Sensing the future

The following is the catalog copy for my forthcoming book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, slated for publication by Oxford University Press in late 2012
 

How do perceptions of the past—not just of particular events, but of the trajectory of history as a whole—shape our experience of the world? To answer this (and other) questions, Jim Cullen looks closely at the work of what might be considered an unlikely source of historical insight—the work of six major Hollywood stars. Indeed, Cullen offers a fascinating portrait of pivotal movements that have shaped our history as reflected in the work of Clint Eastwood, Daniel Day-Lewis (at left, made up as Abraham Lincoln for his forthcoming performance in Team of Rivals), Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, and Jodie Foster. By focusing on the career choices made by these powerful actors, all of whom have the rare ability to put their personal stamp on their work, Cullen reveals a discrete set of historical narratives, including a surprising strain of Jeffersonian communitarianism that runs through Eastwood’s work, a sense of how the frontier shaped American character as reflected in the roles chosen by Day-Lewis, the Lincoln-styled belief in institutions and the power of ordinary people that runs through the films of Tom Hanks (like Jimmy Stewart before him), and the history of liberal feminism of the last century captured in the movies of Meryl Streep. That these historical patterns emerge in the work of these six artists—almost certainly unintentionally--sheds much light on the way that, for all of us, historical forces can shape our understanding of the world without our being aware of them.

Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition, and other books. Cullen is also a book review editor at the History News Network. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

The souls of Streep

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

In the 2009 movie Julie & Julia, Amy Adams is Julie Powell, a young arrival in 2002 Queens who decides to launch a blog in which she writes about preparing all 524 of Julia Child’s 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days. Her story alternates with that of Streep as Child in the 1950s, and the series of events that culminate in the publication of that book. Julie Powell is pleased by the increasingly positive attention she gets for her work, which will result in her own book (and, eventually, a movie). But toward the end of the film she learns from a reporter that Julia Child herself is contemptuous and dismissive Powell, though we never learn exactly what she said or even whether Child actually ever read her blog. Julie is crushed to conclude that the will not only never meet her now 90 year-old inspiration, but will never get her approval, either. “The one in your head is the one that matters,” her husband consoles her.

As someone who has spent time writing about famous people he’s never met, I’ll confess that this scene had some personal resonance for me. Analyzing the careers of celebrities evokes a range of emotions, among them admiration, longing, distaste, and shame (can’t you generate your own material rather than relying on somebody else’s?). Notwithstanding the rejection I’ve experienced, and the fear of it that has prevented me from pursuing the people I’ve been writing about in this book, I have nevertheless soldiered on in the belief that it’s the work—their work, and the work I’ve done to build on it in this modest way—that finally matters, if for no other reason than keeping me out of any number of forms of trouble. There are, after all, worse ways of spending time than in the virtual company of movie stars.

But one of the things I’ve learned from Meryl Streep is that her work is not finally about her, or about me. Instead, it’s really about other people. The great paradox of actors is that by embodying fictive people they enliven real ones. In her 1998 appearance on the TV program Inside the Actor’s Studio, Streep explained this with spontaneity that’s worth quoting at some length:

I was thinking about applying to law school and thinking that acting is a stupid way to make a living, that it doesn’t do any good in the world. But I think it does, I think it does, there’s a great worth in it. And the worth is in listening to people who maybe don’t even exist or who are voices in your past and through you come through the work and you give them to other people. I think that giving voice to characters who have no other voice is the great worth of what we do. So much of acting is vanity. I mean, this [appearing on the show] feels so great to come here and sit here and have everybody clap. But the real thing that makes me feel so good is when I know I’ve said something for a soul, when I’ve presented a soul.

            In terms of the overarching argument that frames this book, I would describe Meryl Streep’s historiographic vision as that of a progressive feminist. I say that because the arc, the non-straight but clear line that runs through her work, is one in which the lives of women have gradually improved.  They get more power over control of the terms in their lives, power that begins at home but eventually moves outside the home. That power has precedents in the past in the lives of those who illuminated the way, but most of it is something whose emergence she charts in the history of our time. To a great degree, this realized dream is a substantively American one, grounded in aspirations that transcend gender. But realized dreams are also surprisingly complicated ones, with unexpected consequences, ambiguities, and unfinished work.

As her comments also suggest, Streep’s historiographic vision has a powerful moral component, and a belief in a living connection that binds people across time and space that she describes in terms of the transcendent term “soul.” Sister Aloysius would probably not approve of this use of the word. But Streep blessed her anyway.

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Habit of authority

After a string of light roles, Streep became a prying nun -- and took her vision of feminism to a new level


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

Most of Streep's movies in the last decade amount to liberal feminist fantasies, in that the women in question have remunerative, prestigious, and emotionally rewarding careers. This is also true of Julie & Julia, which projects such a vision back in time, depicting the happily married Julia Child’s successful quest to find a professional calling (though grieves at her inability to bear a child). In an interesting variation on this idea, Streep plays a wealthy woman with no obvious paid employment but who works as a patron of the arts and as a mentor to a troubled Chinese astronomy graduate student in the little-seen Dark Matter (2008), whose release was delayed by a year because its plot resembled the circumstances surrounding the Virginia Tech shootings of 2007. 

It’s in this context that Streep’s performance as Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the authoritarian nun of Doubt (2008) is so important. John Patrick Shanley wrote and directed this adaptation of his 2004 play about a 1960s priest (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who may or may not be a pedophile, the principal of the parochial school (Streep) who’s convinced that he is, and the young nun (Amy Adams, who appeared with Streep in Julie & Julia) who’s unsure. Shanley’s exquisitely calibrated screenplay is constructed in such a way that it’s impossible to say with any certainty whether Sister Aloysius’s conduct in her pursuit of the priest, which is both intense and ethically ambiguous, is justified. For our purposes, what matters is that we’re dealing with a working-class woman—something we know solely on the basis of her thick Bronx accent—who holds an important job that’s not merely a career, but a vocation. She wields real power, and does so through a series of techniques that include intimidation, passive-aggressive behavior, and a supple command of bureaucratic machinery.  Sister Aloysius is thus a walking illustration of the maxim that it’s women, not men, who actually run the Roman Catholic Church.

Run, but not rule. As she herself states plainly early in the movie, the man she suspects is her superior. She regards his boss as incompetent at best, and suspects his former one is covering for him. To make matters worse, the mother (Viola Davis) of the African American child (Joseph Foster) that Sister Alyosius fears is a victim of the priest believes that even if the allegations are true, this form of abuse is a balm given the physical abuse he endures at the hands of his father, at a school that represents real opportunity for the boy’s future. Sister Aloysius then resorts to great cunning by fabricating a conversation with another nun, and blackmailing the priest into resigning. (Naturally, he’s kicked upstairs.)

