Early in her career, Jessica Lange made two relentlessly movies--The Postman Always Rings Twice and Frances -- in rapid succession. At this point, her friend and Frances co-star, Kim Stanley, suggested that she accept a role in "the first comedy you're offered." The first comedy she was offered was Tootsie, for which Lange won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. The question, then, is Where has Kim Stanley been since then? Where was Kim Stanley when Lange was getting ready to make Far North, was gearing up for Sweet Dreams, was reading the script for Everybody's All-American? Where was Kim Stanley when Jessica Lange really needed her?
One thing you can say for Lange--and there are many good things you can say for her--is that she seems to have a pretty sound idea of where her films fit into the history of American cinema. Asked if she expects to see any sequels to her movies in the theaters any time soon, Lange whimsically shakes her head and sighs, "No." No, there will be no Country II, no Far North by Northwest, no Sweeter Dreams, no First Blood: Crimes of the Heart Part II. Indeed, Lange doesn't even want to think about where Jewell Ivy and her beleaguered family from Country are today.
"Don't even ask" she sighs "They lost the farm, probably, and they're making do the best they can in some small town". She says this while sitting in an inn in Charlottesville, Virginia, not far from the farm where she lives with Sam Shepard and their three kids. Also located nearly is Thomas Jefferson's ancestral abode, Monticello. It is ironic that Large should be discussing a highly praised but not terribly lucrative film about the plight of well-meaning farmers who couldn't make a go of it, because Thomas Jefferson was a highly praised, well-meaning farmer who couldn't make a go of it, ending up $1 million in debt. Of course, Jefferson, like Lange, had other qualities.
The more obvious of those qualities were on display in her first movie, King Kong, in which an ape dwarfed in size only by Dino Delaurentiis's ego put the finger on her. After digging her way out of that artistic crypt by showing that she could act like hell--in Postman and Frances--Lange hauled down an Oscar with an adroit performance as an ethereal bim-bo-who-wants-to-grow in Tootsie. Since then, she has spent the better part of a decade making movies that are definitely not shoring up the fragile financial infrastructure of the film industry, even if she does keep getting good reviews.
Yes, Lange has mastered the art of giving solid performances in a series of bombs, near-bombs, "little" films, and projects involving her husband. These include the charming but unnecessary Sweet Dreams, the loopy Crimes of the Heart, the idiotic Everybody's All-American and the unfathomable Far North. Her unflagging ability to do good work in works that aren't too good may be artistically admirable, but if Yo-Yo Ma kept giving virtuoso performances with the Albuquerque Philharmonic, people might start to complain.
Lange is now trying to extricate herself from these mid-career doldrums by appearing in two new movies. Typically, there have been problems getting them off the assembly line. Men Don't Leave, finished in 1988 but shelved ever since, is the first film Risky Business director Paul Brickman has made in six, going on seven years. A wry, compact drama with comic overtones, it's about a newly widowed mother of two boys who tries to start a new life in downtown Baltimore.
And Music Box, completed in early 1989, marks a comeback of sorts for Constantin Costa-Gavras, the earnest but heavy-handed leftist filmmaker whose last project was the abysmal Betrayed, an implausible neofascist/ FBI love story. Lange, who always gives good, and often great, performances, needs to get some points on the scoreboard, but it remains to be seen whether roles as a lower-middle-class single mother trying to cope, or a Hungarian-American barrister forced to defend a father accused of monstrous war crimes, is what the doctor ordered. As yet, there is no sound of movie-viewing America gunning the engines of their station wagons to get to the early show.
The decision to make what one pundit calls "movies that matter" probably began with Frances, but reached its fullest expression in Country, the 1984 film about a doomed Iowa farming family, which Lange co-produced. This searing indictment of Jimmy Carter's grain embargo, Ronald Reagan's ruthless economic policies, the Federal Farm Home Loan Board, the United States Department of Agriculture, the American banking community, Modern Civilization, and anything else that happened to get in the line of fire, was a microcosm of Lange's career: a well-acted, well-scripted, well-directed movie that never seriously challenged Gone With the Wind for box office supremacy. Lange, who subsequently made headlines by testifying about the plight of the farmers before a Congressional subcommittee with time on its hands, is still pretty upset about the way Touchstone handled her pet project.
"The weekend it was released, the man who'd been the champion of the film got replaced," she recalls. "In came a new regime: Katzenberg and Eisner. Just those names--Katzenberg and Eisner--sound like a cartoon strip. It makes me chuckle when I think of it."
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.
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.