It sucks when life gets in the way of things. With my work, I often times only have one choice of what I can do when I get home. Unfortunately, that sometimes means watching a boring 2 hour film or a movie I've seen like 5 times before. Prioritizing and balancing this blog out can be tough sometimes. Move forward with the project or get further behind on watching the latest Netflix show everyone is talking about or even not going out after work. Thankfully I really enjoy watching these films, even some of the bad ones, so it's not too much of a drain. Plus, I've had some long layoffs before and I don't really want this blog and project to take 20 years. Anyway, I'm wary of the Best Actress category. I'm waiting for a year to blow me away and to consistently find some really great and wonderful performances. Hopefully this is the year but I won't hold my breath.
1989 Best Actress
Jessica Tandy - Driving Miss Daisy
This is very clearly a veteran nomination that charmed the voters enough to get a win. You hold this up to other Best Actress winners and it is not one of the strongest choices by any means. I think you have to look at this field as a whole to really understand why Tandy was able to win. You've got a French film/actress nominated that wasn't going to do much, an unknown British actress, an up and comer with Pfeiffer, and the only real threat in Jessica Lange for a film I know nothing about. That's without having seen any of the other nominees but I imagine holds true for the average voter even back in 1989. They enjoyed this little film about an old lady who is, let's be frank, a fucking racist who gets a negro, oops, I mean black driver in Morgan Freeman and she warms up to him over time all the while still bossing him around. She helps him to read even though that really interesting side piece is glossed over and not much is done with it. If the film were to focus on her being a former teacher and teaching him to read instead of just barely mentioning it, this might have been a better choice. Instead, she's a stubborn, old lady who is wary of her black driver and accuses him of stealing and wants him to slow down while driving and not joke around with the other black help. But of course, Tandy has a change of heart after her negr...er, driver is questioned by some cops in Alabama. She even asks Freeman to a dinner where MLK is speaking because she has become this good Southern woman that the audience can now feel good about supporting. I don't buy the performance. It's boring to me and very predictable. I don't care that she starts to see race as a social thing to support instead of as just being part of the help. It's pandering to the audience and honestly doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Tandy is an awful person who suddenly changes and it doesn't feel authentic or warranted. Sure the two have decent chemistry but I credit that to Freeman's performance more than Tandy's. I don't look at this as a good win or an oh, that's cute type of win. This is a bad look for the Academy who were for whatever reason eager to reward Tandy for such a bad role and a mediocre performance. No thanks.
Isabelle Adjani - Camille Claudel
Isabelle Adjani is really beautiful. That information doesn't have any bearing on the performance but thought I'd throw that out there. I really liked Adjani for the first half of the film. I was surprised that she was giving such a good performance as the title character who was a sculptress and mentored by Auguste Rodin (a good performance from Gerard Depardieu who I had issues with in 1990) before later becoming lovers. I liked the first half because Adjani's character is so determined and such a no-nonsense hard worker. It was refreshing to see her not get bogged down with stale romantic plots and instead be a focused woman engrossed in her work. Adjani gives the appropriate seriousness to the character where you can believe sculpting is her life and passion and that she was a bit of a rebel and ahead of her time for doing so. It was really strong stuff and highly interesting watching her not take shit from the men she worked with. Then the film can't help itself and we get the romantic part of the film which actually isn't too bad. The two respect each other's work and even though Rodin is involved with someone, the two spark up a romance that isn't too treacly or unbelievable. The romance seems rooted in reality up to a point when the fame and pressures of life and other women creep into the relationship. That's when Claudel starts to become critical of her own work and emotional more than she had been in the past. It's this part of the performance that I don't like because Adjani resorts to screaming and overacting the craziness of her character. Whereas in the beginning she was so assured in her character and so earnest I hated when the film devolved into what you kinda think of as a typical French film with all the histrionics. I was really rooting for this performance, too, because the rest of these nominees are so underwhelming. Even still, I was surprised at how good Adjani was at first and think the fault lies more with the film itself. I'll have to see where she ends up for me.