It is possible to finish watching Doubt and conclude that in overstepping her occupational boundaries, ignoring the wishes of a mother who believes she is acting in her child’s best interests, and committing what she herself considers a mortal sin, Sister Aloysius is guilty of creating a deeply tragic outcome. This is all the more so given that for most of the movie, the evidence for her suspicions against the priest amount to little more than an observation that he fails to trim his fingernails. But it’s not credibly possible to finish watching Doubt and fail to see that Sister Aloysius is a deeply committed woman who is willing to make grave personal sacrifices in order to do what she believes is right. Nor, given the recent history of the Church, is it possible not to see real prescience on the part of a woman who tried to prevent a great moral evil that was perpetrated by generations of men who failed to exercise their unchecked authority in a responsible matter. Meryl Streep’s feminist vision is bigger than that of wealthy white women who want a well-appointed home, regular orgasms, and glamorous careers. It’s one in which all women, and thus all men, have a stake.

Next: the final installment in the Streep series -- and the "Sensing the Past" series

'Hours' of 'Adaptation'

In 2002, Streep embarked on a stretch of remarkable creativity and productivity with a pair of innovative projects


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

Though Dancing and Lughnasa and Music of the Heart represent important statements in the evolution of Streep’s cinematic feminism, both were small independent films with miniscule grosses compared with big-budget behemoths of the time like Armageddon (1998) or the The Matrix (1999). Moreover, Music of the Heart was followed by the longest interregnum in Streep’s career: it would be three full years before she appeared in a starring role. (She did have a voice cameo as a blue fairy in Steven Spielberg’s completion of the posthumous Stanley Kubric project A.I. [Articifical Intelligence] in 2001.) Streep’s youngest children were nine and thirteen in 2000, which may have played a role in this slowed output. They probably also played a role in her subsequent decisions to appear in small roles as the comically hapless Aunt Josephine in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) and to provide the imperious voice of the Ant Queen in The Ant Bully (2006). She also had a very funny cameo as herself—as a not very good actress—in the sublimely silly Farrelly Brothers film Stuck on You (2003).

But what might be termed the Meryl Streep renaissance—one defined not in talent but in terms of her artistic profile—began at the end of 2002 with her appearance in two other movies, both involving the portrayal of literary figures. The first of these, Adaptation, is a singular work in Streep’s corpus. Adaptation represented a collaboration between two of the most inventive figures in modern Hollywood: screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. The two teamed up in 1999 for the weirdly brilliant Being John Malkovich, in which a series of characters manage to enter a portal in the famed actor’s brain and experience reality through his eyes. Adaptation, which is about Kauffman’s difficulty in trying to adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean’s 1998 non-fiction book The Orchid Thief for the big screen, actually begins with scenes on the set of Being John Malkovich. It also involves Kaufman’s relationship with his socially tone deaf twin brother Donald, who decides he, too, wants to write a screenplay—and does so successfully even as Charlie struggles. Ultimately the two brothers would get the writing credit for Adaptation, and be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But Donald Kaufman is not actually a real person; for the first time in history, a wholly fictional, as opposed to pseudonymous, character was nominated for an Oscar (the award went to Richard Harwood for The Pianist).

Adaptation has a wonderful star-studded cast that includes Nicolas Cage as both Kaufmans; Chris Cooper, who won a supporting actor Academy Award for his portrayal of the actual Orchid Thief; and Brian Cox as the real life Robert McKee, the famed screenwriting teacher to whom both Kaufman brothers turn for help with their respective projects. Streep plays Orlean—or some facsimile of the actual person. Actually, it becomes increasingly clear as the story proceeds that Charlie Kaufman’s obsession with Orlean makes the portrayal of her that we see on screen increasingly suspect. For much of the movie, she’s a consummate professional, an intimidatingly competent member of the New York literati. Which is entirely credible. But Kaufman starts playing with her, incongruously scripting a sexual relationship with the repellent, if amusing, thief. (There’s a hilarious sequence of her getting high crushed orchid dust.) Indeed, her murderous behavior toward the end of the movie seems to come out of nowhere, its jarring character very much the point of the film’s postmodern sensibility. The meta-textual zaniness of Adaptation, the desire on a viewer’s part to see just how this crazy story will play out, gives it a freshness that’s extremely rare in mainstream Hollywood moviemaking (another Sony Pictures production, it was distributed by Columbia). And it’s especially refreshing to see Streep, a true blue-chip figure in the industry, lend her talents to such a project and take them to an entirely new level.

The same month Adaptation was appeared, Streep’s other film of 2002, The Hours, was also released. Though less so than Adaptation, The Hours, which David Hare adapted from Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel, has a literary/experimental air, which takes the form of a tripartite structure of single days in the lives of three women whose stories only converge at the end of the movie. One narrative involves Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman, wearing a now legendary prosthetic nose), struggling with depression as she begins to conceive her 1925 masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway (originally titled “The Hours”). Another involves Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a 1950s housewife and mother of a young son in Los Angeles who is fighting off suicidal impulses, in part by reading Mrs. Dalloway. The third involves Clarissa Vaughn (Streep) a bisexual New York book editor in 2001 nursing a beloved old gay poet/novelist friend (Ed Harris) through the ravages of AIDS on the day in which she plans to throw him a party—plot elements that allude to Mrs. Dalloway, which is his nickname for Clarissa. He’s written a famous novel that features a thinly fictionalized version of his friend.

I regard Clarissa Vaughn as Streep’s most fully realized creation. She’s a devoted friend of Harris’s character; lover of a woman played Allison Janney; mother of a college-age daughter played by Claire Danes; and a literary professional who midwives writing into publication. This last role is more hinted at by devices like manuscripts on her desk than actually depicted. But love and work, art and life, are so thoroughly fused that it seems misguided to insist on isolating the strands.

Which is not to say that Clarissa is a flawless person. She tends to live in the past, haunted by a romance with the poet that foundered on the vine of their youth. This is more than a strictly interior foible; it leads her to subtly neglect her relationship with Janney’s character, with whom Streep does some marvelously nuanced acting. Their alienation is subtle but palpable, conveyed most vividly in a scene in which they talk to each other from different rooms. Streep’s eyes betray impatience, and her voice is ever-so clipped in responding to Janney, who manages to inflect a slight air of aggrievement that seems justified, at least on the basis of the errands she’s running on behalf of a man she rightly senses is a rival with whom she cannot compete. Clarissa’s daughter is also impatient her mother’s lingering obsession with her former flame.  

Streep’s Clarissa is the only major character of The Hours who can be said to achieve anything resembling a happy ending, though it takes a suicide, one of two in the movie, for her to finally come to her senses, signaled by the great tenderness with which she gazes into Janney’s eyes at the end of the story. In large measure, that happiness can be viewed as a matter of historical circumstance: as a woman of the 21^st century, Clarissa has the capacity to achieve an integrated life of the kind that Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown can only dream of (albeit as very privileged people in terms of their class status). But having such a capacity is not synonymous with achieving it, and for Clarissa it’s a near thing. Michael Cunningham and David Hare created this character; Stephen Daldry, most of whose prior work was for the stage, directed it. But Meryl Streep is the figure who brings this Clarissa most fully to life, with a voice and gestures that are experienced as a gift.

