Cannes 1995: Day 12: May 28

The Quick and the Dead, USA, dir. Sam Raimi

Many people need no help appreciating Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man. If you're me and can't help feeling agnostic, recuperating more admiration for Jarmusch's affected earnestness and genuine idiosyncrasy is a lot easier after seeing a revisionist Western as flat and plodding as Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead Or Sharon Stone's The Quick and the Dead (she also produced), or whoever's The Quick and the Dead. Even the mid-90s' reigning Goldilocks can't save the movie from being too much or too little at all times. The narrative disarray is total—as evidenced by a major flashback tucked into the last ten minutes, which, incidentally, unfolds a scene the audience has already worked out—but even disarray is more interesting than the utter stasis of so many shots where Stone or Russell Crowe or Gene Hackman just stares at people, or the brute momentum of the shootout scenes where the same same same thing happens as the field of contestants winnows down to an utterly foreordained foursome. Raimi's attempts to wake himself aren't any more interesting than the impressions of Raimi asleep at the wheel. But rather than keep laying on Cannes's closing night film, I'm inclined to put pressure on the oft-invoked phrase "revisionist Western," because the John Ford retrospective that unfolded throughout the festival—25 features in ten days——shows that even peak-period Westerns by figures as major as Ford were "revisionist" as often as not. Few have been as austere in their outlook, albeit frequently purple in their prose, as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  This 1962 James Stewart/John Wayne vehicle, which could not possibly be more cannily cast, challenges and complicates so many myths of the frontier, the ballot box, the law, the state, and the gun that you're hard-pressed to find any Western trope that survives intact. I wish I'd had time for more of the Ford films, but boy was I glad to have saved them up so that I didn't finish on Raimi's folly, and I could take in a rounder, wider, bitterer scale of revision than the simple notion of a girl with a gun.

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Best Supporting Actress 1964: Oscar Noms & Better Ideas

Nathaniel has just posted this month's Supporting Actress Smackdown, dedicated to the nominated ladies of 1964. I'm not going to say this is Oscar's worst lineup in this category, but it's the only one I could think of where I don't like any of the five movies and don't love any of the five performances. I had one heck of a grouchy ballot, though I have to say, even more than usual, reading my fellow panelists' comments and participating in the first-ever post-Smackdown podcast gave me so many new ideas about the films, the nominated turns, and entire ways to think about acting. So, huzzah to Joe Reid, StinkyLulu, beloved actress Melanie Lynskey, and hat-wearing, chalk-gardening, iguana-taming, beach-dancing, Charlotte-hushing hostess Nathaniel Rogers, whom I love not only for his website and his insights into actressing but for the scrupulous eight-point agendas he sends before these conversations. (Just like he loves me for writing five 64-word capsules about these performances. I am amazing.)

Still, this doesn't change my opinion that AMPAS needed help picking better Supporting Actress alternatives in 1964. Given that the year's big hits and nomination leaders included Becket, Dr. Strangelove, The Best Man, Fail-Safe, Seven Days in May, Zulu, and A Hard Day's Night, I understand why they didn't feel surfeited with distaff contenders. But look—they didn't need to abandon the eligibility list or even move out of their favored genres and character types to produce a richer field:


Nominated: Gladys Cooper, as Henry Higgins's acerbic high-society mother in My Fair Lady

What I Thought: On the evidence of this film, Cooper's aged more gracefully than Cukor. She seems to be giving a tart but unostentatious reading of Mrs. Higgins, but like many of the actors, she is stymied by her director's distant, stagebound camera. We don't spend much time with her and barely see her when we do, making a capable if unchallenging performance seem even more minor.

Why Not Instead: Glynis Johns's dizzy suffragette in Mary Poppins, if Oscar insisted on short-listing a vivid peripheral player in one of the year’s big musical juggernauts, rendered by an irresistible character actress whose previous nominations had yielded no wins?


Nominated: Edith Evans, as the haughty, intractable guardian of a tiny pyromaniac in The Chalk Garden

What I Thought: If more people knew this movie, I would say, "Ask about me, Olivia, ask about me!" to narcissists at parties, and my intimates could all chortle. So GIF-able, Edith! Otherwise, this feels like a Dench-in-Chocolat nod. I know she's a Dame but it's hardly a peak role, and her emphasis on imperiousness clogs other possibilities in it. Moment to moment, her choices feel obvious.

Why Not Instead: Future Dame Maggie Smith, who's so saucy and insouciant as Anne Bancroft's torpid yet chatty frenemy in The Pumpkin Eater, the kind of movie that pedigreed English actresses should be making instead of odd Disney-Du Maurier mashups like The Chalk Garden. The many, gangly ways Smith finds of disrespectfully inhabiting Bancroft's kitchen are nod-worthy enough. Yootha Joyce is also pretty remarkable as a psychotic in normal-woman's clothing in the scene at the hair salon.


Nominated: Grayson Hall, as the self-hating Sapphic chaperone and geyser of anger in The Night of the Iguana

What I Thought: Hall is even more transfixing than the iguana, and almost more than Ava Gardner caressing shirtless houseboys in the moonlit surf. She's the first coming of Grace Zabriskie. I'm impressed her presence didn't get staler, given how the script keeps on forcing her through the same scene: approach neurotically, throw tantrum, swear revenge, repeat. Sadly, she short-changes the semi-repressed cravings that define the character.

Why Not Instead: Louise Latham in Marnie, who gives a master class in how to telegraph asphyxiated desires and make an instantly perverse impression while still flipping nimbly through every page of the character's highly compromised biography. She's as drily, tensely, indelibly quasi-maternal as Hall is, only she actually is the mother in question. Bonus points: equally bad hair!


Nominated: Lila Kedrova, the deserving winner, as the nostalgic hotelier, voluptuous but tremulous, in Zorba the Greek

What I Thought: I object to the role, which forces its interpreter through serial stereotypes: the delusional coquette, the gaudy epicurean, the whimpering toddler in an aging courtesan's body. Kedrova leans into some of these clichés, mugging with her face and body, limiting the impact of her sorry fate when it (inevitably) comes. But she works with what she's got, livening up this weirdly self-serious travelogue picture.

Why Not Instead: Irina Demick in The Visit, who's got a tough row to hoe in this allegory of mercenary money-hunger and human brutishness, another European movie with a motley cast. She anchors her own B–plot as a somewhat self-deceiving adulteress while busily crossing and re-crossing the film's vision of Moral Lines. She, too, has a funny ak-sahnt but she acts with greater candor and less forcing of effect.


Nominated: National treasure Agnes Moorehead, entering the Kitsch Hall of Fame as the servant in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte

What I Thought: Charlotte should be delicious but instead it tars everyone involved, giving them too little (Astor) or goading them to vandalize their talents (Davis). De Havilland proves you can enjoy yourself without sacrificing dignity. Hopefully Moorehead at least had fun. She’s a kick to watch, appears to recognize what claptrap she's in, and overacts as only a great actor could. But an Oscar, for cartooning?

Why Not Instead: Anna Ciepielewska, that household name, who keeps the audience guessing throughout the classic demon-possession drama Mother Joan of the Angels, a 1961 film that appeared on Oscar's eligibility list for 1964. Is Sister Małgorzata, forever running errands for the convent, the only nun who has resisted Satan's call? Or is she baiting the locals into trusting her, all the better to seduce and snare them? It's a carefully balanced turn even in an equally gonzo but more earnest high-Gothic environment than Charlotte's.

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What's that, Oscar? Still not biting? That's weird, but I'll give you one more shot to mend your ways. With less pressure to ape your own wonky template, what about this ballot?

Julie Christie, who's not exactly breaking the mold of the opaque, bewitching Mystery Girl in Billy Liar (another film belatedly eligible for Oscar in 1964) but who makes a remarkable impression given the limits of the role, suggesting for the first time in her glorious career how gifted she'll be at implying a lot but specifying little beneath her characters' pearlescent surfaces. She even manages to imply that Liz is just eccentric enough, or maybe just sympathetic enough, to be an appealing partner for Tom Courtenay's Billy, without implying they're likely to wind up together. Certainly, Supporting Actress nods have gone to bigger ciphers, less deftly and appealingly etched than this one.

Gloria Foster, future Oracle of the first Matrix movie, who blows pretty much everyone on this page out of the water in a few sequences of the groundbreaking African-American drama Nothing But a Man, playing the steel-spined wife of the protagonist's distant and morbidly alcoholic father. Is Lee an enabler, or a voice of hard truth to both father and son? In Foster's wizardly hands, with incredible, unfussy directness, the answer is both. What are her feelings, exactly, for Ivan Dixon's Duff? Everything Foster does, every way she is, seems to inform Duff's revised approach to his own bond with Abbey Lincoln's Josie (wondeful), but the actress is enigmatic enough that we're not quite sure what Duff is learning from Lee. I craved a sequel, though in truth I would have followed any of these characters into their own movie. Rent it.

Ava Gardner, who twice over seemed within striking distance of her second career nomination in 1964. She's a famously relaxed and effectively sensual presence in The Night of the Iguana, where she might have confused voters by straddling the lead-supporting line. Hall got nominated instead, as did Edmond O'Brien for John Frankenheimer's paranoid military thriller Seven Days in May, where Gardner effectively has the Kim Basinger part: the serene but plot-crucial female role in a big manly ensemble. She aces it, particularly in an extended rencontre with Kirk Douglas. He's in her apartment on false pretenses, but Gardner adds so much poignancy and layering to the sequence beyond its narrative import. What a year.

