HEROINES & VICTIMS
O'Brien, Tom
Screen ART OF THE ACTRESS HEROINES & VICTIMS A COMMON complaint about films in recent years has been the lack of good roles for women. This fall makes up for that. Whatever their defects as...
...Of particular interest is an incident from the deep past: Redgrave remembers her first love affair...
...Unfortunately, Marie's story is not always well told...
...Whatever their defects as movies, Agnes of God and Plenty at least provide showcases for actresses to carry on in the way that actors have done in their portrayals of mad visionaries or neurotic rebels...
...DANCE WITH A STRANGER is another British import with a potential Oscar-winning role, the portrait of the last woman ever to be executed in England (in 1955...
...Part of the intrigue involves figuring out how all the pieces fit a kind of psychological Clue...
...The director is Roger Donaldson, a New Zealander who made Smash Palace, and who has been hired by Hollywood (in specific, MGM) to produce artful American melodramas (like Australian Peter Weir at Paramount...
...With Spacek as its central force, Marie is a moving, sometimes frightening depiction of one woman against the world...
...And in each, the lead actress makes us excuse the film's limits...
...In addition, Donaldson forces transitions between family and public life with "arty" visual associations...
...Nevertheless, each addresses specific problems of womanhood or motherhood in provocative ways...
...Hare is willing to ask questions in Wetherby in consistently ambiguous and dramatic terms...
...often we simply do not know who the key secondary characters are in the Parole Board scandal...
...TOM O'BRIEN Commonweal: 610...
...she alerted the FBI despite sure risk to her career and even some risk to her life...
...Although Dance with a Stranger doesn't whitewash her character, Richardson manages to evoke for Ruth Ellis a bit of Conrad's pity for "the horror, the horror...
...Despite Donaldson's sloppiness, Spacek unifies the film by catching and holding onto Marie Ragghianti's determined personality...
...Spacek doesn't play characters with serious flaws...
...In the abstract, she confronts the dilemma of so many romanceheroines: one man is sexy but not nice, the other nice but not sexy...
...One of the charms of this movie is that the background is only fully explained about two-thirds of the way through, just when Miou-Miou's double life starts coming unraveled...
...Although filmed in color, few hues brighten its drab world, mostly a rainbow of blacker shades of gray...
...These powerful visual associations are intensified by Richardson's way with one-liners and her remarkable shrieking tantrums...
...She plays Marie Ragghianti, a real Tennessee woman who blew the whistle on some high-level corruption in the early 1970s as the chairman of the State Parole Board...
...Appropriately, most scenes occur at night, but the noir-ish feeling is intensified by the frequent use of dimly lit clubs, elevators, stairways, and halls...
...Both fathers are strongly individualized and never caricatured...
...Even stronger portrayals are found in a group of better late-summer and early-fall releases that include some of the finest performances by actresses this year...
...Although the plot peters out, and the answer to why-he-dun-it is too pat, the middle of the film is valuable for its reflections on civilized behavior, the masks such behavior imposes, and the difficulty of living with the masks...
...although she is right too often, she never seems righteous...
...The Air France captain genially reprimands his son for taking too seriously the social studies taught at his excellent Jesuit prep school, particularly the socialist teachings of one "Father Lenino...
...In Wetherby, unlike Plenty, Hare settles for no easy answers...
...Then, suddenly, comes the shock: when the young man finishes his tale, he blows his head off...
...As he tells the story, we relive scenes of the party, especially Redgrave's slightly astonished look when she had opened her door and her polite, witty welcome of her unexpected guest ("The more, the merrier...
...Like Jessica Lange several years ago in Frances, Richardson doesn't seem to be acting mad...
...Richardson, however, is a platinum blonde exclamation point...
...The other father plays weird but amusing betting games with his fouryear-old daughter...
...Ragghianti discovered that Governor Roy Blanton was selling pardons for campaign contributions...
...Ruth Ellis (Miranda Richardson) was a high-class call girl, then a nightclub singer, and finally a lover of two different men: one a rich young playboy (Rupert Everett), who leads her on with false promises, and one a responsible, though dowdy businessman (Ian Holm...
...He just "showed up" some guests (Judi Dench and Ian Holm) assumed that he had been invited by the host, and Redgrave assumed they had brought him along...
