Supporting Actress Sundays: 1990

It's That Time of the Month again, when all of the acolytes of actressing collect at StinkyLulu's house to stump for and swipe at the best and the worst of a given year's Best Supporting Actress Oscar roster. Up to bat this month are the contenders from 1990. Together, they constitute a redoubtable and dissimilar field of actresses but, perhaps, a middle-of-the-road group of performances. You can, and should, read all about that over at the Smackdown. Dip into the warm, perfumed waters of the Comments section, and you'll also see that my own dream list of nominees for that year is probably:

GLENN CLOSE in Reversal of Fortune, who somehow missed a mention despite the film's multiple noms in leading categories, and despite being an 0-for-5 bridesmaid that everyone seems to like;
WHOOPI GOLDBERG in Ghost, who actually won the thing and, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't owe anybody an apology for that;
DIANE LADD in Wild at Heart, a performance championed by several Smackdowners despite the fact that most of us, myself included, have little love for the film;
JENNIFER JASON LEIGH in Miami Blues, who Tim and I agree does an affecting, funny, and atypically unhistrionic job of underplaying her dim Florida call-girl (and has the cinema's all-time best scene concerning vinegar pie); and
SHIRLEY MACLAINE in Postcards from the Edge, a film which you should already know is a favorite, in which MacLaine is an almost Whoopi-level hoot and a holler, and also a game belter and a surprisingly tough cookie, doing a terrific acting duet with Meryl Streep

Mary Alice in To Sleep with Anger might belong here, but she's construable as a lead, and I haven't seen the film in a long while. Helen Mirren also deserves a consolation prize, or maybe an actual nod, for making such brilliant, suggestive use of her screen time in The Comfort of Strangers, acing that Pinter dialogue and adopting a demure voice and delicate demeanor that still puts everyone on edge.

Of the three actress vehicles from 1990 that I screened in the last 24 hours, as a build-up exercise to this morning's Smackdown, the jewel is Paul Brickman's Men Don't Leave, in which fans of You Can Count on Me or Truly, Madly, Deeply will recognize another tart, carefully measured, wonderfully acted tale of bereavement, quiet comedy, and persuasively wrought ties to family, neighbors, lovers, and friends. Joan Cusack gives one of her best Kooky Joan performances as the downstairs eccentric who's putting the moves on Jessica Lange's 17-year-old son, very well played by Chris O'Donnell; Arliss Howard and Kathy Bates are also incredibly deft and funny in their roles as Lange's pseudo boyfriend and insensitive boss. Lange comes closer to Tootsie-style melancholy comedy than she has before or since, and it's nice to see her at comparative ease for once. The writing, especially in the first two-thirds of the film, is clever and economical, and the editing achieves poignancy not by dawdling but through carefully timed pruning and expertly showcased moments. B

Bates pops up in a single scene of Luis Mandoki's White Palace, which also features a generation-gap relationship where the woman is again the senior partner. Susan Sarandon has several effective scenes as a working-class waitress at a "White Palace" restaurant that primarily slings bite-sized hamburgers (uh....), and James Spader gives his eerie, clammy eroticism another go as the upwardly mobile yuppie whom Sarandon takes home for a hot roll in the sack. Spader has a Sadness in His Past that he won't snap out of; Sarandon also has a Sadness in Her Past that she pretends to have snapped out of, which is a good thing, because the screenplay barely makes it playable. All in all, White Palace is one of those movies that rails against embarrassment and deceit while constantly lying and emanating embarrassment about the grief, the religious disparity, and the class divide between its characters, though Sarandon does sell a great fuck-you speech as she storms out of a well-appointed Thanksgiving dinner. C