Speaking of people who barely missed, Irene Papas, who's at least as striking a presence as Kedrova in Zorba the Greek and figured importantly in several films AMPAS and critics' groups recognized across a decade, from Electra to Z to The Trojan Women, without ever scoring an Oscar nod for herself. I tend to dislike parts like the Widow in Zorba, a sort of unexplored placard for The Suffering of Women in Foreign Cultures, but Papas individualizes this nameless character. Cacoyannis and Lassally often get lured into filming Papas's face, dress, and body for graphic impact rather than character-revealing detail, but she still cuts through their aestheticizing visual schemes. (And if we're fishing around for international talents, borderline-lead Gunnel Lindblom in Bergman's The Silence was also eligible in 1964.)

Ann Sothern, who scored a Golden Globe mention for her busybody lobbyist in Gore Vidal's political pressure-cooker The Best Man. Sothern mostly recedes after making a big early impression, and maybe she goes with the slightly misogynist vein of the part, which understands women and women's investments in politics in a pretty narrow way. But Sothern gives Sue Ellen Gamadge potency, ferocity, and a gift for turn-on-a-dime public pretense, which is more than was asked of her in her belated nomination for 1987's The Whales of August. Note: this part was assayed recently on Broadway by Supporting Actress perennial Angela Lansbury and in an earlier Broadway production by Elizabeth Ashley. Along with Sothern, Ashley was the other 1964 Golden Globe nominee dropped for Oscar's ballot. She's not one of The Carpetbaggers's many, many problems, but I think my work here is done... beyond exhorting you to contribute your own suggestions below!

Monday Reviews: Borom sarret and Only When I Dance

I was disappointed not to be more impressed with Only When I Dance, a recent documentary about Brazilian teenagers aspiring for a spot in an elite ballet corps or an international academy. I have at least one friend who is partial enough to the film that I feel like a buzzkill. And contrary to what some readers might think, it's no fun to ruin a film's perfect Rotten Tomatoes record, even if, as a culture, we seriously need to get over our over-investment in that heuristic.

In any event, here's my full review of Only When I Dance, but I'm thrilled that I am able to chase it instantaneously with something else I wrote in the wee hours this weekend, in response to a real breath-catcher. If you don't know Ousmane Sembene's films, or you're feeling self-conscious at having never seen one and not knowing where to start, you could do a lot worse than his gorgeously controlled, wise, and economical short film Borom sarret. At 20 minutes, it's also perfectly sized for a break from heavy-duty manuscript work, which was also a plum recommendation for the 78-minute Only When I Dance. Both of them inspired a rush of words, but in Borom sarret's case, they're nothing but ecstatic praise. And in this case, I'm blazing a trail for a previously empty Rotten Tomatoes dossier. So, see the film, write it up, and give the Tomato-surfers more to chew on! Seriously, you have 20 minutes, and from where I'm sitting, you're unlikely to be sorry.

Actress Files: Natalie Wood

Natalie Wood, Splendor in the Grass
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1961 Best Actress Oscar to Sophia Loren for Two Women)

Why I Waited: Nat²: i.e., Natalie herself, because everything she's ever done has left me somewhere on the spectrum between indifferent and annoyed; and Nathaniel, who has been my dearly valued friend and primary co-conspirator in actress idolatry for seven years and counting. He loves Natalie. I love Nathaniel. By the transitive property, I was hoping I, too, could love Natalie. And people had suggested I could fairly expect a career-best turn...

The Performance: ...and I got one! Granted, I am not ready to call Natalie a great actress, and not just because her ratio of hits to misses is still so lopsided in my book. There is a stiffness in her physical and vocal carriage and a strained look on her face in too many moments of even her strongest turns. Closely in spirit to an earlier performer like Jennifer Jones or Elizabeth Taylor, or more contemporary stars like Naomi Watts, Uma Thurman, or Jennifer Connelly, Natalie always strikes me as having scored a lot of her breaks based on her extraordinary beauty, in ways that both pleased and irked her, and that she therefore devoted herself aggressively to building up credentials on different grounds. It's not just that her talents needed time to catch up with the breathless pace set by her looks and her early precocity, but that her notion of acting took shape rather too strictly as a desire to prove that she is capable of—perhaps even unduly focused on—the kinds of anguish and "emotional depth" that the culture has a hard time associating with such an eye-catching exterior. As with Thurman or Connelly, I often detect an inward, sympathetic connection with the layers of the women she plays, but an unnerving sense that she's trying to broadcast all of them through a disproportionate reliance on knowing smirks, stunned or self-consciously frozen expressions, and hammering gazes. The whole performance may well be roiling in the back of her head or choked on the tip of her tongue, but she's having a hell of time getting it across her features, into her body, or past her teeth, except in the moments when she rather unreservedly shakes it all out.

The ironic thing for me about her triumph in Splendor in the Grass is that her performance initially feels archetypal of all of my usual reservations, and in some ways never fully detaches from them. Nonetheless, gradually but thrillingly, Wood's take on Deanie Loomis reveals itself as a high-wire essay on this very push-pull between beauty and depth, yearning and externalization, expressing an almost dizzying amount of motion but thinking, worrying, constantly, about just what's being expressed, and why. The film starts with a vociferous make-out session between Wood's Deanie and Warren Beatty's Bud Stamper, parked by the side of a waterfall, as much the creation of human engineering as of nature's laws. Director Elia Kazan keeps cutting to these foaming jets of water as head-slappingly literal equivalents for these teenagers' surging hormones, though the image of the dam also resonates. Deanie is stopping Bud from going all the way, less because she wants to than because of a man-made prohibition against being a "loose" girl, the kind that is electrically but too hyperbolically embodied through the first hour of Splendor in the Grass by Kazan's wife, Barbara Loden (whom you'd imagine would have been catnip to Supporting Actress nominators, but no). Beatty is sunk in that "pained" and mush-mouthed narcissism that ruins nearly all his performances until Bonnie and Clyde. Wood lies back in the seat, pushing at him and at us with a strong, uncomplicated expression of yearning and apology. The character and the actress look a bit clogged, inarticulate precisely in their fervent, inchoate desire to be more articulate. The script is by William Inge, a major midcentury playwright who never met an old standby of American small-town living that he couldn't reframe as a hamhanded symbol or distend into a broad cliché.

Kazan clearly has his work cut out for him, and for a long while he seems to be losing. Scene after scene of Splendor in the Grass's opening half tells us exactly the same things about the same characters, the repetition even more aggravating because there's so little subtlety involved in the scenes where we first identify, say, the paternalistic pressures on Beatty's squirmy quarterback-hero, or the steep social climb that Wood's Deanie will have to undertake to hold onto him, or the resentment that her prematurely spinsterish English teacher (Martine Bartlett) feels toward these infatuated lovebirds. The scenes at home with angsty Beatty, wildcat Loden, their tremblingly overbearing oil-tycoon father (Pat Hingle), and their profoundly recessive mother (confusingly not played by Mildred Dunnock) feel like Written on the Wind remade in the logy, pedestrian key of Peyton Place. Across town, Wood achieves a looser, livelier rapport with Audrey Christie, doing superb but self-effacing character work as her mother. They have an early, haunting conversation about how sex, or "coming near to someone," is little but a necessary imposition in the life of a young woman. "Woman" here translates to "future babymaker." Natalie has clearly been listening to Kazan's injunctions about realist acting and improvisation, conspiring with Christie to keep the pitch and cadences of their exchange unpredictable, and fondling some props with a slightly over-deliberate randomness. All those Method actors, hunting for years for another milk bottle, another one of Eva Marie Saint's gloves. Anyway, as ever, Wood's giving the good college try, but for a solid 45 minutes, I felt like I was forced to watch as she murmured the name "Bud..." (or sometimes "Bud...?") in various stages of adoration and whiny pique; as she coped with awkward, rehearsal-level experiments like the scene where Bud comes close to strangling Deanie; and watching passively as Loden's fireworks and Beatty's smug stab at fragility walked off with the movie. It still wasn't feeling like much to walk off with.

But then.

There's a special thrill in seeing a movie and a performance not only seize themselves back from the slow drain of banal inertia but do so in unexpected ways, going so far as to recuperate much of what previously felt unsatisfying. Not quite halfway into Splendor in the Grass, the Stamper family, engorged by their own affluence, holds a Happy New Year 1929 party, which seems all but guaranteed to doom Inge's script to hokey, Cavalcade-style historical literalism. You know Loden will party too hard and probably embarrass everyone, but I wasn't expecting Kazan to hit us with the movie's first pair of truly unnerving spectacles, first as she steals a quick, insolent glance straight at the audience on her way into the men's room, and then as she's carted away by a whole gaggle of young men in tuxedos, agitating rather overtly for an impending gang rape. Bud intercedes just in time (or maybe not? we can't tell...), and there's Deanie behind him again, screaming from the sidelines: "Bud....!" But the ensuing brawl—lit almost entirely by headlights, and thereby comparable to a scene in Kazan's directly preceding Wild River—actually snaps Splendor in the Grass awake, pouring some palpable, bloody stakes into its rhetorical notions about stifled youth, irrepressible libidos, acting according to rules vs. acting out of urges. The scene sends Loden out of the picture, which turns out to be a huge boon to Natalie Wood: she's no longer playing the intimidated foil to a grandiloquent emblem of female sexuality refusing to police itself. Neither, mercifully, is she goaded into filling Loden's shoes. Instead, she inherits the plum assignment of sending Deanie into a barely contained frenzy, unsure of whether to mirror Ginny Stamper and get brutalized for her wantonness or whether to stay put as Deanie Loomis and feel asphyxiated, unhappy, and sexually parsimonious. Even, however, if the character starts thinking in these stark binaries, the actress will quickly demonstrate that she and Kazan have better plans in mind. Meanwhile, it's clearer than ever that Splendor in the Grass is ready to take risks, heightening its spookily quiet but otherwise humdrum soap-operatic aesthetic into a nervier plane, a merging of the bold, confrontational colorism of Some Came Running and the odd, teasing, arrhythmic grammars of Kazan's most daring films, like Baby Doll and Wild River.

