Streep critiques

Fair or unfair, not everyone has liked Meryl Streep's acting

The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

Streep has always had her critics, and they have come in a variety of forms. Some of this has criticism has been the result of Streep’s early uneasiness with her peers, a problem that dogged her throughout her high school, college, and graduate education. In her first year at Yale one of her teachers placed her on a form of academic probation because he believed, as she later recalled, “that I was holding back my talent out of fear with competing with my fellow students.” Streep was hurt by this, but admitted it was true. Such problems became less obvious with the passage of time, but it’s hard to believe they disappeared entirely in a business as competitive as Hollywood. Streep herself has sometimes come out on the losing end of such contests, most notably in the case of the title role in the 1995 film Evita, for which she underwent considerable preparation. “I can sing better than Madonna,” she said at the time. “If she gets it, I'll rip her throat out.”

Streep has also had critics who have been less than enchanted by her style of acting. She can hardly be faulted on her technique, and her mastery of voices and accents – she learned Polish as part of her work in her Oscar winning performance in Sophie’s Choice, used a Danish accent for Out of Africa, and has spoken the Queen’s English in roles that ranged from the Victorian servant of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981 to Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady thirty years later – are simply dazzling. But to some that’s precisely the problem: her acting calls attention to itself. Katherine Hepburn told her biographer, Scott Berg, that he considered Streep among her least favorite contemporary actresses, dismissing her with this bitchy appraisal: “click, click, click.”

The best known, and most damaging, of Streep’s critics was Pauline Kael (who, as you may recall, was not particularly fond of Clint Eastwood, either, though for the opposite reason: she didn’t think he was an actor at all). Over the course of her first decade or so in movies, Kael asserted that Streep acted “only from the neck up,” speculating that “in her zeal to be an honest actress, she allows nothing to escape her conception of a performance.” Kael too could be bitchy, describing Streep as “our lady of the accents.” In 1994, three years after Kael’s retirement, Streep offered her reaction to such criticism: “It’s so awful that someone you admire hates what you do.” But still later, she was less diplomatic. “You know what I think?” she asked in 2008. “That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blonde hair, and their heartlessness got to her; then, years later, she saw me.” New York Times reviewer came to his former colleague’s defense: “Kael being quite dead, she can't address Streep's psychoanalysis, but one might also think she wouldn't have gotten far as a critic if she relentlessly avenged these theorized college slights with undeserved digs against everyone on screen with long blonde hair, a not uncommon feature for an actress. One might think it's possible to simply not like Streep's acting style.” Streep, it is clear, can also be bitchy.

Still, on balance, it’s hard not to be impressed by Streep’s overall equanimity, particularly when one learns of far more crude dismissals. In a 2008 interview with Entertainment Weekly, she related that during her audition for a leading role in King Kong (1976), a part that ultimately went to Jessica Lange, producer Dino De Laurentiis asked his son in Italian, with Streep in the room, “Why did you send me this pig? This woman is so ugly!” Steep responded in Italian, “I’m very sorry that I disappoint you.” As she explained, “He was so used to treating girls like bimbos, never imagined that a blond person could speak Italian,” she said. De Laurentiis, who died in 2010, denied describing Streep as a pig, or meeting with her about King Kong, though he does recall doing so for another movie. In her 1984 biography of Streep, journalist Diana Maychick has the actor describing a similar incident involving a different De Laurentiis project, the 1978 film King of the Gypsies, in which it is De Launentiis’s son, who died in a 1981 plane crash, who makes the disparaging remark in Italian. My guess is that the earlier version of the story is what Streep was remembering, largely because less time had passed at the time she related it. But that something like it happened – in that case, among others – is very likely. Even in the case of a high prestige project like Out of Africa, and as enlightened a director as the late Sydney Pollack, Streep felt forced to deal with comporting with traditional ideas of femininity. In a documentary on the making of the film, she described  Pollack as believing she was not sexy enough to play the part of Isak Dinesen, and wrangling with a meeting to further discuss the part. “I went, pathetically, to that meeting in a very low-cut blouse with a push-up bra. I’m really shamed to say that I did, and it worked.  That’s the really sad part.” Streep related the story lightheartedly. But the tone never entirely undercut the words. In a subsequent interview with James Lipton for Inside the Actor’s Studio, Lipton noted that he had recently interviewed Pollack, who reported no such recollection these exchanges. “I knoooow,” she replied to laughter. “He probably doesn’t remember. You know, he probably doesn’t remember that was the thing. But” – she pauses for comic effect – “that was the thing.”  
Of course, she could afford to be magnanimous. One can only wonder – no, one need not wonder at all – what less esteemed women have had to put up with in Hollywood, among many other workplaces. Streep has had about a charmed a professional life as woman could have had in the American Century, which is a way that it’s been charmed indeed, and yet to faintly damn those who have smudged the quality of that life. Even at this late date, Streep does not have a production company the way many male movie stars, among them Eastwood and Hanks, do. (Playtone, the company run by Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson, was one of the producers of Mamma Mia!)  “I don’t have anybody directing my career, it just depends on what scripts come,” she said in 2010. “If I like them I do them.” Now in her sixties, she has been phenomenally productive, with dozens to her credit, among them four movies in 2007 alone.

In an important sense, Streep’s entire career has been a matter of using her talent and power to give voice to women. That career began at a propitious time; she had more opportunities that her predecessors did. But it also began in a culturally conservative one that decisively shaped Streep’s feminism.  The product of an anti-institutional moment, her statements on behalf of women took, if not anti-institutional tone, then a largely non-institutional one: the political was personal. That’s not surprising. What may be more surprising is that was only the beginning of her story.

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Next: Streep's early years as a star.

Theatrical transformation

Streep's transition from stage to screen -- to (another) screen

The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

It’s worth pausing for a moment here to note that while Streep’s ascent was rapid, it was relatively invisible for those not familiar with the intricacies of the theater world. Unlike every other figure I've been studying, she did not have an apprenticeship in television. Clint Eastwood had Rawhide, Denzel Washington had St. Elsewhere, and Tom Hanks had Bosom Buddies. Jodie Foster lacked a regular perch, but did years of yeoman’s work on a variety of shows and spent a stretch of her early career at Disney. Hanks and Washington had real stage training, but only Daniel Day-Lewis, who also did a variety of television work, underwent as long or as rigorous a preparation as Streep did. When she finally did emerge in the mass media, her impact was uniquely swift and decisive: almost overnight, she became the gold standard of acting excellence across gender lines.

