way through every situation, so quick-witted and fast-paced that we can’t say a thing without having her retort. She’s the kind of woman who’s so street-smart that she thinks everyone’s full of nonsense -- she certainly doesn’t take any from her kids, at whom Carroll lashes out with unbounded maternal furies that manage to be both hilarious and telling; not from the welfare worker who visits her, either (there’s one hilarious quip where Claudine mockingly asks if the welfare worker would “like a beer?”). Carroll seems to have no trouble encapsulating this woman’s whole lifetime -- and, more importantly, how she’s come to view it -- in a matter of a few glances; she attacks each situation with such self-deprecation that it’s as if she’s learned to make light of her very desperate situation. This is a serio-comedy, of course, so we won’t be seeing Claudine’s life presented with gritty, down-in-the-dirt realism, and Carroll seems acutely aware of this; to those critics of Carroll’s performance who cite that she’s just too phony or glamorous to convincingly play a woman living below the poverty line, I say, “phah!” Not once does she provide the condescension only a sophisticated, jetsetting rich star like Carroll could give to this role. Carroll herself has said that she’s always felt this character was very close to her heart, and you can feel it -- she’s drawing from this source of kinship with this woman with brutal life force, demonstrating that she’s got that glorious, unfettered ability to simultaneously inhabit her character and comment on her.

She doesn't fall victim to how episodic this film is, either -- Carroll has a way of exposing Claudine’s crescendoing anger at this system with these releases of small, revelatory emotional inkjets. It’s in the way her face pales in embarrassment when she’s walking up the stairs to Roop’s whore-infested apartment; it’s in her quiet surprise when her cantankerous, radical black power-obsessed son kisses her on the forehead -- Claudine’s got vulnerabilities that are inevitably hiding behind her steely-but-warm-hearted urban persona, and Carroll reveals them without completely slipping out of character. Even when she’s presented as guarded, and maybe even a little weak, Carroll doesn’t abandon that screechy, crackling voice that’s so characteristically Claudine’s. Carroll doesn’t need the didacticism of a script that’ll outline Claudine’s anger at this very exploitative societal system for her; she’s so skilled that she can communicate this part of Claudine’s frustration all on her own, through a matter of wordless glances that seem to lift this abstraction off the written page. She’s able to fold hints of cynicism into Claudine, too -- she's worn down by the cyclicality of this world, especially when she sees her daughter repeat those exact same mistakes Claudine herself made, but she's too world-weary to know that it’ll change so easily.

I just don’t see how this performance could be better. Carroll manages to make a greater political statement than any half-political tracts pursued by actresses in the late seventies, because hers is the kind of non-preachy exercise in social commentary that lurks behind an unbounded capacity for delight. In interviews, Carroll’s commented that Claudine reflects not only what many Harlem mothers were going through at the time, but also what many mothers living in the third-world poverty had to endure, too, but there’s nothing self-important about Carroll here -- she seems perfectly grounded in this character’s realism. She seems to enjoy a sort of natural command over the screen -- everything we feel in this film seems to radiate from those flares of her cartoonish, overstressed eyebrows. It’s a perfect screen performance. Carroll’s a great manipulator of our feelings -- she knows exactly what we want and draw it from us; she presents this woman’s rather dramatic dissatisfaction with life in a curiously non-dramatic, straightforward way that’s so accessible that we’re drawn to her shared experience. She somehow manages to exude radiant warmth in her fits of heated rage, never once losing sight of the fact that the primary role this woman’s taken on in her life has been that of a mother. Carroll always allows us to see how Claudine’s mind works -- we witness her thinking, plotting, and quickly shooting down ideas in her head with one fell swoop; we can see how quickly Claudine snaps right back up when she fears she’ll lose her cool. She’s an Almodovaresque heroine before Almodovar started making films -- the goddess who stands for this part of of the American feminine experience, required to slip-and-slide between different personas. Carroll has a way of doing this without ever losing touch with her character -- she plays Claudine with such low-key constancy that it never seems as if she’s acting, acting, acting while chewing away at this woman; she’s behaving.

BEST ACTRESS 1974

2010-08-24T14:19:00.000-04:00

BEST ACTRESS 1974

(Milwaukee Journal, March 1975)

Ellen Burstyn, "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"

Diahann Carroll, "Claudine"

Faye Dunaway, "Chinatown"

Valerie Perrine, "Lenny"

Gena Rowlands, "A Woman Under the Influence"

This year is fucking glorious. I can't wait to start reviewing.