Does this mean that Wood gets to finally let loose and show us how she can throw herself into wailing and suffering? No. May I repeat that? No. Deanie gets to embody a more complicated case than the discontentedly repressed good girl who turns into a harlot on fire. To the extent that, during a long sequence surrounding a school dance, Wood does have to convey completely unhindered eroticism—just imagine how strongly you'd have to come on to scare off Warren Beatty—it's only one of several guises that Deanie Loomis adopts, while she's in a kind of identitarian free-fall. I need to describe this with some care, too, because Wood and Kazan concertedly avoid a Three Faces of Eve demonstration of kaleidoscopic personas. They seem intent on showing a Deanie in profound distress, but not a Deanie who is "crazy"; they also seem more interested in capturing a flailing character than in showing you that, Boy!, Natalie Wood can sure snap in a moment from full-on Jezebel to weeping novitiate to shell-shocked patient. Instead, all of these guises and more get excitingly blended into one another, even in those intervals when one of them becomes floridly primary. In Wood's first brilliant scene, she gets called on by that disgusted teacher while she sits in her desk, drifting in a fugue state, stunned at having pushed Bud away, and shocked at what, according to a wildfire of hearsay, she has pushed him into. On top of everything we're already tracking about Deanie as she walks into this classroom, Wood shows us things she hasn't disclosed thus far. For example, Deanie wants her teacher to like her, and has no wish to flout her rules; she does feel that poetry might be speaking to her, though today it's throwing back unwittingly painful reflections of herself; she hates everyone's prying eyes, not because of what it means they know, but because she herself has no idea how she'll react to all of this surveillance, and as her feelings well up, she's terrified of their incoherence. I'll add, too, that the signals Wood gives us here of Deanie being a flawed but at least an intentionally conscientious student only deepens the impression of how uncharacteristically obsessed with Bud she must have been to dawdle and drift so openly in the prior scenes. She's not some budding nympho. She was wild about him.

The good girl, the truant, the rejected lover, the unraveling mind, the school kid who actually cares what adults think about her, the student who cares but doesn't precisely grasp what Wordsworth is saying to her: it's all there. Did they film Splendor in the Grass in sequence? Almost certainly not, but how else to account for the fact that Wood seemed so flatly bottled up before, and so nimble, complicated, and fruitfully pushed onto scary promontories for the entire rest of the movie? Even when she's guilty of being fetishistic or a bit of an exhibitionist about the character's fraying moods, she's much more precise and potent than I've seen her before or since: raving in the bathtub, dunking herself in the reservoir. (Poor, hydrophobic Natalie, beating away at the water.) But this isn't Frances: we aren't swinging on a pendulum between Snake Pit mad scenes and sad, self-righteous lucidities. When Deanie is indeed sent for a while to an institution, Wood doesn't just forget everything that was smart, self-aware, or appealing about this girl before her heart got smashed—before she got simultaneously lanced by everyone she cares about her, for wanting to have sex and for refusing to have it. Deanie quite clearly charms her doctor, and not by coming on all cutesy-poo as the fetching pixie who isn't crazy, just "creative." She looks like she's thinking about herself—not just about Bud, or about her predicament, but about who she is. Wood disconcerts her parents, and she disconcerted me, with a mad, swooping sprint across the hospital grounds to come see them in the visitor's center; not everything about her feels immediately on balance, even in quick impressions like this run. But during the actual scene, she's thoughtful, permeable, and attentive. She sees, all of a sudden, that there's more to her father than she thought, and that her mother is much more seduced by the hormonal dramas of high school than she had understood. Usually these kinds of scenes turn into full-throttle takedowns of the parents, for being autocratic, passive, or both, but Wood manages to seem a bit at sea and a little disturbed while also intrigued at these new insights into her mother and father.

Wood, bless her, does not think that beneath every dutiful student and well-raised grocer's daughter there's a howling hysteric waiting to be unleashed. When she is hysterical, she and Kazan have filled the performance with so many specific choices and environmental triggers that we see what's pushing her, as well as enough linking threads to the "healthier" Deanie that she doesn't feel as though she has erupted into some different, undisciplined imago of herself. She's arresting when she needs to dial it up, gorging her mouth with invisible food while she screams at her mother from that steaming bath, but arresting, too, when she's distant or restrained. The final note in those hospital sequences, where she has otherwise seemed so unexpectedly plucky and restabilized, is a haunting long shot in which she confides her enduring feelings about Bud to a trusted doctor, gripping the door frame and dropping to a verbal and physical hush, while still sustaining this unexpected choice of a angle, anchored clear across the room.

Without giving away too many of Splendor's secrets, and without invoking too august a comparison, the final scenes of Deanie's homecoming and her subsequent, complicated visit to see her former flame offer the only moments in a movie about young love that has ever put me in mind of those devastating hours after Gena Rowlands returns home in A Woman Under the Influence, trying to be herself but also not herself—wanting to release something, but being terrified to, and feeling desperate not to hurt anyone, or bring more hurt on herself. Obviously, Wood is not Rowlands, but who even imagined we'd be able to see Rowlands from here? Deanie gets a final close-up where she either has absorbed Wordsworth's wisdom or else has learned to sedate herself with a homiletic, defanged, anaesthetizing version of that wisdom, to keep her from being bereft at the way sexual puritanism, whether parental or American, finally costs us too much. Especially as applied to the young and passionate, even with good, protective intentions, it can so easily stunt our culture and our individual happiness in bigger, broader ways than the occasional, ostentatious production of a dangerous rebel-livewire like Ginny Stamper. Wood, like Inge, is surprisingly and inspiringly willing not to over-sell some prim, condensed moral, not even the one I've just paraphrased. She holds to the character, not to some dubious, extreme version of the "truth" that she can refract through the character. I don't leave Splendor in the Grass thinking everything she does is flawless, and frankly, I'll probably walk into my next Natalie Wood vehicle with lots of the earlier reservations. But here, she is ambitious, careful, magnetic, touching, and memorable. Just this once, I get the fuss.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 6 to Go

Actress Files: Edith Evans

Edith Evans, The Whisperers
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1967 Best Actress Oscar to Katharine Hepburn for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner)

Why I Waited: A legendary turn in a category that's shorter on those than I wish it were. In fact, I probably should have retained her as my token representative of the 60s in my final ten performances, but after recently marveling at Kim Stanley and Leslie Caron in films by the same director, I couldn't wait. The long-deferred arrival of a DVD, with a slightly cropped but still exquisite-looking image, was even harder to resist.

The Performance: So let me get my one caveat out of the way, which is more a mark against the movie than against Evans, though it hampered my love for the performance just a bit. The Whisperers, for me, had a hard time working out how deeply it wanted to involve itself in narrative, and which aspects of its story it felt really committed to. Edith Evans is in every scene, often alone, but other characters pass in and out of the film according to very strange cadences. Some stay much longer than you're expecting, some flit in and out and come to naught, some make entrances that reshift the focus of the whole film only to depart it again, and some pop up for recurring appearances, involving themselves crucially with the life of the Evans character, but not finally rewarding either story or theme as much as I expected. In some ways, these diegetic off-rhythms are an intriguing device by which director Bryan Forbes—who has generated multiple forms of unease and dread in several films, without ever repeating the same ones—unsettles our expectations and keeps our sensibilities on edge in yet a new way. But in another sense, Evans is rendered even lonelier than the scenario already requires. She's not just the engine of the movie but in many ways is the vehicle herself, as well as its destination point. Writing these Best Actress profiles has only reinforced to me that, as much as I seem to be celebrating individualist achievement, the greatest performances are those in which the ingenuity of the performer and the formal, thematic, and storytelling work of the film continue to raise each other's game. The Whisperers is a stylish and spindly puzzle, but good as it is, Evans's contribution so enormously overwhelms any dividend the film pays back to her that I felt a slight pang of disappointment by the end. Maybe I'm thinking too much about how Caron's work in The L-Shaped Room takes fullest flight by interacting in such beautifully calibrated ways with other characters, in ways that maintain a profound resonance in the scenes where Caron is left alone in her own thoughts. Or maybe I'm preoccupied with recalling how the criminal, the detective, and the spiritualist strands of Séance on a Wet Afternoon collide so decisively in the final scenes, such that Stanley's character has to reveal her governing priorities once and for all, and her choice was so surprising to me, I was knocked back in my seat.

Evans's exchanges with characters played by Avis Bunnage and Eric Portman are very involving, but they're hard-pressed, maybe even helpless, to be as interesting as she is in solitude. Is she doing too much? Is the film doing too little? The story of The Whisperers circles around more than it develops or culminates, racing through seemingly crucial plot elements such that I wondered on a few counts whether I'd blinked and missed something. Fans of the movie will assert that these misgivings lie close to the point of The Whisperers. In any case, the predominating issue is that Evans is so magisterial, poignant, discomfiting, and instantly addictive that I couldn't help craving a film that evinced a more fully realized sense of what to do with her. Speaking more generously, Forbes may well have intended an off-center experiment in stalled but cyclical dread and in evoking a claustrophobic environment via an unexpectedly heavy reliance on wide, exterior shots—odd, ambitious goals in both cases, and fairly well executed. Maybe these or other plans for the film just got overshadowed by Evans's brilliance in her role, the proportions by which Forbes had mapped the rest of the movie rendered irrecuperable by such a tour de force.