The movie could have been worse but also could have been much better, which also describes Philip Kaufman's gorgeously photographed Henry & June. Sadly, the director's follow-up to The Unbearable Lightness of Being is nowhere near as confident or as mysterious. The effortful recreation of 1930s Paris looks fussy and tacky despite Philippe Rousselot's diligent attempts to sublimate it, the script is full of faux-serious and ersatz-literary howlers, and the cast simply isn't up to the complexities or the charismas of their characters. Fred Ward and Maria de Medeiros give things an honest go, but either they don't have a knack for stylized performance, or else their maladroit versions of realist acting come across as failed stylization. Kevin Spacey and Richard E. Grant are cloying in second-tier parts, and Uma Thurman is, as so often, a disaster. The period seemingly means nothing to her except a reason to assume awkwardly "sultry" poses and stares in a series of exotic outfits, and she hasn't got the head for the writerly themes nor the physical grace required for the slinky character and mise-en-scène. Some welcome touches of wit are scattered through the film, and you can see the smarter, tighter movie lurking beneath the existing version, but it's still a bit of an ordeal. C

As for the nominated Supporting Actress movies, I'd give The Grifters a B– for nastily diverting but annoyingly hollow showmanship; Goodfellas an A– for prodigious, engaging technique and daringly comic overtones, whatever its lapses into autopilot machismo and style for style's sake; Ghost a B+ (and y'all can complain if you want to) for playing its sentimental plotline affectingly straight and also for laughs, and working the machinery of Pop Cinema quite deftly; Wild at Heart a C+ for finding 20 minutes' worth of truly startling images within 124 minutes' worth of drafty self-indulgence; and Dances with Wolves a B for telling an embarrassingly Uncle Tom's Cabin-level tale of white male sentiment, and orbiting around a terrible Costner performance, but nonetheless achieving real majesty in its score, its cinematography, and its editing.

Supporting Actress Sundays: 1974

StinkyLulu, that deft miner of silver linings, that veritable Mrs. Dalloway of the Supporting Actress set, manages to host an ebullient and invigorating party even when the crop of nominees is as grim as I found the 1974 vintage to be. The first of these performances I ever saw was Diane Ladd's in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and while I'm a fan of this flawed but precociously affecting movie, and while Ladd's tart, flavorful turn as Flo has grown on me over the years, I never imagined that she'd emerge as my pick of any litter. But so it is. Ingrid Bergman and Talia Shire remain as off-putting now as they were when I first saw their movies, and though I was excited for my first encounters with Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles and François Truffaut's Day for Night—two diametrically dissimilar metafilmic comedies—neither the movies nor the performances by Madeline Kahn or Smackdown winner Valentina Cortese took me quite where I wanted to go.

With Claudine's Tamu Blackwell failing to ride the coattails of Diahann Carroll's Best Actress nomination; Lenny's Valerie Perrine vaulting successfully to the lead category; The Great Gatsby's Karen Black losing an Oscar nomination after winning a Golden Globe; Young Frankenstein's Cloris Leachman losing the Funnywoman Slot to Kahn (who herself impresses more in Frankenstein than in Saddles); and critical darling Bibi Andersson barred from contention for the rhapsodically received Scenes from a Marriage, Oscar compounded the problem of the year's slim pickings by exercising some bizarrely poor judgment and tripping badly over its own arcane eligibility rules. I'd like to believe that 1974's two fêted offerings from the late, great Robert Altman, either the gambling dramedy California Split or the eccentric bankrobbing yarn Thieves Like Us, might have yielded some piquant possibilities, but I haven't seen them.

If you have your own ideas about how Oscar might have made less of a muck of things in 1974, or if you want to stick up for his chosen field of five, please leave a comment here or chez Stinky. Give some props to the formidable Ladd, who also lent some picante sauce to her brief moments in Chinatown that same year. Don't lose sleep over the fact that Bergman's asinine victory in this race very probably cost her the Best Actress statue that was so obviously due her for 1978's Autumn Sonata; the catch-22 to being overcompensated with Oscars is that you tend not to win them when you finally deserve them. And let's look forward to December's Supporting Actress Shindig, which you, YOU, YOU have the power to route somewhere interesting. For novelty's sake, since I've only seen two movies apiece in each of these years, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for 1966 or 1984, though if the electorate anoints either 1975 or 1993, I get to revisit this life-defining masterpiece or this one. L'embarrass du choix!

(Image © 1974 Warner Bros. Pictures, reproduced from DVDClassik)