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

Lange is amused by the notion that she leaves men high, dry and wasted in her films.

"I don't choose roles for that reason," she explains. "I always choose the part because of the arc of the character, because of the exciting journey it can take you on. And if it's a woman's film, the chances are the female character is going to be the strongest."

The only time Lange gets testy is when the subject of Frances comes up. After all, the 1982 film was the story of an independent-minded ingenue who started out making dumb blonde movies, then moved east to have an affair with a pretentious playwright, and then saw her career go slightly haywire.

"I don't see any similarities in our lives at all," says Lange. "I played the part because there was a great arc to her character."

Oh yeah, that arc again. And in truth, though certain surface comparisons may suggest themselves, Clifford Odets never manifested the polo-playing prowess of a Sam Shepard, nor is there even the slightest indication that Lange is likely to undergo a lobotomy and end up hosting a talk show somewhere in the Midwest. That career path is staked out for Sean Young.

One movie whose autobiographical elements are not in dispute is Fosse's occasionally amusing, though fundamentally dreadful, 1979 film, All That Jazz. Lange brushes that one off, saying she made it "just because of Bobby." Asked what it was like making a movie about a talented director and choreographer who is killing himself with booze, stress, nicotine and sex, filmed by a man who several years later would kill himself with booze, stress, nicotine and sex, she says: "People live with such tremendous unhappiness. Bob was so incredibly talented, so genuine, so sweet. But there was a flip side to that. He had a real dark side."

Lange has warm feelings about Sweet Dreams, a charming if not entirely indispensible chronicle of the life and times of legendary country singer Patsy Cline. Despite fine performances by Lange and Ed Harris, this is essentially a hard-driving-woman-tries-to-save-hard-drinking-man romance, and like virtually all movies about pop stars, ends in transportation tragedy. Lange says that director Karel Reisz deliberately set out to make a love story, not Coal Miner's Daughter, though she seems to find the Ed Harris character--who gives Lange a pretty nasty beating towards the end of the film--more sympathetic than he really is. But the film lacks any real tension or overall thrust: Cline was a tough, feisty girl who could belt out a mean tune and died in a plane crash. Should Emmylou Harris or Linda Ronstadt meet an untimely fate in the suddenly unfriendly skies, you could probably make touching movies about them too. But would Michelle Pfeiffer take those roles? Cher?

Asked to identify directors she has enjoyed working with, Lange cites Sydney Pollack, Bob Rafelson, Paul Brickman and her husband. She also loved working with Costa-Gavras because he was "so intelligent." This is not a characteristic she ascribes to Taylor Hackford, who directed the inane Everybody's All-American, the only movie in recent years that can seriously compete with Silverado for sheer volume of cinematic cliches.

"I despise that film," says Lange, curling her lips with the Jack Palance-like venom she displays in Crimes of the Heart and Music Box once she really gets riled up. "It was the worst experience of my life."

For those of you who got to the video store and found all 36 copies of the film rented for the weekend, Everybody's All-American is a churning, hokey Cuisinart clunker about the travails of a once-famous LSU football player and his ex-Magnolia Queen wife. Lange says that she loved the original script, which answered the question: "What do you do for the rest of your life when you've peaked at 19 or 20?"

"It asked you: what is the basis of their love?" says Lange. "It was a great love story. But Taylor just didn't get it. He somehow thought it was a football movie. I wouldn't have taken the role if I thought it would end up like that. I'm not about to do a supporting role in The Knute Rockne Story." She hesitates, then gets back in the cockpit. "It's just a stupid film. I was up in New York doing one of those press blitzes, and when I saw it I was so infuriated that I went back home the same night. I'd been writing letters and notes to Taylor for months, but he cut out the underbelly of the story." She eventually calms down. "It was just a poorly made film by a mediocre director."

Does Lange ever go back and look at her films?

"I look at them at a rough-cut stage," she replies, noting that, "sometimes you can effect changes. After that, I don't want to see them. They just don't interest me anymore."

What does interest her? A role as a villainess? A part in a Claude Chabrol film? Would she like that?

"Yes," she responds, "but I think if you'd asked me that five or ten years ago I would have been more motivated." Lange, who takes parenting seriously, repeatedly rescheduling interviews because of her children's violin lessons and whatnot, adds: "I've made 10 movies in 10 years. That's certainly all I want to do."

Lange is not especially generous when it comes to fellow actresses. "You see good movies--_Sea of Love_, The Fabulous Baker Boys--and they're well made,

well acted, but there's nothing to them. It's all about mundane relationships; there's nothing very profound about them. It's slick, but so what? The story doesn't stick with you, the characters don't stick with you, the movie doesn't stick with you."

She also wonders why the women in Dangerous Liaisons got all the good ink, while John Malkovich got dumped on for his idiosyncratic performance as an almost simian 18th century fop.

"I thought Malkovich was brilliant; I thought Malkovich dominated the entire film. I was stunned that Malkovich didn't get honored for his performance." She pauses. "Is my perception so far out of the mainstream?"

Apparently. But enough of Malkovich's past; what about Jessica Lange's future?

"The only thing that interests me is doing something different," says Lange. "I'm not disheartened, I haven't lost interest in acting, but I don't want to repeat anything." But she also says: "This isn't a great time for directors; it isn't a great time for scripts."

It also isn't a great time for studios that get films out on time. This month, Lange can be seen in two new films, both of which have been sitting on the shelf. And both were directed by individuals who could use a hit. Paul Brickman made Tom Cruise a household name in 1983 with Risky Business, then didn't make another film until 1988. And Costa-Gavras, famous for such classics as Z, State of Seige, and Missing, stumbled badly the last time out of the chute with Betrayed, a movie only Debra Winger could love. So here we have the intrepid Jessica trying to bounce back from the worst experience of her career in the company of a director who's just made the worst movie of his career and another director who made the best movie of his career and then went AWOL for six years. Is this any way to run a career?

Still, things could pan out. Maybe it was seeing one too many films with people named Bridges or Bottoms or Quaid or Sheen in them, but Music Box struck this viewer as the genuine article, the real McCoy. A chilling account of a young woman's gradual realization that her Hungarian papa is not the man she thinks he is, Music Box draws its power from the fact that everybody in the audience--even the folks unfamiliar with Costa-Gavras's sledgehammer approach--can see what's coming a mile away. Drawing from Hitchcock, Costa-Gavras uses endless plot twists and unexpected detours to tantalize the audience with the question: When will the heroine realize what we already know--that back in the old country Lange's papa used to kill Jews for a living?

And although the frail, pallid Lange is not altogether convincing as a lawyer, and even less convincing as a Hungarian-American, this may be her finest performance ever. Music Box is a brutal, disturbing film about an unendurable truth: that some of us are the parents of fiends, that some of us are the children of monsters. Lange's talents are never better arrayed than in the scenes where she silently embraces her father; the moment she gazes through a window with a face that seems a thousand years old; the sequence when she staggers down a flight of stairs in Budapest after seeing a photograph she never should have seen. That's where Lange's ace in the hole--her beautiful face--comes in handy. She doesn't look so beautiful after she's gazed into the abyss.

This is not Demi Moore country; this is no place for Daryl Hannah. This is chilling stuff, the sort of thing a sinister character in Sam Shepard's True West derisively refers to as a "film," rather than a "movie." Well, it's a good one, a domestically made foreign film that achieves the distinction of telling us something about the Holocaust that we don't already know. Thus, Lange gets her wish, making a dire, important, memorable motion picture that has a ghost of a chance at the box office. It beats working with Taylor Hackford. It beats making movies in Duluth.

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Joe Queenan writes for Spy, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal.

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