So, let's get to that tour de force—and let's imagine getting this script and tracing this character on paper, pretending that we haven't witnessed everything that Evans does with it. A woman living alone, 76 years old, long ago abandoned by her husband and seldom visited by her son. She hears voices, probably as a projective coping mechanism after years of isolation, but this isn't the supernatural ghost story I had imagined. We barely hear the "whisperers" even when she does. Her flat is a rat's nest of newspapers, bundles, and empty milk bottles. Her only external errands are visits to a Christian charity for hymns and hot soup, furtive siestas in the library where she can warm her stocking feet on the pipes (tsk tsk, say the guards), and visits to the public-assistance office, where she inquires about huge, clearly imaginary windfall sums that we know are never coming, and pretends to "make do" for the time being with the tiny dispensations that represent her state allotment.

We know how many actresses would flat say no to playing such a sad old lady. Setting those vanity cases and lazybones aside, we know how much art, though perhaps dubious art, could go into making her an "irrepressible" comic figure, or a pathetically terrorized victim, or a Jane Darwell type soldiering on beneath an invisible halo, sporting a phantom sandwich board that reads "ARE YOU NOT ASHAMED? FEED THIS WOMAN!" To curtail the bathos, the generic nobility, or the possibility for mockery might itself require someone as peerlessly stage-trained as Evans, leading to the sorts of reviews where one writes, in earnest awe, "She gets laughs without selling the character short," or "She shows this woman's misery without looking like she's got the full weight of a Message Picture on her," or "She makes us feel desperately sorry for this woman without trafficking in gooey sentimentality." I'd have been thrilled to watch some imagined version of The Whisperers and feel any of those ways.

In some ways, I do wind up feeling those things even about this version of The Whisperers, but Evans flies so far above those frameworks of praise that you practically have to start over. I had expected a virtuosic crack-up under the macabre pressure of supernatural taunts, doubtlessly gumming the line between fantasy and reality—sort of Repulsion for the Hospice set. Indeed, there are elements, too, of this scenario in the film and of this sort of potential energy in Evans's work. But we have to start back even further, because Evans has done more than inhabit one of these tonal influences on The Whisperers and elevated it through consummate technique. She has not even stopped at her breathtaking feat of braiding those registers I've already hinted at, the pitiable, the droll, the frightening, and the humbling, although this she also does, with astonishing and sometimes eerie finesse. Evans doesn't look like she's thought in terms of genre the slightest bit, and the "register" of her performance pivots so continually—often a dozen times within a single scene—that I'm confounded to extrapolate a general description. The humor in the performance has black blood; that is, sometimes the demented and forlorn say the darnedest things, and all of a sudden, but the giggles choke a bit in your throat. The neglect in which Mrs. Ross lives has not made her persona pathetically small, nor blustery and grand in the absence of any pushback. Instead, the disaggregating strands of her personality pass over her like cloud systems: wisps of cirrus, abrupt stormbarrels of slate-gray, patches of clear and windless light, cottony plumps of cumulus. The larger canvas across which these dispositions pass is a disheveled but oddly snooty stupefaction, hanging together but rubbed bare, like the corduroy at an old professor's elbows.

Evans clearly has a complex and practiced take on old age, and is interested in the atmospheric and psychological tensions generated by slowing things down. Mrs. Ross doesn't whip from reveries to indictments to fogginess to paralysis with Three Faces of Eve suddenness. She's not interested in putting on a light show. The effect is closer to that of a cloudy crystal ball, in which one side of this woman emerges for a moment before singing back into the whited-out mist, from which some other face emerges a beat or two later, and often quite a different one. Mrs. Ross lags into weary dumbfoundedness, staring at nothing and not moving for a few moments in a row, before leaping with sudden dispatch to pound her broomstick against her ceiling, in protest of the upstairs neighbors and their noisiness. She casts a mistrustful eye at a neighbor in the welfare office, and then passes into a sort of human fadeout (but to gray, rather than black) and then she starts offering a random chapter of fruity-voweled autobiography. "You see, I married rather beneath me...," she expounds, listing heavily to one side, as though her posture has aphasia; she is vehement in her pronunciations, as though she's a deaf old beast trying to hear herself but also as though she's taking patrician care in making her own life story, which is fascinating if she doesn't mind saying so, perfectly pellucid to other people. Few of these vocal, bodily, or attitudinal habits feel like anything I've seen before, and the enigmas or the brazenness or the stillness or the unexpectedness of each of them only lends more mystique to the others—but always with the effect of playing Mrs. Ross, not playing "mystique."

Evans can do anything: hug herself with the dumb, indolent satiation of the fetus in the womb; sag into silence; retreat from insults and dangers in a spirited panic; faint dead away; put on ladylike airs, stone-seriously though they're laughably misplaced; take gumsmacking slurps of honey from a jar, like some Faulknerian idiot, or a high-culture spin on Edith Massey; achieve a Giulietta Masina expression of clock-faced hyperalertness, then drape a mothy veil of dementia over top of that, then peer toward the edge of the frame at something that probably isn't there but has you immediately dying to know. When she's menaced by a cadre of thugs, who have either taken some money or are trying to find out who did, she doesn't play the defiant old battle-axe or the terrorized septuagenarian, but a five-year-old whose fear takes the shape of annoyed incomprehension: "He hasn't come home," she protests, in a high, tiny, but weirdly substantial voice that neither the criminals nor the audience have any idea how to respond to. But that petulantly plaintive five-year-old is trapped in a body that's the very shipwreck of the aging poor. She sometimes has an insane, mischievous sprightliness, like Miss Marple as played by a barely made-up Charles Laughton as played by an inmate from Marat/Sade, under constant threat of the hose. She confounds any organizing border among madness, indigence, and solitude. In the case of this woman, they mean the same thing, but without reducing the sense of their being reinforcing rather than identical or successively causal problems. Tim reflects, brilliantly, that Evans's is essentially a Beckett performance, and sometimes a trio of monosyllables (we're not friends..., you left me...) are all she needs to transform a sleek mid-60s kitchen-sink chiller, as though those are a dime a dozen, into the bare, planked stage of absurdist existentialism. She's Winnie from Happy Days buried in a more realistic mound of her own life's refuse, but then she gets out and ambles into who knows what, and then she finds herself quite literally back in the gutter. And then she's locked up. And then she's let back out. Is she the same woman she was before, or has she been cured, soothed, further deteriorated? Evans hints but she won't come out and tell.

Doesn't it sound like an awful lot is going on in this performance? Are you wondering as you read this how insufferably fussed it must be, how hard the movie must be pushing her around, or how flamboyantly Dame Evans must be pushing the character around? It's a huge task to evoke the extremities, the ambitions, the eccentricities, and the weird fusions of this performance, much less the bafflingly simultaneous payoffs of bemusement and profound sadness. The only character I can think of to set aside Edith Evans's Mrs. Ross is Ellen Burstyn's Sara Goldfarb, but where Burstyn has to exemplify the loud rhetorical yawps of a hyped-up writer, a heavily-amped director, and a pugilistically unambiguous moral, Evans confounds any final "message" in the performance even more than the script does. She finds all of this tumult not in a harrowing downward spiral, but in the mystery of a ruined person, as untended as a graveyard garden. Burstyn grimacing at her grapefruit breakfast, or wondering if her son hears her teeth knocking against each other, before either of them has mentioned it: those moments, if you know them, suggest a bit of Mrs. Ross, but everything else about Sara Goldfarb is a fever-red or a mold-green explosion, whereas Evans seems to heighten and underplay, suggesting years of unenviable living within the poses, rhythms, lies, and fluting vocalisms of a lady who's all whites and grays, against a forbiddingly sooty backdrop. Without a smash-cut in sight, Evans offers a pause-giving nightmare of riding out one's years in deranging solitude, with hallucinated comforts and with predators less imaginary than they might appear. But there's also something ...happy about Mrs. Ross? Could this be? Evans thinks of even more questions than the script does. She dignifies the character even when she's drooling or in the grip of delusion. She's conducted deep, private investigations into the woman's unwritten backstory, and she supplies and obscures the evidence she has unearthed with equal constancy, and equal aplomb.

Are you still reading, or have you marched off to rent it by now?

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 12 to Go

Actress Files: Rachel Roberts

Rachel Roberts, This Sporting Life
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1963 Best Actress Oscar to Patricia Neal for Hud)

Why I Waited: Until very recently, I also had Leslie Caron's and Shirley MacLaine's nominations to fill in from the same year, which, short of Hud and 8½, has generally not offered a treasure-chest of great discoveries. Still, I figured it helped to catch 'em in close succession for sake of comparison, and if the Criterion Collection endorses this film, I figured it was worth looking forward to.

The Performance: To read Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution, as everyone seems to have done by now, is to make the indelible acquaintance of Rachel Roberts, the banshee wife of Rex Harrison, downing bottles of liquor till she's barking like a dog, howling for sex on or under the table, and rivaling the hundreds of animals on the Doctor Dolittle set for sheer cacophony and uninhibited instinct. This portrait hardly resonated with the imposing face but cast-iron reserve of the school mistress I had met in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and though I know I've seen her in two other pictures—Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express, which I've seen twice, and John Schlesinger's Yanks, for which she won her third BAFTA—I can barely remember more than a vague image of her from either performance. Not only has it been strange trying to reconcile the actress who is so often described in awestruck tones by the most demanding critics with these utterly evanescent semi-impressions, but I couldn't imagine anyone as harrowingly outlandish as Harris describes being so forgettable.