Ironically, it was television, a medium where Streep has done relatively little work, which made her a household name. After landing a supporting role in the 1977 NBC movie The Deadliest Season, as the wife of a hockey player played by Michael Moriarity, Streep was cast in a leading role in Holocaust, a 1978 ABC miniseries that followed in the wake of the hugely successful Roots (1976). Streep played Inga Helms Weiss, the gentile wife of a Jewish artist (James Woods), whose prosperous family is sucked into the Nazi vortex. (Her Deadliest Season colleague Moriarity plays Erik Dorff, a jobless drifter turned Reich functionary, giving a performance of satisfying inscrutability in an otherwise drearily high-minded affair.)  Holocaust was not as successful as Roots in terms of its reception or subsequent reputation, but it premiered during the golden age of television as a mass medium, and was viewed by some 120 people, half the U.S. population. Streep, who won an Emmy for her work in the seven-part series, nevertheless correctly described her part in Holocaust as “unrelentingly noble,” and says she took it largely for the money, as her fiancé Cazale was terminally ill with cancer. Upon her return from Austria shooting the series, Streep nursed him to his death. (She began seeing, and married, Don Gummer later the same year.) Streep would return to television in 1997 as the mother of an epileptic child who insists in the face of skepticism that his condition can be improved by his diet in First, Do No Harm, for which she was also nominated for an Emmy. She won her second Emmy for her work in the 2003 HBO miniseries Angels in America, in a tour de force clutch of parts that included Ethel Rosenberg, an angel, and, most amusingly, an almost unrecognizable elderly male rabbi.

It was in movies, however, that Streep cast her lot. Her first film role was small but significant: a snarky friend of playwright Lillian Hellman in the 1977 film Julia, which starred Vanessa Redgrave in the title role and Jane Fonda as Hellman, both of whom won Oscars. Its importance is less a matter of the part itself (most of which ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor) than Julia’s status as a feminist statement. Though generically related to the “woman’s film” or “weepie” that was a staple of moviemaking in the mid-twentieth century, Julia was packaged and perceived as a sign of the new power and prestige of women in the movie business. While this would prove to a false dawn, Streep’s association with the project, directed by old-time Hollywood heavyweight Fred Zinneman, would position her as A-level talent. Fonda, twelve years Streep’s senior and a feminist trailblazer in the business, conferred her blessing: “This one will go far,” she told Zinneman.

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Next: Streep's critics

Jersey girl

Scenes from a suburban childhood

The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

Meryl Streep is an anomaly among the figures I’ve studied: a movie star who appears to have had an unremarkably happy childhood. Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, and Jodie Foster were all children of divorce; Daniel Day-Lewis had a father, previously married, who died during his adolescence. Clint Eastwood came from an intact family, but an itinerant one buffeted by winds of the Great Depression. Conversely, the prep-school Day-Lewis was born into a storied family of the intellectual elite; Foster is literally and figuratively a child of Hollywood.

Streep, by contrast, is a child of suburbia. Suburbia has had its thoughtful critics, but for her it appears to have functioned the way it has been most fondly imagined: as a kid-friendly place where an intact nuclear family, relative prosperity, and access to the metropolis function as a garden where success and happiness twine. It is surely no accident that Streep and her husband, sculptor Don Gummer, chose to spend the majority of the time raising their own four children in small-town Connecticut. (Two of those children, Mary and Grace, are now professional actors. In one of the more amusing turns in her career, Streep has a small role as the older version of Mary, also known as Mamie, in the 2007 ensemble piece Evening.) Clearly, there are multiple roads to greatness.

Mary Louise Streep was born on June 22, 1949, in Summit, New Jersey, the eldest of three children (she has two brothers). Her ancestry is mostly German; one branch of her family line goes back to William Penn.  At the insistence of her father, a marketing executive at Merck pharmaceuticals, she was named after her mother, who after her christening (as a Presbyterian) rued the decision and started calling her Meryl. The family spent much of her childhood in Basking Ridge and Bernardstown, two towns in central New Jersey, on the western rim of metropolitan New York.

Mary Streep had been a commercial artist before having children, and continued to work as a freelance illustrator after they were born. But motherhood was her vocation, and one that, notwithstanding the professional aspirations she nurtured for her daughter, made a deep impression on that daughter. Streep has referred to her mother’s example frequently in her work, both in gratitude as well as a source of inspiration for specific characters, whether they happen to be mothers, or not. “My mother was and is my role model,” she said at a time when Mary Streep was still alive (she died in 2001). “Not precisely for what she did in her life, but for the way she’s always done everything. She always started the day singing, she loves a good joke, she has energy and verve, wit and great natural graciousness. Everybody loves my mom because she’s the Will Rogers of women; she puts people at their ease and can diffuse any awkward situation with a witty aside or a joke at her own expense. I’ve always admired this ability to lighten the atmosphere when she enters the room, and I think the best role models for women and girls are people of either gender who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.”  

Both Streep’s parents were musical—Dad played piano, Mom was a singer—and Streep had ambitions for becoming a singer herself (her younger brother Harry became a dancer and choreographer). She’s fond of self-deprecatingly telling the story of her mother taking her for singing lessons on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the confident child was preceded by a student named Beverly Sills.  “Nobody had heard of her either,” she joked years later. “I thought she was sort of good.” (Actually, Streep has a very good singing voice that she has deployed to good effect in a number of films, among them Postcards from the Edge, A Prairie Home Companion, and Mamma Mia!)

Streep’s voice lessons were part of a larger cultural education that included frequent trips to the theater, musicals in particular. Still, an early love of the performing arts was only one element in the mix of a classic postwar childhood. As an early biographer noted, Streep quit her singing lessons after four years “and devoted all her time to playing out a winning performance among the boyfriends, girlfriends and teachers in the biggest drama of her adolescent life: high school.” Though she often describes herself as an ugly duckling as a child, there’s little sign that Streep, a high school cheerleader, was anything less than a star once she entered adolescence. Her 1967 yearbook portrait shows her to be an attractive, if somewhat unusual-looking, blonde, and the accompanying list of activities include being named Homecoming Queen as well as membership in the National Honor Society.  Interestingly, acting in school musicals is not on the list, despite the fact that she appeared in enough to engender envy among her rivals (a problem that would become familiar in the years that followed).

When Streep entered Vassar in 1967—one of the legendary “Seven Sisters” of liberal arts schools for women—same-sex education was still the rule among elite undergraduate institutions. But that was rapidly changing; indeed, Streep was a junior when the school went co-ed in 1969. She did not like it. In particular, she objected to the way men took over leadership positions in student activities and dominated political discourse. “Everybody was a miniature Abbie Hoffman in front of a swarm of adoring girls,” she remembered. “I just thought it was bullshit.”

Fortunately, by that point, she had carved out a domain of her own as a dramatic actor, where her talents awed her teachers. To escape the tumult of Vassar’s transition, as well as the jealousies of her classmates, Streep spent a term of her senior year as a visiting student at Dartmouth, which did not yet allow women to matriculate. This did not prove to be a happy experience for her, either, and she returned to Vassar, from which she graduated in 1971. She got her first work as a professional actor with the Green Mountain Guild, a Vermont troupe, supplementing her income by working as a waitress. Streep decided within months that if she were to have a future in the business she would need a graduate training, and so applied, and was accepted, into the three-year Master of Fine Arts program at Yale Drama School, where she was awarded a scholarship. Streep’s Yale years were the crucible of her career.

She had arrived at a pivotal point in the school’s history. A few years earlier, the legendary theater writer and critic Robert Brustein had founded a repertory theater program at Yale, and as its artistic director transformed New Haven into a powerhouse venue for arresting interpretations of classic works (Shakespeare, Chekov, et. al.). Brustein mentored Streep along with classmates like playwright Christopher Durang. The training she received there was the theatrical equivalent of a boot camp, fostering a range and intensity that would make much of what followed seem downright easy.