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Next: Streep as villain.

False fantasies

Streep's early '90s movies deconstructed notions of gender
 

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 followed-up She-Devil with the more upscale comedy Postcards from the Edge (1990), Carrie Fisher’s 1987 autobiographical novel about recovery from addiction set among the Hollywood elite. Though it’s less pointed in its gender politics than She-Devil, the Mike Nichols-directed Postcards is nevertheless a departure for Streep. For the first time—and surprisingly late at that—she is a daughter rather than a mother, as the struggling adult child of a major star, presumably Fisher’s famous mother Debbie Reynolds, played by Shirley MacLaine.

There’s a pleasant postmodern fizz to Postcards, in that it calls attention to its own artifice. The film opens with a dramatic sequence about a drug cartel that turns out to be a movie-within-a-movie, though the drug angle is real enough: Streep’s character, actor Suzanne Vale, is fired for taking a snort in her trailer. At other points in the movie, we learn a city street is actually a movie set, and Streep spends a long stretch of the movie ironically wearing a policewoman’s costume.

Though much of the plot turns on her relationship with a wayward playboy producer (Dennis Quaid), her character’s struggle is typical of that facing the boy who seeks to become a man: What will I do with my life professionally? How do I emerge from the shadow of a powerful parent and gain my own public identity? How will romance fit into, as opposed to define, this picture? The script (also written by Fisher) suggests Suzanne has begun to resolve these questions by making the movie’s closing sequence the shooting a music video, which allows us to see a truly fabulous Streep performing a country tune, “I’m Checkin’ Out,” written by Shel Silverstein, a remarkably versatile author and illustrator who also wrote the Johnny Cash classic “A Boy Named Sue,” among other country hits.

Postcards, then, had some serious currents running it, notwithstanding its decisively comic tone. By contrast, Streep’s next movie, Defending Your Life (1991), proceeds from a presumably grave question—what happens when we die?—but is so light it almost floats off the screen. Writer/director Albert Brooks has long been a kind of cut-rate Woody Allen, an auteur with a real sense of humor whose movies are rarely fully satisfying (he’s better as an actor). In Defending Your Life, he plays Daniel Miller, a morose Los Angeles advertising executive who drives his brand new luxury car into an oncoming bus and dies. He awakens in “Judgment City,” a kind of purgatory where the events of his life are reviewed through a judicial hearing that will decide whether he will graduate to a higher form of consciousness or be forced to repeat human life in what amounts to a kind of Southern California Hinduism. Fortunately, Judgment City is a pleasant place to pass the time; you can eat all you want for free and never gain an ounce. While in Judgment City, Daniel meets his dream girl, Julia (Streep), who is charmed by Daniel’s jokes. There are lots of comic bits about Julia’s higher standard of living in Judgment City, owing the fact that she was a nicer person than Daniel was. But despite their divergent verdicts, true love conquers all, even in heaven.

Streep agreed to act in Defending Your Life because she was charmed when Brooks pitched it to her, poolside, while she was filming Postcards from the Edge. But her motives in taking the part seem to have been at least in part a matter of playful experimentation with gender expectations. “I know Albert feels he’s written a whole woman, a completely full-blown person,” she said in a 1991 New York Times profile. “I didn’t know how to break it to him, he’s really not done that. He’s written an idea of a woman. And I did my best to fill those silver slippers. But it was also fun. I thought, ‘Ah, the hell with it. You’re dead. You can do whatever you want.’ ”

Streep’s next movie, Death Becomes Her (1992), was a black comedy on the order of She-Devil. As with She-Devil, this is a story of romantic rivalry, but its main theme is a veritable American obsession: aging, a subject whose gender dimensions are especially vexing for women. Streep is Madeline Ashton, an aging actress who steals and marries Ernest Menville, the plastic surgeon boyfriend of her frenemy, Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn). Helen, plunged into a despair gauged by a grotesque weight gain, ends up in a psychiatric ward, but as with Ruth Patchett, gets rejuvenated by the prospect of revenge. Madeline, meanwhile, has also aged and gained in weight, while the alcoholic Ernest has been reduced to working as a mortician. Unbeknownst to the other, each of the women learns of, and imbibes, a magic potion that reverses the effect of aging, purveyed by a woman named Lisle von Rhoman (Isabella Rossellini). A newly svelte Helen seduces Ernest, and convinces him to kill Madeline. Madeline learns of the plot, and the movie moves into slapstick overdrive as the women commit grotesque acts of violence against each other that result a twisted heads for Madeline, holes in the Helen’s abdomen, and the like, none of which are of course fatal. (Death Becomes Her, which Streep described as taking longer to make than any of her movies, won an Academy Award for its special effects.) Ironically, though the two women reconcile, they find themselves dependent on Ernest to spruce up their brittle, if immortal bodies, until, even more ironically, they find themselves dependent on each other. (Sisterhood may be powerful, but it’s very often exasperating.) As such, the movie ends on a comic, though not particularly satisfying, be-careful-what-you-wish-for note.

It’s a message, however, that’s consistent with Streep’s own thinking, particularly in terms of the movie’s critique of the cult of beauty. “My son, Henry, who’s 12, asked me, Who do you think is the prettiest girl in my class?’ ” she reported in a 1992 interview.  “And I said, ‘Who cares?’ ” Streep also professed to comfort with aging. “I felt 40 years old since I was eight,” she said. “And so when I became 40, I felt suddenly like I could fit into my clothes. I could say whatever I damn well please.” Of course, one might well reply, such things were easy for a woman as attractive and powerful as Streep to say. But her subsequent track record as an actor does indeed suggest a sense of personal liberation and a more relaxed persona in many of her roles. While few of them have had the searing intensity of Sophie’s Choice or Cry in the Dark, many have proven to be deeply satisfying. It’s hard not be moved, for example, by the tremendous affection that Streep pours into her portrayal of the aging Julia Child in Julie & Julia (2009), and the palpable joy that infuses the performance itself, which feels not showy in that “our lady of the accents” way critics like Pauline Kael disliked—even as her mastery of Child’s unique voice can make you laugh out loud—but rather as an affirmation of life itself.

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 Next: Streep in flux.

 

Maternal care

Streep's greatest roles have been as (tragic) mothers.


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

At the risk of belaboring the point, I want to be clear that I’ve been applying a specific litmus test to Meryl Streep movies, measuring them in terms of whether the women she portrays have an autonomous life apart from any specifically gendered one of wife, lover, or mother. I’ve done so to argue that Streep’s brand of feminism, neither unique to her nor entirely shared, had a specific tenor in the first decade of her career, one that both suggested the possibilities as well as the limits of that feminism in the mainstream popular culture of the Reagan era.