Just a scene or two into her one Oscar-nominated performance in Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life, I decided that I had seen Roberts before on one other occasion, playing one of the velociraptors who ferret those two kids out of the stainless-steel kitchen in Jurassic Park. With her scalpel brows, her incensed gaze, and an aura as tense as the surface of a drum, Roberts seems more than cut out for the role of the furious harridan. If anything, one of her obstacles, especially in a performance like this, is that her natural features and resting facial expressions imply that she's innately overacting the part, such that Roberts needs to act peevish, pessimistic, and miserly without looking like she just is this way; she may even need to pull back from the profound sourness that seems to course in waves off her body. But obviously, if she'd made this kind of forceful impression in the other films, I'd have a clearer recall of whom she played, and how. By contrast to those trace recollections, though, This Sporting Life's Margaret, more frequently called "Mrs. Hammond," constitutes an impressive etching of scabrous disillusion—suggestive of what the vituperative daughter in Secrets & Lies or the young protagonist of last year's Fish Tank might turn into after 25 more years of unreliable men, cruel setbacks, gruff but committed maternity, and tiresome chores in dark apartments.

Mrs. Hammond lost her husband Eric, a promising rugby player, in a freak drilling accident. We later connect this mishap to the tense, murky, disconnected impressions of danger and violence in the film's prologue, abstractly cross-cut with the groaning, intimidating sights and sounds of another rugby match (plus some chords of shrill, modern, experimental music thrown in for good measure). There is some question as to whether Mrs. Hammond has curdled into the broody, lemon-sucking skeptic she is today because of her husband's loss—as well as the various forms of class-based vulnerability that had him working such a risky job in the first place, despite the ostensible attention and salary paid him by the men who run the squad. Alternatively, Mrs. Hammond's withering hardness may itself have been one of the burdens that her husband had to shoulder during his life, possibly prompting him to tempt fate with tactical on-the-job carelessness. Does Mrs. Hammond know that some people think this about her? Did she conceive the possibility that she motivated Eric's suicide long before anyone else did, perhaps even while Eric was still alive? How much grief or humiliation is mixed in with her toxic mood of distrust and resentment? She still polishes Eric's shoes and leaves them out well past his death, but in the spirit of any plaintive, denial-based longing that he'll come swinging back into the door one day. Roberts suggests a powerful, ongoing, even carnal attachment to a man we suspect she would keep at arm's length, maybe even scream at, if he materialized for one more visit from the grave. No "ditto" and floating pennies and Whoopi-channeling and late-night pottery for these two; we imagine that no woman could look so armored and so forthrightly scabbed if Eric's premature death had interfered with previously uncomplicated bliss. Nothing about Margaret seems uncomplicated, not even her straight, no-chaser penumbra of hostility.

At present, Mrs. Hammond rents a room to another rising rugby phenom named Frank Machin (a hulking and excellent Richard Harris), and when she says she's only doing it for the money, we know she isn't making it up. Bent over a sewing machine, shooting off fuck-you glares while she makes the beds and brushes off Frank's tyro enthusiasm about his rise up through the ranks, Roberts's Margaret unquestionably feels that she's seen this all before: as an abandoned woman, as a wife who competed with the rival thrills of sport, as a toiler and saver in a highly class-stratified society where the working class oughtn't lie to themselves about their long- or even their short-term prospects. It's a brusquely pragmatic arrangement, and yet Mrs. Hammond does seem to study Frank as someone for whom she harbors both contempt and a grudging interest, as someone who might teach her something about the man she lost and/or pushed away, as someone whose own motivations for charming her children and begging romantic affection from her don't make immediate sense... though she may not be as dead-set against his hardbodied appeal as she thinks she is. And the prospect of more money—for all that she doubts whether Frank's burgeoning celebrity within the league will continue paying dividends or inspiring protectiveness from his owner-managers—cannot be lost on Margaret, either. She cracks one of many bitter jokes when Frank, after some nervy negotiation, returns to the flat with a kingly £1,000 paycheck. Shimmering with pride and excitement, he wants her to guess his worth before showing her the check. "Threepence?" she fires back, like a taut tripwire of emasculating blasts, yet her bolted-down frown does crack into its first smile as he divulges the actual fortune. Then again, it's only another moment before she reflects, spitefully, "It's a bit more than I got when my husband died... You didn't have to do anything for it... Some people have life made for them."

Mrs. Hammond's basic sense is that the world is rude, buffeting, and venomous, which is quite possibly what the "sporting" in This Sporting Life would mean to her: to hail from her caste or Frank's is to be the sacked and winded player, if not the tossed and manhandled ball, if not the stamped earth, routed with cleats, over top of which other people hammer and pounce at their tainted, pyrrhic goals. Roberts has to suffuse Mrs. Hammond with this outlook at all times, and even make her a deliberate poisoner of other people's self-contentment. The risk, not entirely avoided, is that Mrs. Hammond will play as a one-note figure, a shrew, a kitchen-sink Maleficent with blazing, belligerent irises. She bristles, repeatedly, upon being told that things will get better when she knows they won't, upon being pulled into bed by a rugged Adonis whose interest seems to dismay her when it isn't merely irritating. She's a knife-edged presence, written and directed with a kind of implacability that inherently constrains the range of variation in the performance. Moreover, because a certain acidic quality seems to come so easily to Roberts as it is, her enactment of Mrs. Hammond can feel, if not relentless, then at least somewhat qualified in scope, or like a product of can't-miss casting as much as skilled portraiture. Roberts pops off with some harangues, she takes literal and metaphoric blows in due course, and she's shot and lit with an intensity that frames the performance as an embodiment of an intractable, almost antagonizing force, rather than a human-scale character. You see fairly quickly where the performance is centered, and basically where it is headed, and how fundamentally occupied Roberts will remain in bringing Mrs. Hammond's already-impressive boil to an even more aggravated roll without appearing to overact.

But I must say, Roberts's moments of stock ferocity are much fewer and farther between than they might have been; that it's an achievement in any event to sustain such basically ill temper for two hours without the viewer wishing to be rid of you; and that she shades and layers Mrs. Hammond's personality over the course of This Sporting Life in ways that enrich the film as it plays. It's partly down to her and to the even hardier performance she helps elicit from Harris that This Sporting Life seems more complex as you mull it over, even after some climactic bouts of histrionic misery and needless literalizing of themes threaten to dull the force of a very strong, very sharp, robustly executed picture. When Frank takes his landlady and her children out for a day of picnic and sun, Roberts swipes a few occasions to show us a Margaret who enjoys a game, who appreciates company, who is pleased at seeing her children happy and her own consternations rendered unnecessary. Still, she unveils these hints in very brief, surgical strokes, avoiding the clichéd approach of showing a Mrs. Hammond who "softens," categorically, during anything so paltry as one sojourn in the fresh air. Indeed, her devices for evoking a bit of levity or unguardedness in Mrs. Hammond always manage to underscore, at the same time, the very formadibility of her usual defenses and overall disabusement. She fosters an impression not of a warmer woman eager to escape the body of this frosty and ornery one, but of a creature of kiln-fired habit for whom any restored sense of comfort pushes her awkwardly off balance, as though she's walking on legs she hasn't used for years.

One of the centerpiece scenes in Frank and Margaret's relationship—and in the script's mapping of how blue-collar heroes are as coarsely unprepared for privilege as they are systematically denied it—involves a doomed outing to a high-quality restaurant. Roberts is at her most labile leading up to this excursion: intrigued and even excited to be going, chagrined at the mink coat that Frank has bought her (which she knows her neighbors will castigate as the bit of childish ostentation it is), hopeful of finding some steady way of relating to this man who is also an eager and quite literal meal-ticket, furious at seeing what asses he makes of both of them in public, gratified in some dark way at having been right that he's an oaf, that the whole world is rigged, that she was foolish to imagine some deliverance into ease. This sequence hit home harder for me than some dramatically pivotal but on-the-nose exchanges between Frank and Margaret in the graveyard behind a chapel, although, during those latter scenes, Roberts takes a punch to the face with less flinching than many a male action hero. And it's here, as she howls about the late husband whom she dares Frank to even speak about, as she lacerates him with allegations that men as a race are a categorical horror, as she signals with a new kind of pain in her eyes that she'd yell just about anything to get him to leave her alone—it's here that Roberts makes Mrs. Hammond's anger the most total and harsh it has been to that point, but also the most polychromatic in its breadth and outrage and woundedness. She's a woman who's been used badly; a woman who maybe rebukes herself for not succeeding in keeping either of two men; a woman who might hate herself precisely for turning such a scouring, blaming eye on herself; a wise woman; a narrow woman; a self-consciously cash-strapped woman; a raped woman; a woman who'd rather be raped than paraded in tacky and ill-earned finery; a woman who saw all of this coming and didn't listen to herself; a woman who didn't see this coming and can't believe she's allowed Frank so close to her.

Sometimes you look at Roberts and see mostly that white-hot expression that serves as a backbone for most of her performance. That expression in turn can feel like the only affect she's recruiting into a scene: potent, but slightly familiar, and evidently close at hand for this performer. But at least as often, you look at that white-hot light and remember that white is not the absence of color but the total of all of them, and that inside the deceptive purity of Margaret's rage, there's a whole spectrum of separate frequencies. Not unlike the Patricia Neal performance that beat her to the trophy, Roberts's work comprises a series of deepening plunges into a predominating chord of feeling: plangent but aroused taken-for-grantedness in Neal's case, domestic truculence, ardor, and a taste for conflict in Roberts's. It's a smaller part than her male costar's and, in many ways, it exists to refract onto his. But Roberts, like Neal, manages not to seem like she's "supporting" anyone. She has her own story to tell, through and as this scrupulously drawn character. Within the film, you really feel the change once Mrs. Hammond, like Hud's Alma, departs for good; later, it's impossible to think back on the films without seeing these women's faces.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 16 to Go

Actress Files: Leslie Caron

Leslie Caron, The L-Shaped Room
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1963 Best Actress Oscar to Patricia Neal for Hud)

Why I Waited: First, the search for a print worth the trouble, which I finally resolved with a DVD I bought in the BFI shop, right before Tim and I saw The Trespasser. Then, by a combination of hope and skepticism that this really is the game-changer for Caron that I'd heard described.

