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.

Donnie Darko Redux

Donnie Darko has had another go at me, or I have had another go at it. The Director's Cut of the film played theatrically at Cornell tonight, and I am so glad that my friend Anna convinced me to shelve my grading for a couple hours and go. Donnie Darko looks more and more like one of the essential American movies of this decade. Any movie that keeps its secrets this beautifully—even after two viewings, even with 20 semi-"explanatory" minutes added, even with a plot that seems so overdetermined from the outset—any movie like this will be reckoned with for years to come.

Part of the ingenuity lies in Jake Gyllenhaal's performance, which pours itself so effortlessly into that eerie, impossible gap between Donnie's two selves: the charismatic inquirer who might just save his glazed-over suburb, and the seriously troubled soul whose anguish is cheated, reduced, if we only laugh with it, laugh at it, or lionize it. Gyllenhaal himself is both arresting-looking and utterly average; his acting is neither invisible nor strenuous. It is exactly, uncannily the performance the film needs.

Part of the ingenuity lies with Richard Kelly, the writer-director who was only 26 years old when this film opened—which means he can't have been more than 24 or 25 when he filmed it, and that he must have been younger than that when he wrote it. Somehow Kelly knew to stuff cotton in his ears whenever anyone near him said that you can't juxtapose a camp exchange between two Sparkle Motion mothers and a fearsome surrealist vision. That you can't recruit a cast this heterogeneous and ask them all to mesh together, and to take this teen-targeted hybrid curio so seriously. That you can't crash a jet engine into a family house, twice, in a movie that has almost no budget. That you can't use the synthiest of 80s pop bands as the discomfiting wormholes into the dark suburban hollow, with its sense of something going wrong, something complicated being canned for easier consumption. That you can't use music this way and yet also make it deliciously, nostalgically seductive. That you can't cast Drew Barrymore as a high-school English teacher, and a good one. That you can't cast an imaginary rabbit as the anti-Harvey, or cast an imaginary rabbit as anything, and still have your movie hold together. Fuck "hold together": emerge out of nowhere as the deserving and concurrent sibling of Mulholland Drive, as the movie American Beauty might wish it had been.

Donnie Darko scuttles all brands of fundamentalism without once seeming didactic, puffed-up, or politically motivated. It somehow mocks and embraces religiosity at the same time, and braids that rich agnostic thread with an equally judicious, equally questioning approach to psychiatry and secular "therapy." The movie treats the whole idea of genre like an antique, a distant memory, while assiduously flirting with nearly all available genres: science fiction, teen comedy, family drama, mystery, horror...

It is the first movie in eons to offer a pristine, unimprovable character performance where you least expect one, in the form of Mary McDonnell's priceless Rose Darko. And just when you think your amazement at McDonnell outstrips the film's interest in Rose, Kelly gobsmacks you by handing her the entire end of the film on a tiny, indescribably fragile platter. McDonnell works the same quiet, subtle sorcery here that Toni Collette did in The Sixth Sense, but she's even quieter, and even greater.

Donnie Darko knows its period, well beyond its shimmering tunes or even April Ferry's spot-on costumes. The 1988 context isn't for nothing. The squelching of conscience, the national covenant not to know things is what Kelly conjures, unobtrusively but ungratuitously, in those Bush-Dukakis debates, in the cresting wave of "self-help" as something you pay other people to model for you, even do for you.

Donnie Darko is a kind of minor miracle. I wonder what it's all about. Here was my best guess, crystallized in the movie's quick cut to a paperback of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Hawking's book was as much a paradox as Donnie Darko is, a profoundly subversive artifact that wormed its way into clubhouse argot and soccer-mom consciousness. Hawking suggested entirely new dimensions and relations in our universe, and still, for 99% of us, what the book amounted up to was the production of a new public eccentric. A minor celebrity who wrote a book that now naps on the shelf of Barnes & Noble. The film, tilled in the soil of suburbia rather than science, asks the question: what if the universe as we live it, not just as we theorize it, really isn't as we imagine it? In making the mundane as bottomless as the cosmic, Donnie Darko has the guts to remain a riddle itself. The looping, immensely idiosyncratic, uncertain narrative (still an enigma, don't you worry, despite the added footage) is a rebuke to the know-nothing era it spoofs, but a rebuke, too, to the cynical Y2K belief that somehow we know better now. The movie doesn't sell a theory, it implies one. It doesn't resemble Hawking's book, with its sellable lingo of the unknown; it resembles Roberta Sparrow's, which is frightened, fragmented, out of time. The movie forces you to wonder, maybe again or maybe for the first time, about immense questions which Kelly nonetheless refuses to put into words.

Anna, who had not seen the movie before, felt something else, and I found her thought brilliant, so I hope she'll allow my embellishments of it. She felt that the movie makes both palpable and terrible that very sensation which Donnie most fears: what would it feel like, the moment of dying alone? Donnie Darko circles and spins, it reveals and re-veils, it's funny and scary and sad and sharp, and in the middle of all that is this lonely soul who remains lonely, and who all but wills for himself the kind of final, essential instance of solitude he's been wondering about forever. The movie, stranding us among genres and implications, forcing us into our own private relationship with its uncanny spectacles, makes us, as we watch, even with friends or in a crowded theater, alone.

I like Anna's idea more than mine. (That is usually my experience of Anna's ideas.) Where I think our ideas intersect is how they embrace the notion that a movie can distill something intimate, in a unique and specific way that a book or a word might not have achieved. I am reminded of another of my favorite images from this movie, which is clearly in love with the inventive, descriptive, and emotive power of movies. What if the wormhole, the "liquid spear," isn't something that only Donnie can see? What if we can all see it? What if it's that silver screen we're looking at as we watch Donnie Darko? Richard Kelly has made one of those terrific movies about what movies are, and what they do: they transport us, into other worlds, but also into our own mystifying insides.


All images © 2001 Newmarket Films.