But not everything. Upon Streep’s graduation from Yale in 1975, she took a job with the Theater Communications Group, a company that performed in small venues around the country. From there she made the transition to the New York stage, performing with the New York Shakespeare Festival (where she met fellow actor John Cazale, who became her fiancé) and the Public Theater under the direction of Joseph Papp. These, too, were grueling proving grounds. By this point, however, Streep’s career was on a steep upward trajectory, earning rapturous reviews in a string of shows. She received a Tony Award nomination for best actress in the 1976 production of 27 Wagons of Cotton, and was poised for stardom far beyond live performance.

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Next: The long road to overnight success. 

Feminist line

Meryl Streep's cinematic choices sketch a trajectory in the history of women's work.

The following post is the first in a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies. 

  I can’t say she didn’t warn me. “The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor,” Meryl Streep conceded in a 1998 interview with Interview magazine. But, she added, “it’s a completely random process. In other words, which role was available which year has more to do with who was running a studio or who was bankrolling a particular project or who the costar was.
     “The people who write about films [like person you’re now reading] always attempt to find a through line to a career,” she continued. “There is a through line to a life based on the choices you make, and so you can discern some things about an actor. But not necessarily a lot.” 
     Actually, I won’t claim to have discerned all that much. Though I’ve now spent some time in her virtual company, I don’t claim to know Meryl Streep. I will say that making allowances for the promotional persona stars adopt for pitching their work to the public—in which every project was fascinating (if challenging), every co-star was a blast, and every director was brilliant—she appears to have an truly winning personality: spontaneous, funny, self-aware.  And, allowing for typical human foibles as well as those particular to celebrities, an intriguingly normal one. “The story about Meryl Streep is that there really is no story,” Roger Ebert, who has interviewed his fair share of stars in the last half-century, wrote recently. “She is a great actress, probably the best of her generation, and has given one wonderful performance after the other. The rest of the time she is an admirable wife and mother, utterly free of gossip, scandal and even anecdote. The stories that are told about her, even the funny ones, are essentially about how gifted she is, and how much people like her. That’s it.” 
      Well, not quite. Actually, there are “through lines” to Streep’s life that are reasonably discernible. Like this one: She’s a feminist, at least in the general sense of feminism as a belief in the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. Streep is legendary for the diverse array of characters she has played: not just wives, mothers, daughters and sisters, but also clerks, journalists, teachers, and politicians. But all of them are strong characters who assert themselves in their respective environments. As does Streep herself, who has been active in any number of environmental or political causes over the years, particularly those related to related to food.
     She is a particularly acute, yet good-natured, critic of sexism in her own industry. I was amused in watching a slightly tart Streep assert in a 1993 interview assert that “actors, in general, as a general sweeping rule, are much more vain than actresses.” Deploying her vast gifts of mimicry, she then impersonated a male movie star (“they’re always checking their hair,” she says, gesturing with her hands). “I’m right, aren’t I?” she asks someone off camera, ratifying the apparent approval by saying “absolutely.” An offscreen (male) voice then asks, “And you’re not vain?” “No,” she says with mock solemnity, breaking into laughter. Still, the point remains: “I’m vain, but I’m nothing like these men.” 
     She was more pointed in a 1989 Premiere interview with Terri Minsky, who went on to have a successful television writing career. It’s worth quoting in a little detail:

“Can I just tell you [she told Minsky] that $11 million is what Jack Nicholson got for Batman. Eleven million. He was in Ironweed [with Streep herself], if you recall. Okay. All right. He was in Heartburn [also with Streep] if you remember . . . I was in Out of fucking Africa, remember? Kramer vs. fucking Kramer! The Deer Hunter.” Her voice retains its musical lit, but the passion shows in the way her pale skin begins to flush and she leans forward on her elbows. “I’m saying it’s a guy’s game. If I asked for $11 million, they would laugh. In my face. I make enough that nobody’s gonna weep on my side of the table. But it’s outrageous. I love Jack”—this is said very sweetly. “I’m happy for him. I know he’s laughing all the way to the bank when he makes these deals. But there are different rules for men than for women. I know it’s true. I’m not angry. I guess I’m angry, but not angry enough. I have a great life. If I were starving, I would be doing something about it. I’m not, obviously. And probably that plays against me in that whole negotiating process. But it stinks.”

Twenty years later, she was still fighting similar battles. There had been a time when one could plausibly claim that for all the laurels Streep had earned—among them an unprecedented 16 Academy Award nominations—the quality of her acting did not necessarily translate to box office success. But by the end of the first decade of the 21^st century, that moment had long since passed. A string of her films running from The Devil Wears Prada (2005) to It’s Complicated (2009) were major commercial winners; the 2008 hit Mamma Mia! alone generated over half a billion dollars worldwide. Streep was also increasingly working with female writers and directors, notably her longtime collaborator Nora Ephron. And yet, as she noted, she still confronted what she called “vestigial” sexism every time she made a deal. Streep got some attention in early 2009 when she observed that “Three of the nominated films [for Best Picture] this year had 26 men and one woman— Slumdog [Millionaire] and Milk, and Frost/Nixon. You know, we accept it. It’s not unusual. But we would go nuts if three of the nominated films had 26 women and one man. It would be a very, very unusual thing. We’re still not telling everybody’s story in our country and that’s where we are.”

Of course, to call Streep a feminist is not really to say all that much. Notwithstanding the difficulties some women, particularly younger ones, have with the term, the affirmation of gender parity is not an especially rare or unconventional proposition in U.S. society, at least as a matter of genteel public opinion. More specifically, Streep is a liberal feminist, which is to say that her version of feminism focuses more on notions of equality, as opposed to assertions of female power that rest more on a sense of gender difference (consider the contrast between Hillary Clinton and, say Lady Gaga in this regard). Though Streep’s versatility as an artist has always been widely noted, her persona, particularly in recent years, has had a distinctly bourgeois cast.

But this is where history comes in to the Streep equation, and the particular “through line” that I’m tracking here. Unlike the male movie stars I’ve been looking at, Streep’s work does not reveal an implicit version of the U.S. past in the vein of Clint Eastwood’s Jeffersonianism, Daniel Day-Lewis’s frontier sensibility, or Denzel Washington’s generational vision. Instead, her work documents the integration of feminist ideology into American cultural life in the transitional decades between the 20^th and 21^st century. More specifically, it documents a shift in emphasis from private life to public life. Born in 1949, she came of age after major struggles—for voting rights, abortion, pay equity, reproductive rights—had already been launched. By the time she was a young adult, many had been substantially, though not completely, achieved. Her movies show these struggles to be ongoing, as well as the ways in which life remained complicated and contested even for women who were presumably emancipated.

 So Streep’s work tells a story of the past. But is also a story in the past. She came of age in a conservative era, witnessing the failure to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1982, and a vocal antifeminist backlash on the Right, developments she tends not to address directly but ones which she addresses implicitly in her work nonetheless.