That said, I remain aware of Streep’s injunction about reading too much into her choices. The line I’m drawing is not exactly straight. Still, it is real. Actually, the Streep roles I’ve found most intriguing are the more ambiguous ones that blend private and public feminism. But even those ambiguous ones tend to run toward the private side of the spectrum. As we’ll see, that would change.  

The other thing I need to say before we move on is that Streep has never been particularly ideological in these matters. She’s an artist, not an intellectual. And one who has been committed from the outset to capturing the realities of women’s lives from multiple perspectives, whether or not they happen to be her own.

It’s notable, then, that two of Streep’s greatest performances were a matter of embodying women whose gender identities—particularly the gender identity of mother—are avowedly at the center of who they understand themselves to be. The first is what for a long time was Streep’s signature role, that of Polish émigré Sophie Zawistowski in Sophie’s Choice (1982), for which she won her second Oscar, this time for Best Actress. The movie, based on the semi-autobiographical 1979 novel by William Styron, is presented from the point of view of an aspiring novelist named Stingo, who moves to Brooklyn in 1947 after finishing his education at Duke. He rents a room in a large house whose residents include a vivacious couple, a dashing Jew named Stingo (Kevin Kline) and Streep’s mysterious and alluring Sophie, a Polish-Catholic refugee who fled Nazi Germany. The three enjoy each other’s company immensely, but it becomes increasingly apparent to Stingo that Nathan, who presents himself as a high-powered chemist, is a fraud, and a schizophrenic prone to flying into jealous rage.

Though Nathan is demonstrably insane, he is right in one respect: Stingo is falling in love with Sophie. She, too, is not who she appears to be: she claims her father was an anti-Nazi professor, though we later learn he was Anti-Semitic apologist for the regime. Sophie had a lover in the resistance movement in occupied Poland, who was caught and executed. Sophie herself was caught smuggling a ham for her dying mother and sent to Auschwitz with her children. In about the worst kind of cruelty imaginable, a camp official tells her she must choose which of her children should live. She chooses her son, who is sent to a children’s camp (we don’t learn anything beyond that), while her daughter goes to a crematorium. It is a scene about as wrenching as any in modern cinema, and must have been very difficult to execute.

Streep’s performance is awe-inspiring on many levels, most obvious in the way she reverse-engineered her way to English as a second language, by learning Polish (a language she did not master) and its accent (which she did). As with the French Lieutenant’s Woman, she conveyed a sense of alluring mystery in her character by managing to hold something in reserve that you can sense without ever being told. We also sense a tragic outcome, even as Stingo tries to flee Nathan’s murderous rage by taking her with him to a hotel, from which he hopes to return to the South and marry her, where they can live on a farm he has inherited. But Sophie simply cannot relinquish the horror of her motherhood. Indeed, one suspects her decision to cast her lot with Nathan after the war, a man who abuses her and with whom she can never finally be happy, is an act of self-sabotage.

In a 1983 interview, Streep responded to a journalist’s question about whether Sophie worked while living in New York by saying, “Yeah. Not that we ever saw. But yeah, she worked. Still, that wasn’t what that movie was about.”  Instead, what it’s about is a mother’s grief. Sophie indulges Stingo with a night of fantasy, but returns to Nathan, with whom she commits suicide. Her death, like her life, can only be defined in terms of others.

 Sophie’s Choice was a tour de force showcase for Streep’s talents. But her acting in A Cry in the Dark (1988) is all the more powerful for its understated quality. Here she’s another true-life character, Australian Lindy Chamberlain, who became ensnared in a media maelstrom in 1980 after she was accused of murdering her infant daughter despite her insistence that the child had been killed by a dingo, a wild dog indigenous to Australia, during a camping trip. Streep mastered yet another accent for this role, one she said she found more difficult because unlike Isak Dinesen or Karen Silkwood, Chamberlain was still alive and still in the public eye, and someone whose idiosyncratic expression required more precise emulation. But it’s the helmeted quality of Chamberlain’s expression, the Puritanical mien of a committed Seventh-Day Adventist married to a minister (Sam Neill), that badly damaged her public image, and which Streep captures in her performance.

Cry in the Dark was directed by Australian Fred Schepisi, who also directed Streep in Plenty. It performed poorly at the U.S. box office, probably because American viewers were not widely familiar with the scandal, and because the material is so wrenching. But Streep nevertheless earned yet another Oscar nomination for the role. Since nominations come from fellow actors—winners are chosen by the membership of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences as a whole—such recognition is an honor in its own right, and a testimonial to Streep’s realized ambition to represent the reality of a woman’s life on her own terms, in this case a woman who saw herself first and foremost wife and mother.

By the end of the 1980s, then, Streep was not simply a movie star, but a cinematic brand—a virtuoso known for high-wire characterizations in artistically challenging dramas. Asked by a film professor at the University of Kansas in 1988 whether she still takes a secret delight in jumping into a movie with a new face on, Streep said yes with a laugh. “It’s part of what I get criticized for,” she noted. “But that’s what the joy of it is for me.”

In the years that followed, however, Streep began seeking out somewhat different joys.

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Next: Streep in (comic) transition.

Engendering humor

Streep's comic approach to middle-aged womanhood


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

In 1989, Meryl Streep turned 40. By that point, she had crossed into “woman of a certain age” territory, at least in Hollywood terms, and as such had entered rocky shoals. It has long been the conventional wisdom that female stars fade in Hollywood, and while there have always been exceptions (Sally Field, Susan Sarandon, and Helen Mirren come to mind), illustrations of the rule (Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer and Melanie Griffith, all a decade younger than Streep) are not hard to generate. Though she never has never gone more three years without appearing in a movie, and has appeared in two or more movies in the same year a dozen times, there is a general perception that Streep’s star power dimmed in the 1990s, when she typically surfaced annually. Partly this is a matter of choice; these were years when she was actively raising children, and logistical considerations, like the locale of a shoot, have often been factors for her. But the quality of the roles she took was sometimes weaker, principally when the women she played were so saintly as to lack the edgy interest of a Joanna Kramer, Lindy Chamberlain, or even Karen Blixen. Still, Streep was never a passive recipient of parts, and while it’s clear that she acted on instinct, there’s surprising consistency in batches of choices that she made in the second decade of her career.

The first such batch of choices involved a set of roles that satirically deconstructed the idea of womanhood itself. The conventional wisdom is that after ten years of appearing in serious drama, Streep made leap into comedy. This was indeed a shift, and while critical and commercial reception was initially mixed, it proved to be a durable one: Streep has been a reliable cinematic source of laughter ever since, particularly in the last decade. But it’s those first few movies, a quartet of films she made between 1989 and 1992 that I want to focus on here. Though they were not highly regarded, they’re surprisingly coherent in the way they play with notions of gender.

