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: 1982

Yes, it's that time of the month again, if you know what I mean. Yet another roundelay of Supporting Actress Sundays has been convened chez StinkyLulu, this time with Nathaniel, Ken, and myself as Stinky's proudly actressexual coffee-klatschers. This month we review the ballot from 1982, when Hollywood collective frrrrrreaked out about gender and its discontents. Not in that rigorous and politicized 1991 way, as in Poison or Paris Is Burning or High Heels or My Own Private Idaho or Naked Lunch; dontcha know by now, these aren't the Independent Spirit Awards. Instead, Oscar flirted with gender parody in a spirit that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, critic laureate of queer theory, famously dubbed "kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic." Jessica Lange and Teri Garr orbited and elevated the zippy, zingy man-as-woman drag in Tootsie; Lesley Ann Warren outcamped all comers in the draggy woman-as-man-as-woman drag of Victor/Victoria; Glenn Close bravely dignified and thereby ballasted the coy, cutesy-poo misogyny of The World According to Garp; and Kim Stanley paid her once-per-decade visit from the weird planet of Being Kim Stanley in Frances, a corrosive true-Hollywood story about a woman who could have stood a little more camp and a little less misogyny in her life. (Also a lot less gin, more reliable parents, a slightly less shit-heel boyfriend than Clifford Odets, and fewer tenures in a medieval asylum.)

As in all the best months, Nathaniel has bestowed upon us his own bit of frankincense and myrrh, in the form of one of his trademark Oscar clipreels. These movies all scored with the public, they haunt the hallways of Netflix, and they pop up on cable all the time, so here's hoping you've seen at least a few of them and feel like throwing a Comment our way. There's plenty of flying fur to go around when the SAS debates begin!

(Image © 1982 Columbia Pictures, reproduced from the Movie Screenshots blog)

Gothic Nightmares

Ever hear the one about the deranged movie star who clung with Apollonian vanity to the fading vestiges of stardom, imprisoning a tender young up-and-comer in a desperate final bid to win back a fickle public?

If you haven't, you can hear it now. Twice. First, Glenn Close has signed to reprise her role as Norma Desmond in a film musical of Sunset Boulevard. The musical, of course, was based on one of the greatest American movies of all time, though considering the adaptation is by Andrew Lloyd Webber, I have a feeling that it is not one of the greatest American musicals of all time. True, Norma's signature track, number, "As Though We Never Said Goodbye," is pretty enough, and Glenn's performance at the Tonys in 1995 was memorable. I love Glenn. I'm excited that she's been crawling back into the spotlight with the current arthouse release Heights, even though I'll be stunned if the movie is better than mediocre.

Perhaps, however, someone can explain to me how Ewan McGregor and Hugh Jackman have both signed on as co-stars? Assuming the musical is reasonably close to the film, I can't think of who the second younger man could be....

Meanwhile, also ready for their closeups are the increasingly ghoulish Tom Cruise, his zombie betrothed, and her "Scientology chaperone." Whaaa?? The indomitable Safire tipped her readers off to this hot-off-the-press W Magazine interview with the brainwashed ingénue itself. I swear, the photo you see at left is a still from the W photo spread, not from the upcoming Tim Burton animated opus The Corpse Bride. Seriously. I wouldn't lie about this.

How did Katie Holmes go so quickly from being the interesting upstart making smart, durable choices—Go, Wonder Boys, The Ice Storm—into this empty-headed vessel of pre-teen bubble-gum babble? How is anyone gon' sign up for a "religion" in which it is a recognized practice for the most devoted worshippers to commit themselves to the church for a period of a billion years? Seriously, read the article.

TomKat is more than a celebrity flare-up. It is genuinely grotesque, a real-life invasion of the body snatchers, except that "real life" doesn't really seem to play into it, anywhere. I continue to maintain that Tom Cruise is not gay, and I had George Michael pegged back in the days of Faith, so listen up, scouts. The 'dar is not pinging. Actually, that pinging sound you keep hearing is just the echo that results when a gust of air blows into Tom Cruise's ear.

So that is the big state secret: Tom Cruise isn't gay, he's just monumentally cocooned inside a narcissistic mental matrix of his own making, and now he has kickstarted the solenoids inside his greatest creation, a woman who says nothing except "I love you, Tom," in the manner of a parrot...which, come to think of it, was the same manner in which Katie delivered her performance in Batman Begins. Maybe that's the secret nature of their blood pact: she won't tell anyone that he's crazy like a platypus, and he won't fess up that she, under all the makeup, is not a humanoid at all, but a trained bird.

If Tom® and Katie™ want to go make sweet, naïve, plasticine, new-money, mumbo-jumbo, Mattel-style love under the polestar of L. Ron Hubbard, then let them have at it. But so long as they're chilling in outer space, could they send us back one of those cool memory-wipers from Men in Black? I'm trying to forget that I ever took either of them seriously. And as for the future, Katie, when you pen your Little Girl Lost tell-all book about how you just had, like, no. idea. what it would feel like to have the whole Cruise® PR Machine crashing down on your every move, shadowing every flick of your diamond jewelry and every maniacal cackle emitted by your daddy-substitute, I. am. not. buying. it.

I don't even think this relationship is a "hoax," per se. I think it's what happens when dumb people fall in love, loudly, in front of microphones. It doesn't even count as a fatal attraction, or a dangerous liaison, and it's more than a reversal of fortune, and more than a big chill. To use the only Glenn Close title that applies in this context, this is what it looks like when Mars attacks. Or, to plunder Katie's own filmography, this is straight-up Disturbing Behavior.