Streep’s tale of liberal feminism unfolds in three distinct stages. The first, which runs roughly the first decade of her career, is marked by characters whose self-assertion is typically played out in their private lives, particularly as wives and mothers. Then, for a brief period between the late 1980s and early 1990s, she took a series of parts that satirically comment on gender roles, part of a broader move away from drama toward comedy. Streep’s feminism shifted again at the turn of the century, this time focusing on women whose power was played out in public, institutional settings. These phases are not completely segmented, and one of the most distinctive aspects of Streep’s career is the way in which she has blended her roles. Indeed, one might say that Streep’s signal achievement as a feminist has taken the form of dramatizing the ways a woman can experience a full, if never easy, life with any number of public and private permutations—as well as the cost of not allowing this to happen. I nevertheless believe that these phases are reasonably distinct and usefully traced as such. The through line may not be entirely straight, and blurs at times. But it is one worth tracing if it allows us to see a bit more clearly how women have, and have not, changed.
  
Next: A biographical sketch.

Femme Flawed

Foster's turn toward unsympathetic characters

The following post is part of a series of on Jodie Foster specifically, and Hollywood actors generally, as historians.

With The Inside Man (2006), Foster began edging into new territory: playing flawed people whose imperfections are not incidental to who they are, but central to our assessment of them. A character like Sarah Tobias in The Accused was no princess. But it is nevertheless decisively evident that she did not deserve to be raped, and we would still probably like if we got to know her (there’s a wonderful scene, for example, when she connects in mutual fear with a reluctant witness at her trial). Anna Leonowens of Anna and the King had her prejudices, but her heart is always in the right place. So does Dede Tate of Little Man Tate. But in The Inside Man, Foster’s Madeline White – her ironic name refers not to her purity of character, but rather an absence of one – she plays a stylish, intimidating, and amoral political fixer. It’s a small role; this Spike Lee movie features Denzel Washington as a police detective and Clive Owen as the lead bank robber in a memorably complex, cerebral thriller. But it’s among the more vivid in her career, and one that shows her as a powerful figure functioning very successfully in a male dominated world, which amounts to a kind of guilty pleasure in its own right.

            Foster is called in to assist a powerful financier (Christopher Plummer), who happens to have a safe deposit box at the bank being robbed. She silkily navigates her way around the police and even manages to get into the bank to speak with Owen, whereupon she learns that far from incidental, that bank deposit box is central to the whole reason for the heist. It turns out that Plummer’s character is a former Nazi collaborationist whose empire was founded on this original sin, a secret he is desperate to protect. Foster maintains a poker-faced stance toward this revelation, and continues to do a job that involves trying to steer Washington away (in a nice scene in a government building, they literally face off on a marble bench, engaged in low-key rhetorical fencing, during which Washington proves to be a wilier opponent than she expected). Shortly after this, she breezes into the male enclave of an elite men’s barber shop to confront Plummer. He discloses all, confident that the check he holds out at the end of his disquisition will buy her silence. “Well, I’d love to tell you what a monster you are,” she says, taking the money, with a smile, “but I have to help Bin Laden’s nephew buy a co-op on Park Avenue.” The kicker, delivered straight, is a form of blackmail: “We’re listing you as a reference.” In the end, though, it’s Washington who both winks and gets the last word when he breaks into a lunch meeting at a restaurant that includes her and the mayor. He’s now in a position to put Plummer away, and in an inside joke returns the ballpoint pen to Foster that was actually a recording device he used to get incriminating evidence against her. “You made copies?” she asks, seeming to refer to information rather than the pen itself innocuously. “Please,” Washington laughs. He looks at the mayor. “We have to keep the real criminals off the streets.”

              In The Brave One (2007) Foster does become a criminal on the streets, albeit one of a complicated kind. She plays Erica Bain, the host of an NPR-like talk show – Foster really does have a great voice for radio – brutally attacked, along with her fiancé, who is killed, during a nighttime walk in Central Park. Unable to manage her grief, she becomes buys a gun illegally and becomes a vigilante, roaming the streets of the city and killing evildoers – first those she encounters accidentally, and then those she seeks out. She’s befriended by a soulful detective, played by Terence Howard, who becomes increasingly aware, and ambivalent, about her actions.

            The Brave One is an intriguing, but deeply flawed, movie. It can be seen as a kind of bookend with Taxi Driver in the way it resonates with classically Fosterian themes:  the world is a dangerous place, even the presumably cleaned-up New York of the 21^st century, and one in which official authority is ineffectual at best. But this time the woman “graduates” to becoming the man with the gun rather than the victimized bystander.

            The problem is that the film’s message is fatally divided.  It’s very clear that Foster intended The Brave One to be a deconstruction of the vigilante genre, in that we see a damaged woman deal with her grief in a dysfunctional way. As she explained to Entertainment Weekly at the time of the movie’s release, “I don’t believe a gun should be in the hand of a thinking, feeling, breathing human being. Americans are filled with rage/fear. And guns are a huge part of our culture. I know I’m crazy because I’m only supposed to say that in Europe. But violence corrupts absolutely. By the end, her [Erica Bain’s] transformation is complete.” Foster’s interviewer noted that members of the audience tend to cheer at the climax of the film, a fact she calls “shameful,” comparing it to those who cheer during a screening of The Accused that she attended. But this is a fundamentally misguided conflation of two very different scenarios. While such a reaction to The Accused is hideous in that it celebrates wonton violence against an innocent person, the rhetorical fingers of The Brave One are on a scale weighted toward seeing the perpetrator of a crime against the protagonist get his comeuppance. The Brave One was helmed by Neil Jordan, the great Irish director, noted for his rich, independent body of work. But it was produced by action-flick impresario Joel Silver, and ultimately the moral logic of the project tips in that direction. Everyone Erica Bain shoots has it coming; we  get no back stories of these people to suggest otherwise. The one person whose situation is the least bit ambiguous is a prostitute who gets hit by the car of a pimp after Bain shoots him, but she may arguably be better off with that as the price of having him dead. If the movie wanted to make the point vigilante justice is immoral, it should have done so more unambiguously. But of course to do that would have compromised the commercial appeal of the project, whose message was plain in the poster that advertised it: A tough, looking, androgynous Foster determinedly pointing a gun.  So while The Brave One is an important document in the evolution of Foster’s artistic/moral/historical vision, it is finally unsatisfying work.

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Next: A final Foster post. 

The courage to be weak

 Jodie Foster, breaking feminist rules

The following post is part of a series on Jodie Foster in particular, and Hollywood actors generally, as historians

          A more promising, if somewhat ironic, new direction for Foster in recent years is her attempt to show something few actors, especially successful female actors, do: weakness. This is something that was apparently on her mind in mid-decade, because it came up a number of times in interviews. “If there’s one stereotype that I have, it’s that I always play strong women,” she told the UK cineaste magazine, Total Film, in 2005. “I’ve played dumb blondes but they were strong dumb blondes. I’ve played bad characters but they were strong bad characters. I’m not sure I know how to play weak. I really don’t know how.”