The Performance: By this point in my Best Actress viewing, the only titles left to explore entail films, performances, or both about which I'm highly intrigued. Really, I haven't had to hold my nose since heading into Ship of Fools, and even that had some night-of-a-dozen-stars appeal. Bryan Forbes has coaxed such rich, unshakable performances out of bonkers Kim Stanley in Séance on a Wet Afternoon and surly Katharine Ross in The Stepford Wives, both of them gripping and atmospheric films to boot, that the prospect of The L-Shaped Room enticed me (and that's to say nothing of Edith Evans's nominated lead for Forbes's The Whisperers, coming up on a future post, which everyone seems to love). Unquestionably, though, of my remaining thesps, Leslie Caron is by far the most heavily sandbagged in terms of my past distaste for her work. It's not that she's a bad actress in An American in Paris, Lili, or Gigi so much as she's an empty one, seeming too girlishly deferential to her male co-stars and yet too much the p's-and-q's introvert to warrant a term like "girlish." Her catlike features are probably right up someone's alley in terms of adorability, but not mine, and her later-years appearances in small roles in Damage, Chocolat, and Le Divorce (where she at least shows a modicum of spunk) only reinforce the impression of someone who stumbled into movies as though by accident, finding them an inoffensive lark but not a prompt to real artistry, and serving some presumed niche-market in the audience that I'd be hard-pressed to sketch, much less to join.

The one caveat I'll supply about her work in The L-Shaped Room is that, for all its tremendous sensitivity and groundedness, it's the kind of excellent work that makes its strongest claims while you're actually watching the film. Something about Caron, some curtailing of complexity or a fundamental inhibition from bigger, nervier risks, precludes even this performance from lodging in the brain the way that Stanley, Ross, and Evans all manage so superlatively to do in their work with Forbes. (Yes, I'm a little ahead in my viewing from what I'm publicly admitting.) The performance grows a little vague in retrospect, maybe because the movie itself is such a delimited character study of a ragtag coalition of residents in a London boarding-house. Making do with the makeshift and crumbling walls, with each other's eccentricities, and with the problems weighing on their own hearts, the residents do not come to love each other. It's achievement enough that they come so close to liking each other, and yet the warm glow you might generically expect to be gradually lit from within The L-Shaped Room remains modest and fitful as warm glows go—soothing, but hardly effacing the uneasy dilemmas that these characters are still contending with, largely on their own, by the end of the film. What's special about The L-Shaped Room, allowing Forbes's usual weak-spots of overplayed mood and some trouble sustaining the narrative, is how palpable but fragile their bond as a "community" feels. As usual for this undervalued director of actors, his work yields strong psychological insights.

You could say the same for Caron's own achievements here, with even more emphasis on the positives. Sometimes, in that early-Binoche way, she opts for beatific lamp-lighting of broad emotion rather than precise delineations of how her character inhabits and shifts within a specific scenario, and I suppose, too, that the character doesn't navigate as complete or as rich an arc as an even more resourceful actress might have allowed. But even as I write that, I rush to defend myself from myself, for Caron does develop a very scared and secretive girl named Jane Fosset, unwed and pregnant, into a young woman who's learning to breathe a little easier and to trust a bit more in her own fortitude, even as she remains deeply unclear about her future and about the various enigmas of friends and lovers. The early scenes are lensed with such inky Gothic chiaroscuro, as a distasteful landlady leads the soft-voiced Jane up a huge set of stairs to the clammy, bare-brick attic room of the title, that I initially suspected Jane had some prior, Anne Radcliffe-style, but as yet undivulged relation to this haunted flat. Forbes keeps tunneling in for intimate, wide-angled close-ups, in which Caron's fretfulness and her tears threaten to be overplayed by the camera, though not by the actress. After over-exerting itself to put us on edge, though, The L-Shaped Room soon relieves itself of such broody intrigue as an end in itself. Jane is spooked by her room as anyone in her position would be: because she is lonely, with child, and seemingly cut off from any sources of solace. She's also got ants in her thin mattress, and an early sign of Caron's strength, of her immersion in the role rather than a preoccupation with the melodramatic contexts of the role, is that she responds to these bugs like a woman perturbed by having bugs in her newly-rented room—not like a meek or an overwrought heroine who processes every setback as a symbol of her cosmic trials, or as a soapbox from which to remind us How Hard She Has It. Jane discovers some backbone in having to stand up to Avis Bunnage's slatternly proprietress about the infestation, and it's nice to see how crisply Caron serves her own letter of intent to the audience: that she'll be playing the character appealingly but not preciously, and from the inside out rather than from the vantage of how paternalistic producers or castmates might wish to position her.

Helpfully, her tempting love interests in The L-Shaped Room are a jocular pair of fellas her own age in the boarding-house: Tom Bell's struggling writer and Brock Peters's warm, music-loving expat. Here, too, you start prepping yourself for a cutesy Truffautian triangle of romantic bonhomie, but without making Jane enervated or rigid, Caron shows us how Jane, for all her keenly felt loneliness, is also a bit annoyed at having her solitude impinged upon. Romance is the last thing on her mind. Toby, the prankish livewire so charmingly played by Bell, who likes to call Jane a "French maniac" when she has a mood swing or a misty moment, seems aroused, at least partially, from the moment he meets Jane. Peters's Johnny is more circumspect and maybe more complex as to why he comes on strongly as a buddy but less so as an angling suitor. But again, Caron holds fast against playing Jane as a wounded or an exasperated woman who cannot bear to think about men while she's living in a tenement, carrying an unwedlocked child. She's not uninterested in having a boyfriend so much as she's jealous of the time and space to think privately about what she's going to do for herself. In that way, Caron nicely rewrites The L-Shaped Room not as a maudlin story of a maid forced to resolve her fate in a damp, tawdry, unenviable little sublet but as a story about a woman who, after riding out her initial shock of this unappetizing real estate, is desirous more than anything of a room of her own. In other words, her L-Shaped Room is not about a woman who is suffering but, with much richer dividends, about a woman who is thinking.

Gigi and Paris's Lise Bouvier had less content at characters, and yet Caron had a tendency to play them as icons of cuteness, yearning, confusion, incipient restlessness. In The L-Shaped Room, she shows unprecedented dispositions and talents for playing Jane as no symbol of anything but as a girl with a problem, whose oscillating sense of what to do with herself grows even trickier to fix because living among this passel of London misfits inevitably pulls her into a wider circle than she intends, and most of these new acquaintances disrupt some preconception she has harbored about the ways people feel, or for whom they feel, or the ways people manage to be happy, or how happy they need to be. Caron's reflexes toward watchfulness, which sometimes make her seem too demure or self-effacing at the center of her own vehicles, serve her beautifully here, once Jane has broken her chrysalis enough to really start studying people. In these scenes, we realize that Forbes's entire approach to the material, not just with Caron, is to forestall as much cliché as you possibly can in a film that climaxes with a Christmas birth. Though some of what Jane learns from the introspective prostitute, the aging spinster, or the jealous and unrequited admirer sound entirely banal on paper, the adept performers of these roles redeem these moments into spontaneous, credible drama—but Caron herself is a crucial ingredient in how this happens, listening intensely and signaling a very active, subtle consciousness in response to what she sees and hears.

Caron doesn't overplay her reaction shots and never comes across as a particularly technical actress, but her emotional identification with Jane and, therefore, with Jane's series of encounters and her evolving judgments about herself and others add up to a rich characterization and a very detailed lens through which to watch the rest of the film. You believe that she's a young woman who would say in retrospect that "in the end I decided my virginity was becoming rather cumbersome," even as she lives out the heavy consequences of a physical relationship. Her bouts of despair, never histrionic but very sobering all the same, feel as genuine as her moments of mirth, and in long, key scenes like her barroom exchange with the father of her baby, she expresses so much of what Jane does and doesn't expect from this man, and of how she is responding to every moment of their conversation. This feels less like "consummate underplaying" and more like a settled, confident ability to be the character, lacking even the traces of fuss that often accompany naturalistic acting or ostensible underplaying. Within that gallery of Forbes's women, she "does" much less than Stanley or Evans do in their infinitely showier roles, which, thank heaven, they are both such inspired, captivating performers that you want them to tackle those characters as energetically as they do. Caron is much closer to what Ross managed in The Stepford Wives, a largely reactive performance in a film that's nonetheless about her, watching and listening in completely un-timid ways, adding up to a potent internal portrait of the watcher-listener and a rangy tour of her own affects and personality. Neither Ross nor Caron ever found another part as good as these, but they aren't the kind of actors for whom one necessarily imagines a long string of comparable triumphs even if the roles had been forthcoming. To watch Caron in The L-Shaped Room is to find her, at long last, ideally cast and utterly of a piece with her character, effacing any clichéd rhetorical line about what is "strong" or "weak" about Jane. In an era of British cinema full of restless, lunging, malcontented men, Caron moves more slowly and expresses herself less floridly, arriving at no higher perspective about how her troubles or her feelings have been rigged on her behalf by the the social apparatus. She's just a girl getting older and smarter before our eyes and, sometimes, getting hurt in new ways. If that reads like a hackneyed or a miniature or a lamely bourgeois journey, it certainly doesn't in light of the clarity, directness, and unflamboyant emotional heft with which Caron communicates the micro-shifts of feeling at a charged turn in the character's life, the day-to-day textures and tiny epiphanies of becoming Jane.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 17 to Go

Actress Files: Geneviève Bujold

Geneviève Bujold, Anne of the Thousand Days
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1969 Best Actress Oscar to Maggie Smith for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)

Why I Waited: A nomination leader, starring an actress I already admire, and one of my father's favorite films: lots of reasons to hope I would like this one.