The first, and perhaps most obvious example is She-Devil (1989). In what was widely regarded at the time as an odd piece of casting, Streep’s co-star was Roseanne Barr, a stand-up comedian who was approaching the peak of her cultural status as a working-class icon of feminism on the strength of her hit TV series Roseanne (1988-1997). But the dramatic contrast between the aristocratic-looking Streep and dumpy-looking Barr, which was played to the hilt, is essentially the core premise of the movie. She-Devil, based on the 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil  by British writer Fay Weldon, had been made into a four-part BBC television series in 1986.  The main storyline of all iterations involves a housewife and mother named Ruth Patchett, whose accountant husband (Ed Begley Jr. in the movie) leaves her for a famous romance novelist named Mary Fisher (Streep). Patchett then systematically responds to this betrayal by dismantling the public and private pillars of her husband’s and Mary’s, life. In its literally explosive garishness, the film version of She-Devil makes the BBC series seem downright prim by comparison. Barr goes out of her way to accentuate her ugliness as Ruth (as in ruthless), though she’ll undergo a transformation before it’s all over. But it’s Streep’s performance that endows the movie with a comic zing by giving us a Mary Fisher who’s both sharply observed and almost impossibly over the top at the same time. The funniest scene in the movie is a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous profile by the real-life host of the series, Robin Leach. “They find ways to make the man feel important and comfortable,” she says of her novels in a breathy voice, her blond tresses framed by a pink dress, pink nails, and poodle with pink ribbons.  “To let him know that he is—pregnant pause—the man. You know, so, there’s no confusion.” Mary later condescendingly marvels about “all the little families, mommies and daddies and dear little children tucked away for the night. How lucky they all are.” She will of course get her comeuppance, and Streep is as least as game in playing her descent, already underway when she snappishly evades being caught in a lie about her age. Ruth, for her part, begins her revival by dumping the kids at Mary’s house end entering the work force, something she does in the service of her master plan, but which results in a promising new career. These strongly feminist accents are undercut a bit, in that the story ends with Ruth’s husband rejoining the family after his release from prison for embezzlement, which she helped expose: Why would she want the lout back? Mary, for her part, recovers from a tepidly received final novel (she’s seen painfully ignored at a mall book-signing) to reinvent herself as a Serious Writer with a memoir, Trust and Betrayal: A Docu-novel of Love, Money and Skepticism (our last view of her is at a bookstore signing flirting with a charming Frenchman). Revenge may be sweet, but it need not be complete. Besides, the Other Woman was never the primary problem anyway; the feckless man is.

Next: Other Streep deconstructions of gender.

Woman at work

Some of Streep's feminism in the 1980s integrated public and private life.


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

There were some Streep projects of the 1980s in which the non-gendered aspects of her characters life were truly important. In Plenty (1985), based on the David Hare play, she is Susan Traherne, a British woman whose small but dramatic role in the French Resistance during World War II, depicted in the opening sequence, makes everything that happens in her life subsequently pale by comparison. We see her in a number of jobs, among them a “good” one in advertising, whose mindlessness infuriates her. Traherne has a tryst with another operative (Sam Neill) early in her life, from which she never recovers, subsequently marrying a diplomat (Charles Dance) whom she treats with indifference that sometimes crosses the line into cruelty. The same can be said of a prior relationship with a young working-class man (Sting) with whom she seeks to father a child without attachments.

In the context of her career, Plenty is a fascinating experiment for Streep: she plays a stunningly unpleasant character. There’s an excruciating dinner-party scene in which Traherne manages to make us sorry for a stuffy senior Foreign Office operative (John Gielgud) grieving over British ineptitude in the Suez crisis. Streep’s capacity to incite anger in viewers usefully poses questions about the standards, gendered and otherwise, by which we judge people, something she would do repeatedly over the course of her career.

Streep did make a couple movies in which the synthesis of public and private feminism was far more successful from both an ideological as well as artistic standpoint. The best example is Silkwood (1983), the first of a series of collaborations with director Mike Nichols, screenplay by Ephron and Alice Arlen. Streep is Karen Silkwood, the real-life metallurgy worker at a nuclear power plant in Oklahoma. Divorced with children who live with their father, Silkwood shares a house with two co-workers, her lover (Kurt Russell) and a lesbian friend (Cher).  The rhythms of their everyday life, both in terms of casual humor and domestic tensions, seems more authentic and contemporary than that of The Deer Hunter. “If anything that’s the thing I’m most proud of in this movie, it’s that it accurately depicts the work force and how people keep their sense of humor no matter how bad things get,” Streep said in 1983.

 She plays Silkwood with a low-grade anti-authoritarian attitude, rendering her as an appealingly profane, pot-smoking good-ol’-girl who at one point flashes her breast on the job as a riposte to some heckling men. That anti-authoritarian disposition hardens as she gradually comes to realize that inadequate safety measures endanger workers at the plant, danger that ultimately engulfs Silkwood herself. Her growing labor activism attracts attention in Washington, but at the cost of multiple personal relationships, with men and women, among them Russell, who nevertheless still loves her.

The real Karen Silkwood died in murky circumstances in a 1974 car accident, just as revelations at the plant where she worked would go public and ultimately force its closure. Some critics disliked the ambiguity of the film’s ending, which was aesthetically as well as politically unsatisfying. But Silkwood herself belongs in the pantheon of Streep characters for the fully integrated quality of her life, a truly three-dimensional feminism of the kind one rarely sees in movies.

My personal favorite example of such three-dimensionality, however, is Streep’s turn as Helen Archer, a fictional character in the 1987 film Ironweed, based on William Kennedy’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel. This may seem like an odd statement, in that the movie is about a couple of homeless alcoholics in the Depression-era Albany of 1938.    (Streep is paired again with Nicholson, an impressive piece of teamwork when one considers they played a Washington DC power couple the previous year in Heartburn.) Helen, cut off from her family, is jobless and nearly hopeless. But we learn she was once a singer in concerts and on the radio. At one point she, Nicholson and a friend (Tom Waits) wander into a local saloon and chat up the bartender (Fred Gwynn), a former singer and recovering alcoholic himself. When Helen ingenuously gushes about his singing and mentions that she too once performed, he genially insists she take the stage at the back of the room and sing a tune. Helen tentatively begins a version of “He’s Me Pal,” a pop standard circa 1905, which she dedicates to Nicholson. But her performance gains in intensity—Streep’s singing talents are put to very good use here—and the room takes on a remarkable glow, even if her teeth are blackened and her clothes tattered. Helen finishes to rousing applause, and Nicholson, who had bought her a flower for her coat moments before, now comes over for a kiss. “My God, Helen, this is as good as it gets. You were born to be a star,” he tells her. “You think so?” she replies, tentative pleasure in her voice, and the two embrace, protected from view by their hats, the iconic image that became the movie’s poster.

