Jessica Lange: Is This Any Way to Run a Career?

The chuckle chuckled, she proceeds.

"The new crew just wanted to dust Country under a rug," she says. "There was no advertising, and you can't open a movie like that without a certain amount of support." Even though it was praised by critics and earned Lange yet another Oscar nomination, the movie didn't do a whole lot better than the farmers it lionized.

Having once been snakebitten by rural America, you might think this ravishing Minnesota native would have had the good sense to stay off the prairies. But no, in 1988 she was back with Far North, the dismal directorial debut by her husband and frequent co-star Sam Shepard, a far better actor than director, and, quite possibly, a far better actor than playwright. Far North is a dreary, artsy affair in which bedridden patriarch Charles Durning tries to persuade daughter Lange to shoot an aging horse that has incapacitated him. An ambiguous finale leaves the viewer confused as to whether:

1. The horse kills Durning.

2. Durning kills the horse.

3. All the women have a big birthday party and let the horse and Durning sort things out for themselves.

The confusion is not diminished by a puzzling fadeout in which what appears to be Charles Durning and what appears to be a horse amble off into what appears to be a mist, but could be an afterlife. Or maybe they'd just gone out gunning for Shepard.

Lange doesn't have much to say about Far North other than "I wanted to work with Sam," and "It didn't do a whole lot of business." That isn't surprising, because as soon as the credits run, the viewer knows he's in big trouble. Epic windbags like Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Wilson, David Byrne and Ettore Scola know that if you're going to be pretentious you'd better do it in exotic locales and on a monumental scale. Unlike them, Shepard shot the entire movie in the icy regions of Northern Minnesota with a very tiny cast. Thus, from the moment the paltry opening credits appear, the viewer realizes that he's going to have to spend the next 88 minutes watching Charles Durning and a menaced horse duke it out somewhere to the north of Duluth. Not even Lange in high heels can compensate. Not that far north.

"There are worse places than Duluth," snaps Lange.

"Like where?"

She thinks about it.

"Philadelphia."

Okay, forget Duluth, let's head south. Do tell, how could a movie combining such awesome talents as Lange, Sissy Spacek, Diane Keaton, Bruce Beresford, Sam Shepard--not to mention the formidable Dino DeLaurentiis and Burt Sugarman--turn out as bad as Crimes of the Heart? "Actually," says Lange, "Crimes was one of the best experiences I ever had." But this seems to be more because of her sunny mood at the time (she'd just had another baby) rather than because of anything in the film, whose only redeeming feature is its exposure of Beth Henley's play as the flabby cornpone it is, Pulitzer or no Pulitzer. Although Lange enjoyed making the film, she decides that her work wasn't very good in it (though it was), and that she was "too fat" (though she wasn't).

"I was just really happy," she explains. "Sometimes I work better when I'm not really happy. Sometimes, if I get happy I just want to sit around and nurse my baby." She thinks about it some more. "I was just being kind of lazy."

Diane Keaton wasn't, acting up a down-home storm in that frock and those ridiculous white anklets, careening around the backyard smacking Tess Harper's bottom with a dust broom, while Sissy Spacek checked in with her usual ditzoid performance: Carrie Goes to Chattanooga.

And let's not forget Beresford. When he made King David, there were people who felt there was no way he could top the ludicrous scene in which Richard Gere squat-dances, Cossack-style, into Jerusalem. But Beresford was just getting warmed up, easily topping King David with the scene in Crimes where Spacek, having unsuccessfully attempted to hang herself from the upstairs chandelier, staggers downstairs with the chandelier still wrapped around her neck and sticks her head in the oven--only to have sister Keaton intervene.

"We just gotta find a way to get through these bad days," purrs Keaton soothingly, perhaps fearing Spacek will try the chainsaw next. No, Diane, we just gotta find a way to get through these bad movies.

While that scene was being shot, Lange is asked, wasn't there anyone in the general vicinity who could have told Beresford and Spacek to knock it the hell off?

"You mean like The Taste Patrol?" she giggles. Now that she's coming clean, Lange admits that Crimes of the Heart was in trouble from the word go.

"I had difficulties with Beresford," she says. "He didn't give us any direction. I suggested when we were in so-called 'rehearsals,' that if we could just establish the relationship these three sisters had between them already that we'd be so far ahead in the story. It occurred to me that we might do that with improvisation. I suggested that to Beresford, and he said, 'I once knew an actor in Australia who liked to get prepared for a role by dressing up in a clown suit. I never could understand that.' "Lange sits back and sighs. "So he thought improvising was getting dressed up in a clown suit. We were out there all alone."

Lange hasn't had to spend much of her off-screen life alone: liaisons with Bob Fosse, Jack Nicholson and Mikhail Baryshnikov, by whom she had her first child (she has two others by Shepard), have all been well chronicled. Here's hoping that Sam's having a better time of it in their marriage than most of Lange's fictional mates do in her films. Obviously, Lange is not a classic ballbuster in the Meryl Streep or Glenn Close tradition: Those two can torch any man within 50 yards with their incendiary performances--you certainly don't want anyone like Jeremy Irons on the set when they get into high gear. But though Lange has little of the fury or sheer power of Close or Streep, in her own charming little way she tends to take her male counterparts and grind them up into small pieces.

Shepard alone is batting 0 for 3, having taken his lumps as the failed, juicing farmer in Country, the ditched lover in Frances, and the goofy, gap-toothed rustic that cockteaser Lange flirts with in Crimes. Add to that list Durning's bedridden invalid father in Far North, Dustin Hoffman's cross-dressing neurotic in Tootsie, and Ed Harris's drunken wife-beater in Sweet Dreams, Dennis Quaid's washed-up gridiron great in Everybody's All-American, Frederick Forrest's outgunned government prosecutor in Music Box, and you've got an impressive string of candidates for the Emasculation Hall of Fame. Remember, it all started with the Konger himself, who gets blown to smithereens as soon as he foolishly releases Lange's hand. The last male to hold his own in the ring with Jessica was Jack Nicholson, and even there Lange first betrayed her outclassed hubby and then helped Jack polish him off. No wonder Fosse cast her as the Angel of Death.

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