...Some of the best scenes in Marie involve her family, and it is impressive to see her abandon a brutal husband and raise three children (one with a serious health problem) while she tries to pursue a career and fight the bad guys...
...Wetherby's plot is simple: Redgrave gives a dinner party, and, the day after, a young man who attended shows up on her doorstep and explains that no one had invited him...
...Several time frames are simultaneously examined: the dinner, the shooting, the immediate past, and the 1950s...
...One gesture when she reaches to touch a friend (Judi Dench) the morning after the suicide has more genuine humanity in it than all her Sarah Bernhardt imitations...
...As a teacher, she is convincingly tender-tart with students...
...These films are more concerned with history than with the present...
...Moreover, she genuinely loves both men (one an Air France captain to whom she is legally married...
...a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, she wears the resemblance like a seal of doom, and when she dons showy red dresses really marks herself off...
...Fred Thompson, Marie Ragghianti's original lawyer, plays himself in the gripping courtroom finale...
...But so much is included that the central drama becomes confusing...
...Perhaps her size helps, or a kind of all-American simplicity and straightforwardness that prevent her from seeming too moral...
...Holding both together is the sweetness and intelligence of the central performer her acting miracle is in making us believe in supermere...
...They reveal nothing like the trend in televi1 November 1985: 609 sion to address contemporary concerns of the "new" woman as in shows like Kate and Allie, or the serious, excellent detective series Cagney and Lacey, with its teamwork between a single policewoman and a married one (who, this fall, both in real life and in the series, is pregnant...
...NY OTHER HUSBAND is a French farce starring the oddly named Miou-Miou (Entre Nous) as a woman who tries to manage two households...
...It is not, as some claim, a Gallic version of The Captain's Paradise the fifties English comedy with Alec Guinness as a bigamist happily voyaging between Gibraltar and Spain and two equally deceived spouses...
...The children are charmingly mischievous without seeming too cute...
...The best is unquestionably Vanessa Redgrave as a Yorkshire schoolteacher in Wetherby, a film written and directed by David Hare, who also wrote Plenty...
...Wetherby becomes a why-he-dun-it, with an exploration of the lives of the hostess and guests and the detective who investigates them...
...When Everett dishonestly suggests they "must get married," she shoots back, "Why, are you pregnant...
...Wetherby's suspense lasts because of the superb ensemble acting, a setting where Redgrave's skills shine brighter than when she dominates a cast (witness The Bostonians...
...About the only fault of the plot is her too-good-to-be-true luck at the close...
...Playing Redgrave as a young girl, Joely Richardson (daughter of Redgrave and director Tony Richardson) is both a perfect look-alike and fine performer in her own right...
...there just happen to be two families, oddly coupled...
...her weird bawling seems the genuine article, and wins sympathy for her in the process...
...Indeed, she's at her best when she loses an argument with one of them over the value of education...
...Miou-Miou happens into her menage quite accidentally and, at the end, eighties style, even tries to engineer a happy solution...
...There are other current films with heroines deserving of further comment: Eleni, Sweet Dreams, Jagged Edge, and Je Vous Salue Marie...
...Of the four I have reviewed here, there is no common denominator in the presentation of women's dilemmas...
...He is also blessed with an actress who, unlike Meryl Streep, goes beyond her usual range, and the standard theatrical rant, to provide us with genuinely personal acting...
...the other a teacher) and their children...
...What makes this interesting is the cinematography and Richardson's high-pitched performance...
...What particularly distinguishes this film from most other Commonweal: 608 French farces is the fresh and affectionate eye it turns on domestic details...
...My Other Husband is a celebratory look at the family...
...Artfulness, in Marie, however, comes out as trying to tell too much while using shock editing techniques to cover the mess...
...Written by Shelagh Delancy, the film is sad, depressing, and finally moving though not necessarily because its heroine ever becomes fully attractive...
...Two present different kinds of victims, two different sorts of heroines...
...Helping her out is Jeff Daniels who plays the governor's legal counsel with the kind of smiling, insincere slickness that he has mastered in several roles (Terms of Endearment, The Purple Rose of Cairo...
...the worst is a cut between the end of a funeral and the opening of a court session...
...Marie stars Sissy Spacek at her usual, reliable, gritty best...
Vol. 112 • November 1985 • No. 19