In the context of recent cinematic history, this is an odd confession to make. It is more or less an unwritten rule in the movie business that audiences want strength, not weakness, and even in those cases where weakness is depicted, the expectation is that we will see the characters in question triumph over it. The imperatives of late-20^th century feminism in particular put a premium on strong women characters: anything else is tantamount to betrayal. As Jane Fonda, one of the great movie stars of the modern era recently put it, “Anger was always easy. Fear was harder.” As we’ve seen, Foster has been a past master of fear, one of the greatest artists of the emotion cinema has seen. But the terrors she’s faced – serial killers, terrorists, rapists, et. al. – have tended to be of the extreme variety. Much tougher are neuroses of the more quotidian variety. So Foster began to rise to the challenge, and to summon the courage to be weak.

Her first such foray, Nim’s Island (2008), was a return to familiar territory, in that it’s a children’s movie, based on the 2002 novel of the same name by the highly successful Canadian juvenile fiction writer Wendy Orr. Abigail Breslin – a child actor who may yet prove to be a Jodie Foster in the making – plays the title character, a girl who lives on a beautiful but remote Pacific island; her widower father (Gerard Butler, a much cuddlier figure than his King Leonidas of 300 the previous year), is a scientist. When dad goes missing on a seafaring expedition, Nim sends an email to her favorite author, Alex Rover, an adventurer who happened to query her dad recently about a professional matter. What Nim doesn’t realize is that Rover (also played by Butler) is really just a figment in the imagination of Alexandra Rover (Foster), who in fact is an agoraphobic woman living alone in San Francisco. Ms. Rover’s desperation to help finally overcomes her desperation to avoid leaving her house. But Foster’s comic rendition of a fearful woman is not without pathos. And while the story is most overtly a vindication of a child’s resourcefulness in the face of adversity, it is also one about the power of imagination in prevailing in struggles that are finally far more internal than external.

            The Beaver (2011), by contrast, is less tidy. Interestingly, while few of Foster’s acting appearances about families, all the movies she’s directed are. Little Man Tate has already been discussed; in Home for the Holidays (1995), in which Foster does not appear, focuses on the life of a loving but chaotic family of adults during Thanksgiving weekend. In The Beaver  – a severe flop for a number of reasons, among them Mel Gibson’s poor reputation and its betwixt-and-between-character as a dramedy – she plays Meredith Black, wife of Walter Black (Gibson), a severely depressed toy company executive who begins communicating via a beaver puppet. The couple has two sons, the older of whom (Anton Yelchin) is a senior in high school terrified he will end up like his father. Meredith reluctantly kicks her husband out of their home, but her resolve weakens when he comes home and plays with the younger son (Zachary Booth), leading the elder boy to rebuke her for her lack of willpower. Despite her stated desire to fight for her marriage if there is any hope of preserving it, is largely a bystander – something that Foster probably could have changed if she really had wanted to, but which makes sense in the logic of the story – which, as is so often the case in Foster movies, matters take a gruesome turn. It is, however, Meredith’s point-of-view from which we see a final father-and-son reunion at the end of the film. At the end of a half-century as a performer, Foster has edged closer to becoming someone almost impossible to imagine: an ordinary person.

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Male Call

Foster's recent work shows a new level of engagement in the lives of men

The following post is part of a series of on Jodie Foster specifically, and Hollywood actors generally, as historians.

If Anna and the King is in important respects of a piece with Foster’s vision as a whole, it nevertheless signals some important shifts in her work. One of the most important is a more nuanced engagement with the lives of men. Though it is of course usually men who intimidate, terrorize, or otherwise oppress her characters, Foster movies, whether directed by her or not, have never simple exercises in male-bashing. Still, in the 21^st century, her projects have shown a new level of depth in their portrayal of male characters. Whether or not this has anything to do with the fact that Foster herself bore two sons – Charles Foster in 1998 and Christopher “Kit” Foster in 2001 – is hard to say. But she has referred to wanting to make movies her kids could see, and it stands to reason that she would be interested in “boy” stories as part of a mix with “child” stories.

            One intriguing document in this regard is The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002), a small independent film in which she plays a 1970s nun who teaches at a Catholic school. The two main characters of the title, played by Emile Hirsch and Kieran Culkin, lead a small posse of comic-obsessed kids prone to sketching graphic pictures that include sexual poses of Foster’s character, Sister Assumpta. Such behavior, along with relatively mild school pranks, are for the most part portrayed as developmentally understandable, if not exactly appropriate, behavior, though Foster’s is shocked and hurt when she discovers them. (In an age when the Catholic Church has much to be ashamed about, it is bracing to see Foster, as well as a priest played by Vincent D’Onofrio portrayed with real empathy, even when we sense they’re not necessarily reacting in the most productive ways). Culkin’s character, however, has an ominous self-destructive streak, which coalesces around a plan to free a tiger from a local zoo. (Hirsch’s character, by contrast, is content to explore romance with his new girlfriend, who is struggling to overcome the legacy of incest with her brother.) Foster’s Sister Assumpta, who walks with a limp, is anxious, even desperate, not to be seen as a fool, which leads her to make psychological pronouncements about the boys of dubious accuracy. But her stricken look at a funeral in the final scene of the movie – Sister Assumpta appears to realize that her name bespeaks a character flaw – suggests her understanding that she has not apprehended the realities in the lives of her students, a message of muted, implicit hope in a time of rapid social change in social and sexual mores.

            Foster’s other project of 2002, Panic Room, was one of her biggest box office successes, in part because of its terrific screenplay by veteran writer David Koepp and the typically gloomy, yet arresting, direction of David Fincher. In the movie Foster plays a divorcee with a diabetic tween daughter (Kristen Stewart) who buys a Manhattan apartment that happens to have a special high-security chamber built for the needs of previous owner. The problem is that she’s unaware that the man left behind a cache of millions stored in safe of the Panic Room, and that the man who designed it (Forrest Whitaker) has plans to retrieve the money, for which he has enlisted a friend (Jared Leto), who in turn recruits another (Dwight Yoakum). The robbers break into the house expecting it to be empty; mother and daughter naturally take unwittingly take refuge in precisely the place where they will be besieged. A series of psychic and logistical twists ensue, among them the need to get rid of police who sincerely want to help but whose presence is on the apartment doorstep only makes matters worse. (As such, a typical Foster scenario.) For our purposes the main point is that we come to see that Whitaker’s character has redeeming qualities, and that he increasingly becomes a besieged himself by the ruthlessness of Yoakum. Ironically, it’s Whitaker, not Foster or her daughter, who ends up as the tragic figure in the story, blindsided by the very kinds of malevolence that have afflicted Foster characters going back to Taxi Driver.