Pauline Collins - Shirley Valentine
I'd be real surprised if anyone has actually heard of Pauline Collins or this movie. I was a bit wary going in because this reeked of the Academy reaching for a nomination for another British film/performance. They fall in love with them and some of them are pretty underwhelming. Collins, however, is actually really good in her role. Now, let me preface this by saying Collins played this very same role on stage in London and on Broadway of a middle aged British woman who feels her life and marriage is in a rut and then goes off to Greece to find herself. It was a one person play and the film reflects that by making her the undisputed star and by not really making us care about the other characters much. So Collins had so much time to develop this character by playing her over and over and over night after night on stage. This is a lived in performance that shows Collins is super comfortable with being Shirley Valentine. There's been a couple of these types of instances so far in the project and it always shows that the performer benefits from the repetition. Would Collins be so likable and well received if she had only done a few takes of the character for the film and that's it? Doubtful and that's okay. She's really funny here in this performance with that dry British humor, spitting out her aphorisms and life affirming messages. Collins also gets to break the fourth wall quite often and it helps her character engage with the viewer and helps the performance be a lot more accessible. I completely understand why the Academy went for her in this instance. It's definitely a one woman show on film even with the other characters and is really easy to like. I would say this is the perfect melding of circumstance and performance because there's no other way Collins gets nominated. This might not be an essential watch but I think people would enjoy it if they had nothing better to do and be surprised at how much they like it because of Collins' performance.
Jessica Lange - Music Box
The second Jessica this year, how neat. And neat would describe this film pretty well. This is a film that is about familial love and coming to grips with the past but is such a boring, flatline of a film that it makes Lange's performance look even worse. Lange plays a lawyer whose father was a gendarme over in Hungary in WWII and gets accused by the Communist Hungarian government of being a war criminal. Lange takes on her father's case and defends him. She does a great job of shooting holes in the prosecutor's case and it slowly is revealed that her father might not actually be innocent. This sounds like a pretty interesting story with some great emotional ups and downs but man, this film and performance by proxy falls miserably flat. The role just seems designed to get an Oscar nomination and though Lange acquits herself well enough, there's a real lack of passion in the character. The courtroom stuff is too polished and slick, I never really bought the familial bond and love for her father which in turn made the reveal that he was a monster lack any emotional power. She was just an actress going through the motions of reacting to the realization that her father wasn't who she thought and fought for. There's no real tension or suspense. You know at the end that the father is going to turn out to be a Nazi. The film just goes through the motions without ever giving us a reason to want to like it. Same for Lange's performance, unless you are a super Lange fan, there's not much to really enjoy.
Michelle Pfeiffer - The Fabulous Baker Boys
I hate to sound like a broken record but I kinda feel like the reason Pfeiffer was nominated because she was an IT actress, one of those hot, young, talented women who the Academy loves. So they end up nominating these women like Pfeiffer a couple times in hopes to make them stars and draw viewers and because they are old, white men. Pfeiffer was nominated 3 times in 5 years and so far it's been for ingenue type work. In Love Field she played almost a Marilyn Monroe type figure and here she's a sexy lounge singer. I wasn't a huge fan of her third nomination in 1992 and this performance feels lightweight, which I hate to say. She is great as a singer, even doing all her own singing. That part feels really authentic and helps cement her as being an actual lounge singer like her character. I wouldn't mind listening to an album of her songs, that's how natural her singing is. It's the fact that she doesn't show up for like the first 20-30 minutes and isn't in the last 20 minutes except the very last scene that makes it lightweight. She comes in as an escort who wants to sing, though that part of her life is really not dealt with at all, and has a sort of attitude and is late and Pretty Woman-ish. Then she sings - well - and sleeps with Jeff Bridges in the inevitable romantic plot. It's telegraphed a million miles away, it happens, and then she moves on to something better, or at least more lucrative. Yes, Pfeiffer plays up her sexy qualities and can sing, but besides acting as the sexy ingenue in the nightclub act, she doesn't have much else to do. That's mostly the fault of the film itself. Pfeiffer literally only has to be attractive, sing pretty good, and be a source of conflict for the Bridges brothers and that's essentially it. That's why I call it slight and lightweight. It's a nomination you get when the Academy wants to make you a star. Pfeiffer is good but I don't feel she elevates herself into Oscar territory. I think it's more you fall in love with Pfeiffer and want to see her rewarded more than anything else. Okay performance but little else to it.
I don't know if I'm going to be able to even pick a winner. None of these performances are that good or at least feel like they should be a winner. Collins might be the best of the bunch but that performance and film are not Oscar winning caliber. Pfeiffer is okay but her performance doesn't feel strong enough for a win. Adjani, I don't even know where to put her. I like the first part of her performance before it becomes more stereotypical and her film and role are way more challenging than the other two I've mentioned. Lange is just so passionless and boring, like we are supposed to nominate her strictly because of what the character and film are about. I dislike Tandy a lot in that role even though I really quite enjoyed her Fried Green Tomatoes work. This has to be the worst Best Actress category I've seen so far and most likely one of the worst of all time. I'm not even going to pick a winner as I don't feel Collins would be a good winner at all.
Oscar Winner: Jessica Tandy - Driving Miss Daisy
My Winner:
Pauline Collins
Isabelle Adjani
Michelle Pfeiffer
Jessica Lange
Jessica Tandy
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