A Hollywood Star gets a lifetime achievement award
The following piece is adapted from my new book, Sensing the Past
Tonight Jodie Foster will be precocious once
more. The native Angeleno who began her acting career at age three will be the
relatively youthful recipient of a lifetime achievement award at the Golden
Globes, having just turned 50. The span of her career has been truly
remarkable; her collaborators stretch from Helen Hayes, born in 1900, all the
way to Abigail Breslin, born in 1996. Filmographically, at least, Foster
qualifies as a grande dame.
This would have been hard to imagine back
in the seventies, when she made her mark in movies like Freaky Friday. Foster’s persona—bright, confident, impatient with
the strictures of authority—was perfect for the post-sixties zeitgeist. One of
the first people to recognize this was Martin Scorsese. Scorsese cast Foster in
a small part as a tough-minded tomboy in Alice
Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974).
But the turning point in her career as an
actor—and a touchstone for her preoccupations as an artist—was her second
Scorsese project, Taxi Driver (1976),
in which she plays a child prostitute. While Taxi Driver seems to reflect a vaguely countercultural critique of
American life common in the films of the 1970s, it is animated by a powerful
vision of evil—atavistic, unexplained, palpable evil—that suffuses Manhattan
like the vapor rising up into the street in the unforgettable opening shot of
the movie. Though lacking an overt theological or philosophical framework, this
notion of implacable, unexplained malice has shaped Foster’s career, a vector
that presses down on most of her films and gives many of them the melancholic
weight that has always made her a bit unusual even as she went on to become an
artist who would operate in the heart of the Hollywood mainstream.
In pursuing this vision, Foster has made
her cinematic journey alone. To a striking degree, she plays single women, and
even in those cases where her characters experience romance, these
relationships are severed by death or other forms of separation. On those occasions where Foster is a
parent, it’s as a single mother. Even her most recent film, The Beaver (2011), a movie that one
could regard as an exception because Foster is in a troubled but legally valid
marriage, ends with her character on the edge of the frame, observing husband
and son from a distance.
Foster
tends to live alone in another important respect as well: to a degree that’s
singular among actors of her generation, her characters try to live their lives
independent of public institutions, particularly government institutions. At
best, institutions are ineffectual in meeting their stated aims; at worst,
they’re dangerous. In her signature role as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, she must confront
the frightening Hannibal Lecter, and the serial killer whose staircase she
descends in a state of pure terror, all by herself.
This state of autonomy tends to be a
pragmatic choice, not a deeply-held principle or grievance. Clint Eastwood
characters often have chips on their shoulders, even as they try to form
communities. Foster characters are tougher: less hostile than guarded, with
little inclination to bond. Even in those cases where they do work within institutions (like the nun of The Secret Life of Altar Boys), they tend to work on their own. They
not anti-institutional so much as non-institutional. As such, they’re both harder to resist
and harder to embrace.
In an ironic yet apt way, Foster is like
Ronald Reagan: compelling in her institutional skepticism and the instinctive
confidence with which she embodies it. Fate twined Foster’s life with Reagan’s
in 1981 when a lunatic tried to impress her by shooting him. This history has
been her burden (as history often is, one reason we go to the movies). It’s the
singular way Foster has interpreted the world we have shared with her that has
made her one of the most distinctive—and, in all likelihood, durable—figures in
American culture.