            Another new accent in this phase of Foster’s career is an increasing emphasis on inner turmoil no less than external threats. In Flightplan (2005), she’s a widow bringing her young daughter from Germany back to America to begin a new life when that daughter literally disappears into thin air on a plane over the Atlantic. Not only does no one know where the child is; there is doubt the child was on the plane in the first place. (Flightplan is modern day variation on the 1938 Alfred Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes, which involved a train rather than a plane.) In one sense, this is standard Foster fare: women in distress fighting back hard against malicious forces – in this case, as it turns out, diabolically clever terrorists who exploit 9/11 fears to their advantage, part of which involves finger-pointing at Middle Eastern passengers. What’s also typical is that authority figures like that pilot are either unable or unwilling to help, or unwitting enablers of terror in their own right (in the form of a terrorist who masquerades as an air marshal). The difference is that for the first time in a Foster movie, one of her characters is forced to question her own sanity. Foster characters aren’t always perfect, but they’re almost always strong, as is this one. But she can’t help but be dogged by self-doubt in the face of a wall of denial, where even those not involved in the conspiracy become increasingly hostile to her “antics” and evident “irrationality.”

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Next: Recent Foster, from The Brave One to The Beaver

Royal Flush

With Anna and the King, Foster helped transform a racist child's tale into a complex drama

The following post is part of a series on Jodie Foster specifically, and Hollywood actors generally, as historians.

The overlooked gem in Foster’s career is Anna and the King. Like Last of the Mohicans, this is story rooted in fact that has gone through many iterations over the course of the last century. Its source material is the two-volume memoir of Anna Harriet Leonowens, a Victorian widow who worked as a tutor in the court of the King of Siam in the 1860s, just as British imperial power was reaching its zenith. The accuracy of the portrait that emerges of the reform-minded Siamese ruler, Mongkut, in The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870-73), has been contested, and is in any case filtered through an elite variety of western feminism. Incidents in Leonowens story received a new lease on life in 1944, when children’s author Margaret Langdon published Anna and the King, which became an evergreen novel of its genre (it was reissued in 2000 and remains in print). The novel, in turn, spawned a 1946 movie starring Rex Harrison (ouch!) as the King and Irene Dunne as Leonowens. The novel also led to the 1951 stage production The King and I, which in turn became the basis of 1956 Rogers and Hammerstein musical The King and I with Yul Brenner and Deborah Kerr in the lead roles. This musical has long been regarded as one of the most beloved works from Broadway’s Golden Age, but like its predecessors is marked by racism that can be truly embarrassing to watch, as in the long minstrel show sequence featuring “Asian” figures in blackface.

            Given this benighted Orientalist history, it’s a bit surprising that anyone would want to approach this material again, and while director Andy Tennant expressed dismay about the difficulty he encountered with the Thai government in shooting the film (most of which ended up being shot in Malaysia) he should hardly have been surprised that his motives would be questioned. But his 1999 version of the story, which is more beautifully designed than any of its predecessors, recalibrates the scales in important respects. Perhaps the most important is the casting Chinese actor Chow Yun-Fat as Mongkut to go along with Foster’s Anna, which he endows with an incisive dignity sorely missing from previous versions. He and Foster have very good chemistry; their evident intelligence is a source of mutual respect and attraction, even as they banter and disagree on matters of style as well as substance. In Rogers and Hammerstein’s King and I there are references to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln – perhaps inevitable, given the American production and audience for the story – but in this one Mongkut cherishes a letter from President Lincoln, who has politely declined the King’s assistance in the Union cause, and the monarch speaks with accuracy and clarity about the meaning of the Battle of Antietam, which takes place simultaneously with the story.

             Anna and the King also recalibrates the gender politics. At one point, the passionate Anna intervenes to prevent the caning of one of the King’s concubines, who is caught while running from court to a Buddhist monastery to join her true love. While we the viewers and even the King understand the merits of Anna’s advocacy on their behalf, it is not only politically naïve, but counterproductive, effectively leaving him no choice but to execute the two lest he damage his credibility at a critical moment in the life of his regime.

            Which represents one more layer of complexity in this telling of the story. Though substantially fictionalized, the movie depicts Mongkut has having to navigate complex political currents that include the imperial jockeying of Britain and France (a well as intra-imperial British tensions) and a coup attempt being mounted by his own brother. Specific details aside, the message here is consistent with the core of Foster’s acting choices going back decades: destructive external forces are always lurking, ready to destroy the most promising of aspirations, whether those of a Great Emancipator of the West or one in the East. It is these political forces – of greed encased in a thin veneer of ideologies that include, but are not limited to, avowed racism – that become the primary barrier to peaceful unions, romantic and otherwise, in this Anna and the King. But all is not lost: the King’s son, sustained by the memory of his father’s unique relationship with a woman as an equal, will fulfill and extend his plans to bring his nation into the modern world.

Next: Foster's foray into flawed characters.

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Wild, Wild Universe

Foster in a zesty Western, and a soggy Sci-Fic flick


The following post is part of a series of on Jodie Foster specifically, and Hollywood actors generally, as historians.

Foster followed Sommersby with another historical movie, this one the comic western, Maverick (1994), based on the old TV series from the late fifties and early sixties that starred James Garner as the title character. This time Garner, who acted with Foster in One Little Indian, plays the father of that character, whose role is filled by Mel Gibson. Maverick was written by a past master, William Goldman, and it’s exceptionally deft in its light quick pace, and a series of plot twists that resemble a card trick, which is appropriate, since the plot concerns a set of poker-playing grifters. Foster plays Annabelle Bransford, a sexy con artist who keeps pace with a fast pack of players that also includes Alfred Molina as Gibson’s antagonist. Indeed, she wins the trump card in the final scene of the movie, a good-natured feminist ending for a movie that is by far the lightest of Foster’s career, and one that she has remembered with great affection ever since. It was during this movie that she befriended Mel Gibson, a man she cast, and stood beside, seventeen years later amid the publicity surrounding The Beaver.

            Maverick was a popcorn flick; Foster’s other movie of 1994 was considerably more ambitious, and ranks among her best performances: the title role in Nell, for which she received her third academy award nomination. (In a bravura performance, Foster manages the arresting task of emptying her face of expression for much of the movie.)  Though this was a pedigree project with major talent – including Liam Neeson, his wife Natasha Richardson, and the esteemed British director Michael Apted – Nell is a fairly predictable undertaking most notable for the way it once again manifest’s Foster’s emphasis on the malignant forces that subvert the designs of even the best intentioned people. Nell is the story of a young woman who has lived her whole life in the remote woods of North Carolina, insulated from contact with modern civilization. She was conceived as a result of rape, and had a twin sister who died in childhood. When her mother dies, and her death is reported to an unscrupulous grocery delivery boy (Jeremy Upham), Nell’s existence is discovered by local authorities. A local doctor, played by Neeson, tries to assist her, and to do this, he enlists Richardson, a specialist in autism. They realize, however, that Nell is not mentally handicapped; instead her strange language is a combination of emulating her stroke-stricken mother and the special language she shared with her twin. Yet their attempt to serve as surrogate parents for Nell is complicated by medical professionals who seek to institutionalize her, as well as people (like the grocery boy) who wish to exploit her vulnerability. In other words, institutions do not only do more harm than good, they also fail to protect the vulnerable from those who operate outside and against them. After a dramatic hearing in a trail-like setting, Nell wins her freedom and can return to the wild with her new family, the Rousseau-like logic of the film finally affirmed.