As we’ve been suspecting, though—how is it that her voice is projecting even when she’s not in front of the microphone, and where did band accompaniment we hear come from?—it’s all been an illusion. The camera cuts to Helen finishing her song, much less impressively than imagined, to a crowd that less impressive, and less impressed, than imagined. (Her man is still waiting for her, though, and the kind bartender, ironically, buys her a drink.) It’s a beautifully heartbreaking moment in a vivid but painful movie. It also represents a rare moment of fusion in a woman’s life, where she is doing something she loves in a public setting for a man she loves, and that man is there to support and savor labors that generate positive attention from the crowd, even if not as much as we wish for her.  Helen is a tragic figure—she had explained the bartender before she sang that her Nicholson’s drinking problem had forced them to sell off her piano and other prized musical possessions—precisely because her vision of a career was not a mere illusion. Just as Nicholson’s love of her is both real and destructive.

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Next: Streep as mother.

 

Jim is in Boston, on his school's annual 10th grade swing through New England: the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut, memorial sites in Salem and the battlefield at Concord Massachusetts, as well as the Hub (with a detour to Charlestown to see the Bunker Hill Memorial). His big news, however, is editorial: his ongoing project on actors as historians -- early draft segments of which have been appearing on this blog -- has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press. (It's had a working title of "Sensing the Past: Hollywood Actors as Historians," but discussions are underway to come up with a zippier title; right now "The Arc of American History: What Movie Stars Tell Us About Ourselves" is in contention.) The hope is to have the book out by the end of 2012, in time to coincide with the release of the forthcoming Steven Spielberg/Abe Lincoln movie Team of Rivals, based on the Doris Kearns Goodwin book and starring Daniel Day-Lewis (one of the subjects of the work-in-progress). More on this as the date approaches.

Stay tuned for further developments. In the meantime, draft segments on the final case study, Meryl Streep, will be running in the coming weeks.

The incidental American

Foster as my window to a wider world


This is the final in a series of posts about Jodie Foster as historian

Though I’ve lived most of my life thinking I was born just a little too late, I still grew up believing that I was in the middle of a great world civilization. As such, I often found myself wondering what would it be like coming of age in, say, Brazil in the 1970s, or Italy in the 1890s, or Japan in the 1730s – times which, even in the histories of such storied places, hardly seem that arresting. If you were a kid, I think you’d want to be Brazilian in the mid-sixteenth century, or Japanese in the late nineteenth century, or Italian at the time of the Risorgimento -- or the first century BCE. (Any turmoil, of course, would be more exciting than threatening.) But to grow up in a place that was not undergoing dramatic change or taking center stage seemed sad to me.

This is of course crude, even imperialist, thinking, though I confess it’s proven durable in my psyche. I suppose it’s akin to the wages of whiteness, a concept the great African American scholar W.E.B. DuBois used to explain why the white working class would never cast in favor of interracial solidarity against their shared capitalist oppressor: at least they’re not black. The wages of Americanness, by contrast, are not specifically racial, though of course white people have benefited disproportionately from the psychic dividend it has conferred. But all of us who have experienced it cannot help but suspect that this dividend is soon to be cut off, and that a reckoning is at hand.

It seems quite likely to me that if the work of Jodie Foster continues to have life beyond the mortal frame of the republic, she will be seen as a distinctively American artist, perhaps in ways we can only dimly perceive now. But for me, she’s functioned – in precisely that half-conscious, ill-formed, but nevertheless discernible way that I’ve been at some pains to trace in the preceding posts – as a living demonstration that you can have a full, complicated, and interesting life without caring all that much that you happen to be American. Again: she is an odd vehicle for that message, in that she herself came of age in Hollywood, the veritable cockpit of the American Dream. Perhaps that allowed her to take it for granted in a way I never did, and to become a true cosmopolitan, the way members of national elites often do. Or maybe it’s simply that she’s a female, and females have traditionally found their allegiances closer to home, whether or not they happen to be wives or mothers. In any case, it took an American for me to begin to imagine a post-American identity for myself and my heirs. Embarrassing, but true.

Now it’s my turn to be the brave one.

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The Sensing the Past series will continue next month with a final set of case studies on the career of Meryl Streep.

Reconstructing Jodie

Foster followed Silence of the Lambs with a series of projects that widened her range.


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

Jodie Foster came out of the post-Silence of the Lambs gate with Little Man Tate (1991), her directorial debut. Although it’s namesake is a precocious, Salingeresque little boy (Adam Hann-Byrd), in a screenplay written by Scott Frank (a newcomer at the time who went on to have a successful career), it’s not hard to see an oblique autobiographical subtext this story about a brilliant child and the tug-of-war he engenders between two powerful women. Foster plays Dede Tate, working-class mother of the seven year-old Fred, who loves him fiercely but lacks the resources, intellectual and otherwise, to develop his prodigious talents. Enter Jane Grierson (Dianne Wiest), who runs an institute for gifted children, but shows startling deficits in nurturing them. It is to Foster’s credit that she chose to tell this notably fair-minded story, which shows sensitivity to some of its specifically gendered dimensions (Harry Connick Jr. does nicely in a brief role that shows the possibilities and limits of male role models for the boy). Little Man Tate is also a hopeful movie in that it suggests that conflicts between adults over children may actually contribute positively to their development when those adults come to realize the important, if incomplete, roles they can have in the life of children. (In this regard, Little Man Tate is a bit like Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters, a film in which an argument between two men helps forge the strong character of a Civil Rights leader.)

Foster followed Little Man Tate with a bit part in Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog (1992) one of the better-realized projects of that prolific director. Shadows is Kafkaesque fable set in an unnamed city—think New York or London in the second quarter of the twentieth century—about a man (Allen) ordered to find a serial killer abroad on a foggy night. Mia Farrow plays a circus performer angry with her unfaithful companion (John Malkovich) who finds herself in a whorehouse whose employees include a genial prostitute played by Foster. “There’s only one thing men will brave murder for,” she says in a moment of wry levity with her companions. “The little furry animal between our legs.” Though thoroughly gothic in its black-and-white cinematography, the movie has an upbeat ending that gets about as close as Foster ever does to buoyancy in her movies.