The Performance: Who knew that Anne Boleyn had three cervixes? Okay, not true. Not necessarily true, since Anne of the Thousand Days doesn't refute this point so much as it remains silent on the issue, despite much history-shaping debate about wombs, their fruit, and the legal and religious provenances under which they labor, including when they're in labor.

Forgive me if I cannot look at Bujold and not have trouble preoccupying myself with memories of her "mutant," sexually humiliated, but stalwart actress Claire Niveau in Dead Ringers, a film I treat quite extensively in the book I'm writing when I'm not writing these profiles. To see this Québecois performer acting twenty years previously in the film that made her a star to English-language audiences is to see a woman that is both strikingly smooth-surfaced compared to the middle-aged, pill-popping but fundamentally disabused traveler I know from the Cronenberg film and yet possessed of the same redoubtable face, the same formidable presence—all the more striking for a performer less than 30 years old who is shouldering a gigantically mounted period drama and withstanding the challenge of Richard Burton at full apoplectic bluster. In between these films, and subsequent to both, Bujold's résumé is filled with unusual roles and projects: the macabre perversity of Coma and Obsession, the different auteurist sensibilities of Medak, Rudolph, and Eastwood, the mother in The House of Yes, the teacher so content to be bedded by former student Callum Keith Rennie on the eve of apocalypse in Last Night. All that plus a recurring string of classics: Cleopatra, Cassandra, Antigone, Saint Joan.

Bujold suggests the high-minded but eccentric tastes as well as the intimidating hauteur of a Judy Davis, which only adds to the sense that a platform of ostentatiously dressed, studio-fabricated "prestige" like Anne of the Thousand Days will be hard-pressed to capitalize on her gifts. And yes, the vehicle seems clearly conceived to place in as many Oscar fields as possible, and walk away with a queen's trousseau of trophies (though in the end, it only nabbed one, for Costume Design). But contrary to every presumption that mainstream historical reenactments are one of the crannies where cinema slinks off to die, I found Anne of the Thousand Days enjoyable and tough, and Bujold's assignment more challenging than I had predicted, either because it was written that way or because her potent, ambitious, but ungreedy approach makes the part seem more sophisticated than it is.

The impression is not immediate. How many characters have we met in dramas like this while they danced some arcane step in a royal hall? Even amidst her galliard, Bujold's pugnacious face, a scalloped series of brute curves (the forehead, the lines under the eyes, the cheeks, the chin, the frowning mouth), bespeaks a substantial personage, even a strong trace of attitude. With her flirtatious dancing, her sprinting about hallways and grounds, her poking her head out of windows, she communicates Anne Boleyn's youthfulness without compromising her sense of resolute maturity: this is someone who rarely breaks eye contact and seems roundly unseduced by heraldry and pomp, even when she's bristling with coltish energy. In an early laze on the grass with her handsome lover Lord Percy, she inquires about his virginity and admits the years-ago loss of her own, handily establishing her untroubled candor about sex, her disinterest in playing the untouched bloom.

Thus is Bujold's basic charisma as Anne quickly, permanently settled, but she really catches fire when Burton's Henry VIII materializes in her household, imagining he can appropriate her as a willing mistress as one nets a butterfly in a field. Anne simply isn't having it—partly through innate personality, partly in protest at the summary casting-off of Percy, partly responding to her own sister's plight as Henry's prior mistress, impregnated and abandoned. The script entitles her to regular blasts of vituperative blowback against Henry, as he throws around his considerable weight: "You're spoiled and vengeful and bloody. Your poetry is sour and your music is worse. You make love as you eat, with a good deal of noise and no subtlety." Even the prosier complaints Bujold fires off with frank, unembellished fortitude. Where many actresses call attention to how much they enjoy lines like these, pausing over each insult or delivering them with a sort of debonair wickedness, Bujold expounds clearly but quickly, as if the whole speech is one big battering ram. You can see why Burton's Henry looks legitimately shaken, cautioning her that "this is not safe," and yet she has an iron justification under Henry's own requested terms for their interactions: "You ask me not to treat you like the king," she says. "I would have lied to the king."

There is nothing feckless or juvenile about the way Bujold's Anne tests the limits of what she can get away with. Her ire is so earnest and backed up by such a forceful screen presence—shaded at different times with all those nuances of filial defensiveness, revulsion for the aged and the presumptuous, pride in her own maturity, anger at the scuttling of her own desires, hotheaded refusal to wind up anything like her sister—that she doesn't seem as green or as foolhardy as perhaps she is. I felt like I was watching a legitimate clash of imposing wills, not a pre-ordained drama of a roaring mouse, getting stupidly close to the lion's jaw. This sense of resolute character, even when it does amount to a needless tempting of a killing fate, rarely leaves Bujold's performance; indeed, her performance only falters importantly in the moments she has been coached out of this bullish sense of herself, whether airily spouting Maxwell Anderson loftiest plaints from jail ("shall I ever be free?") or implausibly crumbling into tears after going toe-to-toe with Henry in her cell. Not that the performance doesn't encompass several other notes, from a trembling disgust at kangaroo-court accusations of adultery and incest to the almost camp-fabulous way in which she teaches her young daughter Elizabeth how to walk with a train. She experiences total, self-dismantling despair at the stillbirth of her son (cut in right after Thomas More's beheading, as though her failure to yield a foolproof heir entails as much of a death sentence as his immovable conscience), and she approaches Glenda Jackson levels of bitchy imperiousness informing Henry that he will not, in fact, be inviting his latest tart back to court from her exile in Northumberland. She is very moving, broken and scared at last but still refusing to spill all her feelings, as she's carted off to her execution.

Still, the performance is always strongest when it's based in Anne Boleyn's invigorating insistence on her own rights, her own survival instincts, her forthright demands on behalf of her own worth. Bujold's closeups are frequently indelible, as punchy as fists, as in the moment when she shoots a fearless, discomfitingly frank gaze at the headsman just before he brings down his axe. But her success in Anne of the Thousand Days—acknowledging the moments when she seems a bit untrained or uncertain how to handle the more sentimental or despondent passages—comes down to much more than having the right, imposing face and personality. There are essentially three movements to Anne of the Thousand Days: the long introduction to Anne and to her defiance of Henry's wooing; the political, ecclesiastical, and continental disarray that results from Henry's choice to marry her; and the coarse displacement and annihilation that befall her once Henry has realized he can really get away with anything, now that divine and royal law have been rewritten to suit his taste for women and his lust for sons. Bujold is a centerpiece player in the first and third passages but rather suppressed in the second, as lots of other players debate the problems that her presence and her intractability have fostered. To create an Anne who is as impetuous and as unwilling to be cast aside as Bujold's, while still enabling her to recede in the film's sprawling second act—that is, without coming on so strong that the drama will appear drab once she's made peripheral for a lengthy stretch, and without Anne's appearing to embrace a submissive position that she has thus far resisted—all of this requires a very nimble management of what seems like a headstrong, unflinching persona. Equally required is a solid, modest grasp of how her work will fit within the overall shape of the piece, itself presenting an occasion to which she must rise, but not one in which she should constantly pull focus.

Most rewardingly, as Anne negotiates these turns from the first movement into the second, and from the second into the third, Bujold has her own tricky sea-changes to navigate. It comes as a shock, and probably needs to, that after all of her gusty refusals of Henry in the first hour, Anne is suddenly so willing, so ambitious of being his queen. That's not the way Bujold has seemed to approach her preceding scenes, but she plants enough seeds of a pragmatic intelligence and a swagger of the champion game-player that she avoids any sense of psychological or motivational inconsistency. By a similar token, over the last hour, Bujold's Anne isn't just vanquished but is caught off-guard at recognizing just how vulnerable she has remained while seeming to play a game with such mastery. It's not clear she could have played any more savvily than she has, and still, this has not been enough. She has after all, in her way, repeated the fate of her sister. Yet even amid this epiphany, which we know to be deeply humiliating to Anne as well as patently unjust, Bujold completes the whole performance without expecting the audience to like her much more than do the heckling crowds of English Catholics, who hate her for displacing Irene Papas's devout, serene, politically becalming Katherine of Aragon. The film is full of moments where Anne demands things for herself and stands up for what she thinks is right, mostly enjoying some measure of our sympathy (given her predicaments) or our admiration (given her canny strategizing), but rarely eliciting real fondness. The performance itself betrays so little special pleading, and is unmarred by the viral blandness or the Encyclopedia Britannica formality that so often afflict screen renderings of famously wronged royals. Particularly, then, within a genre and amidst a decade of Hollywood filmmaking that all but enforce expensive mediocrity as a cardinal rule, this is admittedly improvable but nonetheless complex and inspiring work.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 18 to Go

Actress Files: Lee Remick

Lee Remick, Days of Wine and Roses
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1962 Best Actress Oscar to Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker)

Why I Waited: 1962's race among Bancroft, Davis, Hepburn, and Page, all among the first Best Actress nominees I ever screened, constitutes such an illustrious cohort that I was both eager to save the fifth nominee as a belated treat and nervous about how well she'd be able to measure up.