            Foster essentially repeated that message in a different form three years later in Contact, a tedious science-fiction movie in which she stars as an astronomer who teams up with Matthew McConaughey, unconvincingly cast as a theologian. They battle the skepticism – and, more importantly, the greed and hatred – of those, inside and outside their fields, who reject their fervent belief that alien life exists. The soggy New Age overtones of the film, which include the astronomer’s contact with her long dead father, suggest something of a dead end in Foster’s career-long assertion that goodness and decency are locked in mortal combat with irrational malice. Fortunately, in the ensuing years, her work began to texture this paradigm and portray characters and situations with more internal complexity.

Next: The King and Jodie
 

 

The Good Shepherd

With The Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster gave her work an enduring moral vision

The following is part of an ongoing series about Jodie Foster's vision of U.S. history.

I remember vividly the night I went to see Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. All day long, I dreaded it. I’ve always hated horror movies; only a compelling reason like a sense of professional obligation will lead me to do so. But as a lifelong movie buff, I’ve always tried to stay up with what’s current (like the Best Picture contenders in any given year), and the buzz on Lambs was too great to ignore. On that winter night in February, my wife and I threw a dinner party as a prelude to a trip to the movies. I was uneasy the whole time, looking ahead to the movie the way one does a trip visit to the dentist.

The movie begins somberly, and takes a little while to get truly frightening. The first such moment occurs when Foster’s character, an FBI agent in training, walks down a long hallway toward a waiting folding chair to visit the high-security cell of the psychiatrist-turned-cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, played by the unblinking Anthony Hopkins. It’s one of the great strengths of Lambs that one’s sheer fascination with Lecter almost overcomes one’s fear of him. If nothing else, Lambs is a great movie because it – by which I mean the 1988 novel by Thomas Harris, Ted Tally’s screenplay, but above all Hopkins’s thrilling performance – utterly crushes the shopworn liberal piety that evil arises from mere dysfunction or lack of understanding on the part of those who would otherwise be good. Maybe that’s true of the nominal villain of the piece, a serial murderer by the name of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) who skins women so that he can live out his transvestite fantasies. But in his in his alternatingly courteous and dismissive, understated manner, Lecter is far more troubling in his cell than many criminals are outside it, because he represents a cunningly intelligent malignance that simply cannot be destroyed, only contained (temporarily). So it is that in the first scene together, an annoyed Lecter cuts Starling down to size. “You know what you look like to me? In your good bag and cheap shoes? A rube,” he tells her. “You’re not more than one generation removed from poor white trash.” As he continues his deconstruction, you watch Foster’s face begin to crumple from the verbal barrage and yet somehow maintain its shape: she’s already flinched more than once, she’s being toyed with, and yet she refuses to entirely surrender, making a not entirely convincing, but still resilient riposte that Lecter should focus his insight on someone his own size.

Despite the fact that it’s Lecter/Hopkins who in many ways steals the show, in an important sense Lambs is really a Clarice/Foster movie. And that’s because the creation of such a powerfully credible evil character simultaneously opens the possibility of redemptive good. At a couple points in the story, Lecter guesses that Clarice was abused by her policeman father or the rancher who temporarily served her foster parent after she was orphaned following her father’s death in the line of duty. But here he is wrong. Her father, as we see in flashbacks, was a good man; so, we’re told, was the rancher. So why is Starling so hell-bent on catching Buffalo Bill before he kills his next victim – who, it turns out, is the daughter of a powerful female (Republican) U.S. Senator? Ambition? Surely. But Lecter is smart enough to sense there’s more involved, and insists on knowing as the price of his cooperation in capturing Buffalo Bill (whose name, incidentally, is a mordant parody of a mythic American figure). Starling, who has been repeatedly warned about the dangers of self-disclosure with such an exploitative figure, is desperate enough to agree to his demands.

Starling and Lecter have a series of discussions in the course of the story, the most important of which occurs about an hour into the movie. In a rapid series of quid pro quo exchanges, Lecter relinquishes tidbits of analysis in the Buffalo Bill case and then presses her on why she suddenly left the home of the rancher. Starling describes a night when she woke up to the sound of screaming, and went to the barn from which it emanated. “I was scared to look but I had to,” she says, a remark that also encapsulates her behavior in this grisly case. Lecter correctly speculates that what Starling saw was the rancher engaged in the annual slaughter of the spring lambs. “First I tried to free them, but they just stood there,” Starling muses, her vacant stare suggesting she’s reliving that terrible moment. She grabbed one and ran. “I thought if I could just save one,” she says, her hushed voice trailing off, “but he was so heavy. So heavy.” She reports that only made it a few miles (!) before she was caught. What became of the lamb, Lecter asks. “They killed him,” she informs him. Lecter grasps the implications quickly: “And you think if you can save poor Catherine [the Senator’s daughter], you can make them stop, you think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs.” Starling replies, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

That night in 1991, and ever since, I’ve always found Lecter’s final remark breathtaking: “Thank you, Clarice. Thank you.” Lecter understands and appreciates Starling’s honesty, which has characterized their relationship from the very beginning. But you get the sense that what he also appreciates is a sense of mystery. It’s possible to reduce Starling’s actions to a form of neurosis, an irrational belief that following by her father’s professional footsteps and apprehending a serial killer, she will somehow repair the psychic wounds of her childhood. But this only begs the question as to why her behavior takes this form and not some other, far more destructive course, which after all is the more typical response to psychic trauma. Lecter, it’s clear, is fascinated by Starling – he draws a gorgeous pencil drawing of her holding a lamb – and we sense he’s right to be. She enlarges the world with a sense of moral possibility. In the process, she enlarges Jodie Foster’s career  by giving us a character who’s not simply forced to respond to the malice of the wide world, but who can take proactive steps in giving herself and other people a real reason to live.

Which brings me to one of the most exciting moments in my cinematic life, which occurs when Starling unexpectedly finds herself in Buffalo Bill’s house, and decides to she must descend the stairs into his dark basement alone and try to apprehend him. Foster literally shakes with fear, in one of the most authentic representations of terror ever committed to the screen. It has long since become a horror movie joke that characters defy all psychic logic by entering situations that will prove catastrophic, because if they don’t there won’t be a scary movie. This is the opposite of that: Starling knows full well she shouldn’t go down those stairs, and she does so anyway so that she can save Catherine, a woman she’s never met. Soldiers at the front have to muster courage, but in part that’s because wars create situations where scared men have little effective chance for survival but going forward and hoping for the best. This, too, is the opposite of that: courage as the decision to experience fear. Starling’s descent is just the beginning; she finds herself plunged into pitch darkness while Buffalo Bill gazes upon her in night goggles. (In an eerie move, director Demme shows us Starling from his point of view, implicating us in his gaze.) But she will prevail.

There, anyway. For Hannibal Lecter has his own agenda, and while Starling and her colleagues are in hot pursuit of Buffalo Bill, he ruthlessly engineers his escape from prison. The movie will ends, as its moral logic dictates, with Lecter abroad, as evil eternally is. But he can’t resist a call to Starling at her moment of triumph. “I have no plans to call on you Clarice,” he tells her in what is not quite an entirely reassuring locution. “The world’s more interesting with you in it. You take care now to extend me the same courtesy.” Starling responds by saying, “You know I can’t make that promise,” which of course is the essence of her character. Lecter responds with one of the movie’s memorable jokes: “I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.”