Her next project, Sommersby, is really the only one in the Foster Hollywood canon that can truly be said to be a historical epic. Given its French source material, it’s a bit surprising that co-star, Richard Gere was executive producer, though he probably had more money and clout than the Francophile Foster did at the time. Sommersby is based on the life of Martin Guerre, a sixteenth century man who became a source of folklore in French life and culture. Guerre, who hailed from the Basque country, left his wife to fight for the Spanish Habsburg King Philip V, in a Europe wracked by religious conflict (Spain of course was arch-Catholic; Guerre hailed from a region with strong Calivinist tendencies.)  Years later, the returning soldier resumed his place in his village. But suspicions grew that he was an imposter, and those suspicions grew substantially when the real Martin Guerre returned and claimed he had been robbed of his identity by a man who was really Arnaud du Tilh, nicknamed Pansette (“belly”). Pansette was eventually tried, convicted and executed. A 1982 cinematic version of this story, starring Gérard Depardieu, was co-written by Princeton historian Natalie Zemon Davis, who later published the definitive scholarly account of the tale.[1] The inspired conceit of Sommersby involved taking a different period of intense warfare and ideological conflict—the American Civil War—and telling an analogous story rooted in local events and relationships.

Though nominally a conventional romance—the only one Foster ever made—it’s not hard so see how Sommersby held appeal for her beyond simply establishing her as a leading lady. Though presumably a struggle over identity between two men, it’s really the woman—Bertrande du Rols in life, Laurel Sommersby in the movie—who functions as the keystone of the story. It strains credulity to believe that du Rols failed to recognize that that the returning soldier was not her husband, but this was nevertheless her stance as long as she could possibly maintain it, largely because her actual marriage was an unhappy one (partly the result of Guerre’s impotence, which brought their union to the brink of annulment before his departure).

Sommersby feels compelled to stack its deck beyond simply having dreamboat Gere as the fraudulent title character by having him champion agricultural self-sufficiency for poor farmers and having an almost laughably enlightened view of race relations in the Reconstruction South. Yet there is a modicum of historical truth in his trial being presided over by a black judge (James Earl Jones), for the story is set in that brief interregnum between slavery and the imposition of a segregated Jim Crow regime. In one of his many fine performances, Jones manages to both endow his character with dignity and an implicit recognition of how fragile it is. Which really goes to the heart of one of the most important meanings of the Martin Guerre saga: that in times of social upheaval, it becomes tantalizingly possible to plausibly imagine a different, better personal life.

No one makes this point better than Foster, who manages to convey it solely on the basis of her facial expressions at the start of the movie. We first see her tilling the family field, accompanied by another farmer (the ever-game second fiddle, Bill Pullman), who is in love with her. Informed that her husband has returned from the war, she runs to the house, grabs her son and goes inside to watch his approach with an excited crowd. Obviously guarded—is it because she’s unhappy to see him or knows he’s an imposter?—the two go out to the front steps, awaiting the veteran’s approach. “Go say hello to your daddy,” she finally says to her son, clearly too young to really remember his father, and we sense she’s playing for time, not ready to embrace the man or call him a fraud. But he’s playing his part to the hilt; “I’d forgotten how beautiful you are,” he says, taking the hands that she had just been rubbing nervously. Foster’s faint half-smile seems to suggest amusement with the performance, but after she closes her eyes and two embrace, she opens them briefly, suggesting nervousness about where this ruse is headed.

Mrs. Sommersby nevertheless proves skillful in parrying her “husband’s” advances, “reminding” him that they had not been sleeping together at the time of his departure and would not now, either. Over time, of course, the two fall in love; the great irony of Gere’s character is that his identity theft cannot disguise his irrepressible optimism and sincere generosity. The couple’s happiness is ineluctably temporary, but no less precious for that. The thin but heartfelt smile Foster renders as she watches Sommersby on the scaffold at the end of the movie suggests a joy that not even his death can take away, and the final image of the movie, of black men repairing the steeple on a damaged church, suggests that such small islands of hope become the basis of new and better worlds.

Turning a "Corner"

Jodie Foster, non-exceptionalist 

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 is not really a historical filmmaker. Yes, over the course of making some forty odd movies, she’s made a few set in the past. But most of those take place in her lifetime (perhaps not surprisingly, the 1960s are well represented). Of those that handful which be considered genuinely historical dramas, the most important are French, like the 1984 World War II Claude Chabrol production The Lives of Others, or the beautifully made, yet graphically realistic, 2003 film A Very Engagement, an Audrey Toutou vehicle in which Foster has a small but compelling part as a Polish woman who becomes unwillingly enmeshed in a tragic love triangle between two soldiers on the Western front. Even her most prominent U.S. historical drama, Sommersby (1993), has French origins as a transposed version of the 1982 classic The Return of Martin Guerre, moved from the sixteenth century Basque countryside to the nineteenth century Reconstruction South. Among Foster’s first post-collegiate releases – one that marked an early foray into the role of producer – was Mesmerized (1986), based on a real-life 1882 New Zealand case in which Foster plays an emotionally abused orphan-turned adolescent bride acquitted of murdering the her sexually deviant husband (John Lithgow), which she actually does by hypnotizing him into drinking poison.  Shot in New Zealand while she was still at Yale and given the alternative title My Letter to George, it was not a particularly impressive piece of filmmaking (I think of it The Little Girl Who Lives Down Under, albeit less satisfyingly gleeful in its villain getting his just desserts.)

But when thinking about these projects in the context of the movies Foster has made and set in the United States, there’s something real implicitly embedded in her choices as they reflect her vision of American history: She’s an anti-exceptionalist. There are bad people everywhere, and bad things happen to good people at all times. Not even the land of the free and the home of brave is exempt from the capricious – or not so capricious – hand of fate. What’s particularly striking about his message is that it surfaces in movies set during periods that are often viewed as moments of hope, even optimism, like the sixties (1860s no less than 1960s).

One can see the outlines of this vision emerging in the one true prestige project Foster undertook at Yale, Tony Richardson’s The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), based on the 1981 novel by John Irving. As a number of observers have noted, the movie, a weird hybrid of Hollywood farce and European art-house drama, falls flat somewhere between the two. (I’d also place some of the blame on the source material, as John Irving’s fiction always seems stuffed with too high a quotient of zany characters and improbable scenarios.) Foster plays Franny Berry, the oldest daughter in a large family whose parents met in Vienna in World War II and later open a New England inn.  But the father’s true American Dream of success is going back to Vienna where he opens a financially wobbly hotel (hence the title). Over the course of the story, Franny will endure rape at the hands of a classmate (Matthew Modine), resist the incestuous entreaties of her brother (Rob Lowe), be held hostage with the rest of the family by Marxist terrorists (among them Modine in another role and Amanda Plummer), and grapple with the tragedy of a suicidal sister who happens to be a dwarf as well as a gifted writer. If ever there was a role written to appeal to Foster’s imagination, this surely was it. Indeed, it’s a virtual compendium of the scenarios in which she’d appear for the next thirty years.