The Performance: I screened the original, made-for-television production of Days of Wine and Roses from 1958 in preparation for seeing Blake Edwards's 1962 screen adaptation. Differences between the two versions announce themselves quickly, and they involve major repercussions for the actress playing Kirsten Clay, the increasingly dissolute drinking companion of her husband, Joe Clay. In the television film, Cliff Robertson's Joe meets Piper Laurie's Kirsten as she's heartily knocking a few back at an office party. She's already, if anything, more given over to the stuff than he is. When they leave the party to go walking together, culminating in some very writerly speeches under a dingy bridge and some panting physical contact, it's clear that their shared dependency is already a major force in their coming together, as are their ways of talking about why they drink without admitting that's what they're doing. Flash forward and they have a baby together in a tiny New York flat, where Laurie's ornery Kirsten tries to get Joe to quiet down occasionally so they won't wake the child or suffocate it by having to close the door to its tiny room. From here, the couple withstands some intense lows and some temporary recoveries, most notably during a spell where they dry out by working longterm with Kirsten's father, a farmer and gardener played by the venerable 1940s character actor Charles Bickford. Bickford's character sticks around in the script long enough to see the couple relapse, with Kirsten in particular growing even more incapacitated than she was before. When he confronts Joe for teaching his daughter to drink, the accusation stings even though we know it not to be true, as does Joe. So too, perhaps, in some broken-souled and self-deceiving way, does Mr. Arnesen.

The 1962 film, though adapted by the same writer who penned the original, J.P. Miller, ditches most of these key points, save for the overall narrative trajectory and the casting of Bickford as the aggrieved father. (Bickford's moving performance on this second go-round opens the question of how such an affecting turn by a beloved and winless three-time nominee failed to earn Bickford a fourth citation, over the likes of Victor Buono and the coarse-grained winner, Ed Begley.) Joe is now impersonated by that smarmy-pants Jack Lemmon, whose work grows more powerful as the film continues—as indeed it might, given his indulging of so many relentless mannerisms and narcissistic impulses through the first hour. When he meets Kirsten, now played by newly minted Anatomy of a Murder and Wild River star Lee Remick, he does so under lurid professional circumstances, while procuring eligible girls to "entertain" his high-powered boss at a yacht party. Not only is this Kirsten a teetotaler, but after Joe confuses her with one of the paid escorts, the film spends a subsequent half-hour on his attempts to sweeten her up after making such a piss-poor first impression. This dilated passage of falling in love involves many of the same purple monologues from the original Days, this time spoken on a moonlit wharf instead of that grimy riverside underpass.  It also features Joe introducing Kirsten to her first drink, in the desserty form of brandy alexanders. It's harder to know why Kirsten accedes to Joe despite his evident drinking problem, in tandem with so much else that's errant or tone-deaf in his personality, and when they find themselves as young, married parents having a squall about his drinking, the old lines about waking the baby and suffocating in such small spaces stand bizarrely at odds with the elegant, rambling, high-gloss condo in which they seem to find themselves. Later, of course, when Bickford arraigns Joe for teaching his flailing daughter to drink, the line still hurts but its blunt truth carries less weight than the haunted mix of candor and dishonesty suffusing the same moment in the 1958 version. Moreover, the implication in the second that Kirsten's choices and destiny really have been mapped by her father and husband feels so much more limiting—of the movie's sense of Kirsten, and of Remick's choices as her interpreter—than was the initial, scarier, richer conception of Kirsten as the faltering steward of her own sinking ship.

One thing Edwards's Days has over the televised version, directed in improvisatory, straight-from-the-hip style by no less than John Frankenheimer, are its occasional moments of compositional elegance, even if there are at least as many of hollow, gratuitous "style."  Edwards's version also exerts the peculiar tragic force that comes from seeing two basically cheerful people descend into such sallow unhappiness, such irreparable stalemate as a couple (though again, Days blows its opportunities at making their initial fall into love very convincing). Still, whereas Frankenheimer shapes his piece as an exercise in educational discomfort, entirely powered by his actors, Edwards needs his actors to save a project that laundered screenwriting, plausibility problems, and the bloating of budgets and story-points have threatened to undermine. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in Piper Laurie's and Lee Remick's entirely disparate approaches to the putatively "same" character. Laurie, as neurotic and bullish as ever, is very much the aggressive stage actress, an obvious peer of Stanley and Parsons, Dennis and Page. She plays every moment as though Kirsten's guts are a towel she is constantly wringing out, and she plainly doesn't mind the rough edges and weird excesses of her performance, an inevitable outgrowth of working on live TV, so long as what she ultimately produces is a tangible, idiosyncratic human being. She's kind of a buckshot actress, whereas Remick trades in lasers. She's a forebear in the Jennifer Connelly lineage of diamond-cut beauties who seem to gravitate toward troubled-soul characters, relying on fine-tuned mental calculations and subtle shifts in facial expression to register the high-strung emotions of plainly intelligent women who are nonetheless prone to unraveling.

Remick's thoughtfulness, like her beauty, can be the same sort of impediment that they are to Connelly: some of her characters would make more sense if they seemed less self-aware, and frankly less smart.  The exquisite fineness of their features sometimes translates as a mask the actresses wish they could crack and discard, eager as they are to show us how honestly troubled they are inside. In Days of Wine and Roses, Remick's clear gaze and unfooled manner give Kirsten a refreshingly substantial presence on screen, even without the physical heft or outsized mannerisms of Piper Laurie. By the same token, hers is easily the most understated of the performances in her Oscar category, and though I wouldn't trade Bancroft's Annie Sullivan, Davis's Baby Jane, Hepburn's Mary Tyrone, or Page's Alexandra Del Lago for anything in the world, it's gratifying to see that AMPAS still had a taste for softer touches and stiller presences.

At the same time, Remick's elegant reserve, at least initially, exacerbates the problem of how Kirsten comes so quickly to deny and enable Joe's timebomb behaviors, which she patently clocked so quickly and with such distaste. It's exciting to see Remick turning so many internal gears in her close-ups, implying a strained and complex inner life that could account for Kirsten's outward inconsistencies.  Still, those mental gymnastics are not always dramatized on her glassy exterior, and you sometimes long for an actor who didn't seem so caught up in her own head, even when the script has virtually forced her into it.

None of this means that Remick's work isn't smart, affecting, even gutsy. In an early speech, wondering aloud why more men don't menace her when she goes walking late at night, Remick's unimpeachably beautiful Kirsten suggests a baffled, unpersuasively laughed-off insecurity that something else must be palpably wrong with her to invite such masculine indifference. Remick totally sidesteps the preciousness or the self-pity that might well be risked in this approach. She's lucid and confident in some fields of her life but a tangle of doubts in others, without just settling for playing Kirsten as a jittery mess. (Laurie, not surprisingly, reads this same speech with full and tough self-knowledge, as someone who knows that anyone leering in her direction would instantly detect what an intimidating piece of work she is, as are all Piper Laurie characters.) These character notes resurface later when a sobered-up Joe won't sleep with her: rejected yet again, despite her own almost embarrassing willingness, and from a man obviously lucky to snag her.

From a technical standpoint, Remick is very skilled at a lot of behavioral stuff that might seem simple but trips performers up all the time. She is great at laughing fits, great at looking and feeling tired, good at domestic annoyance without firing up all the way into full-tilt pouts and tantrums. She is superb in handling the well-known actor's boondoggle of drunken speech and movement—crucial, obviously, to the film's success. Through the second hour, when just about all the narrative and psychological beats feel more credible than in the first, she makes a convincing wreck of herself without coarsening her gestures. One of her best scenes is her last, when she summons a new kind of steeliness upon returning to a husband and child she has recently abandoned. She insists on her right not to go completely sober, and despite her evident longing for Joe and their daughter, she is a tougher, more self-conscious negotiator than Laurie was, with a quicker impulse toward self-assertion. She's also as believably baffled by Joe's latter-day capacity to reject drink completely as she was, in the first half-hour, by his helpless susceptibility to it. Even aside from the addiction spiral, Remick traces a humbling arc from showing us a woman who basically knows the score in most arenas of her life to one who wonders, transparently, whether she understands anything about anyone.  By the end, her only certainty concerns her needing to drink, at least a little, even as this blocks her from other relations and possibilities she desires, or toward which she feels responsible.

Remick is smart, engaged, and diligent, a code-breaker and aide to the script.  She empathizes with her character but does so with a tonic dryness, as though she considers herself a somewhat earnest student of The Mind, more than a student of Kirsten per se. She is a practiced gauger, fairly early in her screen career, of exactly what to offer the camera, how to shock it occasionally, and what to hold back—willing to shout, yet trusting the lens to ferret out her more whispered signals. She handles her part beautifully as an exercise but misses something that might make it hum more as a performance. And she isn't, finally, exceedingly memorable, partly because Edwards hasn't made nearly as good use of her most distinctive quality—her agitated watchfulness—as Otto Preminger did in Anatomy of a Murder or as Elia Kazan did even more in Wild River, Remick's own favorite of her performances.

When Remick's strongest in Days of Wine and Roses, you admire her very much; she's never bad, as Lemmon occasionally is, but neither does she excite the director or the audience as Lemmon irrefutably does in his peak moments. Something remains inhibited about her screen presence (again, as with Connelly's) despite her seeming to select parts with the explicit premise of pushing her own boundaries, and probing nervy issues in the culture. She's a sincere documenter of emotional dishevelment whose hands never get quite as dirty as one feels they ought, not because you see her holding back but because something about her seems obdurately immune. A less astute, less skilled actress might have just socked us with the pure, harridan force of her dissolution, and in that sense I thank Remick for her seriousness and discipline. Even allowing the handicaps that Blake Edwards and Warner Brothers imposed on the material, it would be hard to explain what it is that doesn't last or resonate in the performance, like trying to articulate to a promising B+ student why her paper just doesn't have the fire or depth that another writer—even a less polished and scrupulous one—might have brought to it. Remick's quiver is stocked with many arrows: she is strong, rigorous, careful, and moving, and every time I have seen her in a movie, I have wished for her sake that she go all the way and become the kind of cerebral yet hard-hitting actress she so obviously wants to be. She comes close enough to help put over Days of Wine and Roses, but in some ineffable way, she still comes across as a work in progress.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 21 to Go