The Silence of the Lambs pulled off a rare coup, becoming one of only one of only three movies to sweep the five major Oscars for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay (the others were It Happened One Night in 1934 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975). Never again would Foster have to re-credential herself in the industry. Indeed, she consolidated her position by founding a production company, Egg Pictures, and moving into directing and producing. But while both would remain facets of her career, and while she would repeatedly claim that both were where her future lay, Foster would continue to work primarily as an actor. Fortunately, as she did so, her vision widened, and became more psychologically generous in ways that extended to her depiction of historical subjects. 
 Next: Foster heads toward Reconstruction, by way of the Reformation.

 

New Haven blues

Jodie Foster faced a series of challenges during her Yale years, but emerged with a mature artistic vision that would shape her career


The following is part of an ongoing series about Jodie Foster's vision of U.S. history specifically, and Hollywood actors as historians generally.

Jodie Foster turned 18 years old in the fall of 1980. This is a treacherous time in the life of a child actor, one of difficult currents from which many never emerge, whether by choice or not. Foster was well aware of the uncertainties, if for other reason than her brother Buddy’s career. Such considerations, along with a genuinely academic bent, were surely part of the reason why she accepted an offer from admission to Yale. This is not as unorthodox choice now as it was back then, which People magazine described as “the most startling career move since Garbo chose exile.” In an industry where momentum is nearly everything, she was sailing into uncharted waters.

By all accounts, Foster cherishes her Yale education, where she proved to be an adept student and a loyal alumna. But it proved to be a very difficult time in other respects. Foster never gave up her acting career entirely, squeezing screen work into compartmentalized slots like summers. But the material she got – like a supporting role in the 1982 television movie O’Hara’s Wife, with Ed Asner and Mariette Hartley; a more prominent one the following year with Svengali, where she played a muse (onscreen and off, apparently) for the rakishly charming Peter O’Toole – suggested the bobbing of an actor trying to stay afloat rather than a star charting her way. This began to change in her final upperclassman years, when she began doing more high-profile film work. But she was nevertheless waging an uphill battle in terms of forging an adult career.

The biggest challenge Foster faced, however, was the enormous shadow cast over her life by John Hinckley, Jr., a troubled young man from a well-to-do family who developed an obsession with Foster. In some ways still a child, she naïvely tried to parry his advances by phone and letter by taking his calls and trying to dissuade him from pursuing her (he went to New Haven on a few occasions, but the two never met face to face). A warped devotee of Taxi Driver, Hinckley convinced himself he could impress Foster by acting like Travis Bickle and attempting to kill the president – he tried first with Jimmy Carter in 1980 before settling on Ronald Reagan in March of 1981. In the aftermath of the unsuccessful attempt, Foster was unwittingly sucked into the vortex of unwanted attention, which she tried to manage by holding a single press conference, and writing a single essay, which she insisted not be a cover story, for Esquire magazine in 1982 (an anguished cri de coeur, she nevertheless managed to maintain a wry sense of humor, concluding the piece with an expectation that a stranger would one day come up to her and ask, “Ain’t you the girl who shot the president?”). For many years, the incident was something of a forbidden subject; Foster canceled an appearance on the Today show in 1991 when she learned Hinckley’s name would be mentioned in the introduction. In recent years, however, she has referenced it, freely if briefly, without obvious trauma.

 It’s hard for anyone who hasn’t experienced this kind of bizarre notoriety to gauge the adversity it imposed. Foster, of course, was not responsible for what happened, and indeed had been a victim of Hinckley’s long before Ronald Reagan was. Still, it would appear to be in the nature of such situations that people feel forced reflect on what they could possibly have done to attract such attention. But to focus on Hinckley is to some degree to miss the real ordeal Foster faced – and to overlook the bona fide courage she has shown in the decades since.

The first indication that her ordeal was not over came within days. Appearing in an undergraduate play – a challenge in its own right, as she has never been comfortable on stage and has never done live theater since – Foster was stalked again, this time by a man who planned to kill her. Though he could not bring himself to do it, he nevertheless later issued a bomb threat on her dormitory, forcing its evacuation, before he was apprehended by Secret Service agents in New York. In subsequent years, Foster repeatedly would face similar threats – three years later, it was a woman who got arrested for plotting to kill her – along with encounters with flash photographers that ranged from annoying to frightening (one precipitating a broken clavicle). She would also require a fairly elaborate infrastructure, human and otherwise, to ensure her security.

Still, Foster refused to let this ordeal prevent her from proceeding from her acting career. That in itself is not something one should take for granted; it’s easy to imagine another person in similar circumstances suffering some kind of breakdown or simply deciding to retreat from the public eye. But beyond that, Foster has repeatedly chosen to work on movies in which her characters are preyed upon by people with malicious intent. As I’ve already documented, it would be simply inaccurate to suggest that such choices can be explained entirely in terms of her personal experience; before 1981, at least, they reflected a combination of factors that include the opportunities she was offered and her mother’s guidance – and, one would have to assume, her own wishes. But it is nevertheless striking to consider how often her post-1981 movies involve people confronting and overcoming such challenges, including those posed by stalkers (to be discussed in more detail shortly).

While he should not be considered the final or even most authoritative judge of the matter, it’s easy to believe Buddy Foster’s assertion that the Hinckley affair changed his sister, making her a much more guarded figure. That would seem to extend to Foster lending her name to political causes. Much to the consternation of gays and lesbians, for example, she has refused to discuss her romantic life (which, on the basis of what I’ve seen, appears to be bisexual). In the tense atmosphere surrounding homosexuality in the 1980s and 90s, this was seen by some as a damagingly closeted stance. And while in thought, speech, and action Foster is clearly a feminist filmmaker, she seems to deploy the term more descriptively than ideologically, casting her vision more in terms of art, not politics. Many eyebrows were raised in 2010-11 when Foster stood resolutely by Mel Gibson, her co-star in The Beaver (2011), who enjoyed little good will in Hollywood even before he faced domestic violence charges against his companion, later dropped. In interviews Foster would skillfully allude to Gibson's bad behavior while insisting on a redemptive integrity. More generally, it seems Foster has a special sympathy for those in scalding glare of publicity. In his 2011 memoir Stories I Only Tell My Friends, actor Rob Lowe writes that Foster was one of the few people who reached out to him when media reports of his addiction made headlines in the 1990s.

Indeed, one might generally say that for Foster, the personal transcends the political: ideas matter less than relationships. To paraphrase the classic post-boomer line by young women that drives older women crazy, “She is a feminist, but . . .” That’s not necessarily because ideas are unappealing, or even unimportant.  Actually, by most reckonings, Foster is among the most cerebral figures in Hollywood. But at the core of her view of the world, there will always be powerful people – usually men, who tyrannize other men as well as women – who will stand in the way of collective aspiration. For the most part, they must be confronted alone. Now and then.

Next: Toward The Accused, and her first Oscar

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