A more compelling variation on Foster’s sensibility is a much more modest project, Five Corners (1988), written the emerging playwright John Patrick Shanley, who would go on to write Joe and the Volcano for Tom Hanks before finding major commercial success with Moonstruck (1987) and the stage and screen versions Doubt (2004/8). Though not autobiographical in any strict sense, Five Corners, set in the Bronx of 1964, is vivid with a strong sense of local color. That color, however, is dark: this is not the sixties of the Beach Boys or the rising tide of the Civil Rights movement, but one of rising urban crime and national backlash hinted at in background television sets that broadcast information about Barry Goldwater and the murder of Civil Rights workers. Early in the film, which also features Tim Robbins and John Turturro on the cusp of their commercial breakthroughs, a high school teacher is killed when an arrow pierces his back, a work of random violence that helps establish a tone of mordant humor. We also see the threatening figure of Heinz (John Turturro), a psychopath recently released from prison, who bullies the owners of a Jewish delicatessen. Now that he’s back, he wants to resume his pursuit of Linda (Foster), a pet store clerk who was only rescued from an earlier rape attempt by Heinz with the intervention of her friend Harry (Robbins), who has since become a convert to non-violence by the example of Martin Luther King, Jr. Linda has a boyfriend (Todd Graff) who wants to protect her, but it’s clear that he will not be a match for Heinz. When Heinz summons Linda, she feels she has no choice but to meet him, and is subjected to his brutality in the form his frustration over her lack of enthusiasm for the gift of two penguins (stolen from the Bronz Zoo). Heinz, who will go on to show himself capable of decidedly more hideous violence, knocks Linda unconscious, and takes prisoner King Kong style. Her boyfriend, Harry, and the police frantically track them to the roof of an apartment building in which Linda is literally rests on the edge of death. Nominally, the movie has a happy ending, but Linda is saved neither by any of these men, but rather another random act of violence in the form of one of those arrows. A strangely quirky yet compelling movie, Five Corners has an indy sensibility (it was made by George Harrison’s company, Handmade Films, and features the Beatles song, “In My Life,” on the soundtrack) that anticipated the breakthrough of the movement the following year with Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape.

From one standpoint, it seems bizarre that Foster would choose to make a film about a crazed stalker. It seems even more bizarre that she would claim not to have realized she’d done so until the film began shooting. When the subject came up, as it did repeatedly, she reacted with irritation. “I took this film because it’s the best screenplay I’ve read in a long time,” she said at the time. “It has a very strong narrative – it’s realistic as well as mythic and is about an era that interests me. I’m not of the school where I look for juicy parts, and I don’t do films because psychologically I could learn something about myself or because the character is something I always wanted to play. A lot of people do, but that doesn’t interest me as much as doing a good book. I look for good films.”

Fair enough. But such a response begs the inevitably subjective question about what makes a screenplay “best” or “good,” and here it does not defy logic to believe that Foster defines it in such a way that might also allow her to work through her experience and exorcise it artistically. Still, even if one accepts such a premise, it’s clear her tastes run broader than refracted autobiography. Yet even so, a grim subtext was apparent even in presumably more upbeat stories. Foster followed Five Corners with Stealing Home (1988), a much more conventional Hollywood story in which a lost soul and former baseball player (Mark Harmon) is inspired by the memories of his childhood babysitter, played by Foster. But these memories are prompted by her suicide, which is disclosed early in the story. Foster is credible as a wild spirit and source of adolescent fantasy, but Stealing Home is marred by its clichéd plot and the lack of a credible reason why her character would kill herself.

Again, though, she was still at a stage where she could not afford to be picky. And one, moreover, that she would have to fight hard and even create any opportunities that might come her way. Foster’s third film of 1988, The Accused, was her breakthrough. But it was a movie in which she got the lead only after more prominent actors turned it down, and was forced to audition for the part, something not usually required of an established actor.

The Accused is based on the true story of Cheryl Araujo, a waitress from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who was gang-raped at a local bar in 1983. What was important about the case was not simply that it became a local media circus in which Araujo’s identity and character became matters of public discussion, but that two men were convicted for their role in inciting the rape along with two who actually committed it (two others were acquitted). Besides a relatively trivial change of venue to the Washington state, the movie significantly changes the facts of the case by stripping its ethnic dimension: those tried for the crime were Portuguese immigrants, leading to charges of bias, despite the fact that the victim was Portuguese as well. Instead, the movie inserts college students into the largely working-class mob, simplifying the ethnic politics and replacing it with a more straightforward story of gender violation reinforced by white privilege.  While this seems politically dishonest, it’s also probably the only way an already difficult movie could have ever been made.

That said, The Accused does challenge its audience by giving it a relatively unsympathetic protagonist. Foster would win her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Sarah Tobias, a hard-bitten working-class woman whose evident appetite for sex and alcohol made her case a difficult one even for the zealous prosecutor played by Kelly McGillis (herself a rape victim) to press. Indeed, Tobias’s behavior in the movie appears to have been more provocative than that of Araujo. McGillis’s character nevertheless drives a hard bargain and cuts a relatively stiff plea deal with the lawyers of the rapists, but Tobias reacts with outrage: she wanted her day in court, and would endure any backlash to get it. This leads McGillis to prosecute the secondary figures for incitement, despite her (male) boss’s resistance, culminating the victim’s testimony in open court.  Foster’s performance is compelling not simply for the profile in courage of her protagonist but also – and this would increasingly become a theme of her career – her ability to convey the terror of women facing brutal treatment, physical and otherwise. While one must be careful not to conflate the agony of Cheryl Araujo (who died a few years after her ordeal in a car crash) with that of the woman who portrayed her, there’s little question that the graphic rape scene in the movie was a serious personal trial. The decision to do it was a professional triumph, to be sure, but also one of solidarity with a victim and one important for calling attention to serious issues of public policy.

The Accused was an important personal milestone for Foster, and as an entrant into the elite club of Oscar winners, put her in the catbird seat for her next role. Characteristically, she did not cash in this chit by seeking a commercial payday, but instead by deciding to take a leading role in the next movie by Dennis Hopper, a Hollywood legend for behavior no less than directing movies like Easy Rider (1969). It would prove to be a move she regretted, as Hopper lived up to his difficult reputation and was never able to complete the film, titled Catchfire (1990), in a form to be exhibited in theaters. It was later issued in DVD as Backtrack (1994). In the movie Foster plays an artist who witnesses a murder that leads the criminals involved to hire Hopper as a hitman to rub her out.  But he falls in love with his prey, and she ultimately with him. It’s surprisingly high concept fare for a man who was always known for pushing the envelope – a weird array of actors from Bob Dylan to Vincent Price make cameo appearances – and the movie was competently executed (notable in particular for its use of Southwestern landscapes). But it was at best unremarkable film, if still one in keeping with Foster’s penchant for choosing roles in which characters find themselves in dangerous situations for reasons not of their choosing.

In her next role, however, Foster would play someone who did find herself in a dangerous situation of her choosing. And in so doing achieved durable greatness.

 

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Next: Facing Hannibal Lecter