Sissy Spacek
Crimes of the Heart
(Bruce Beresford, 1986)
Spacek’s character Babe, in this film, is an even more peculiar ornament on an already out-of-control tree of strangeness. It’s one of her most unique performances as an actress — channeling an aloofness that she hadn’t really brought to a character before. Watch as she casually reminisces with her sisters, explaining her mental whereabouts on a day that tragedy struck… blowing a bubble the size of her face and fiddling with her lace gloves. In the next breath she talks about shooting her husband because she didn’t like his looks. Something’s just not right about this woman and we can’t stop watching because of Spacek’s devotion to playing it so calmly deliberate in its unpredictability. There’s also a great sadness to it that she allows us to become aware of (but not wholly) little by little, frame after frame, yet she never lets the comedy of the situation out of our sight, even as she repeatedly attempts suicide. This makes us more comfortable watching and it’s a seduction between performer and page that only the greats can accomplish. And there’s enough mystery she brings to her to make it last long after it’s over. The goal of this character is to stick out amidst the eccentric backdrop as the most (!) eccentric and Spacek succeeds in spades by making this all seem totally natural. The more real she is — the crazier she seems. These are all signs of a virtuosic artist, and one would expect no less from Spacek at this point, but she elevated a rather conventional character from Beth Henley’s play into a daffy Southern Gothic goddess. TD
Emma Thompson
Wit
(Mike Nichols, 2002)
I believe there is a terrible misconception about television film performances. In this decade, HBO, in particular, has been home to some of the most exciting performances of the world’s finest actresses over 40, with their beautifully-realized theatrical adaptations like Nichols’ Wit. Thompson is Professor Vivian Bering, a woman who has forsaken a family and life for a career in academia, specifically metaphysical poetry. Fulfilled by her choice up until the moment she (and the audience) find out she has cancer, the film cautiously, fearlessly explores the experience of a woman’s worst medical nightmare (stage VI ovarian cancer, followed by an onslaught of intense chemotherapy), nuance by painstaking nuance. Essentially a one-woman show (written originally by Margaret Edson), Wit is heavy on the close-ups and monologues, and the entire play hinges on the casting of Dr. Bering. Thompson enjoys one of her most adventurous acting offerings to date. She has to play the acerbic, Ivy League lady who retains her composure through the loneliness and impersonality of a cold medical care system that is more interested in exploring her body after she dies. Dr. Bering must come to terms with her regrets and her past, and face the inevitable death from cancer, despite making a couple of friends along the way, completely alone. Thompson in Wit is a study in strength and the resilience of women in critical circumstances — she is heartbreaking one minute, the next waxing poetic, seeing ghosts or cracking wise. There is a wildness and unpredictability to Thompson’s work in Edson’s play, which she adapted alongside Nichols. It is superior to most film performances that actually make it into the theater. MM
Cicely Tyson
Sounder
(Martin Ritt, 1972)
Rarely are our great African American actresses given roles like Rebecca in this Disney film. Even rarer still are they actually rewarded with Oscar nominations. Tyson’s take on a stoic (though never sappy) 1930s sharecropping matriarch, who desperately tries to encourage her children to succeed in a climate short on hope, brought her into serious contention for the award in the only year where two African American women were nominated for the big award (Tyson was nominated alongside Diana Ross for Lady Sings the Blues, and the Oscar would eventually go to Liza Minnelli for Cabaret). Instilling a sense of pride and decency into her children in a situation verging on absolute poverty is hard enough for Rebecca, but when her husband is carted off to jail for stealing food, she must do it all on her own. She tends to the fields, plays mother and father to the kids, and even finds time to challenge the racially-biased by-laws of her county which dictate that she, as a black woman, is not allowed to see or talk with her incarcerated husband. A woman of considerable talents, Tyson used the part of Rebecca to land other iconic African American female leading lady roles such as Harriet Tubman (in A Woman Named Moses), and the title character in the landmark television film The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Today Tyson is still appearing in film, at age 75, working with such successful, contemporary collaborators as Tyler Perry (on two films), and OutKast (on Idlewild), but it is her unforgettably good-natured, elegant turn in Sounder that is her most inspired work. MM
Debra Winger
Terms of Endearment
(James L. Brooks, 1983)
Co-star Shirley MacLaine might have been the one to take home the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Larry McMurtry’s serio-comic novel about the lives of a Texas mother-daughter that Brooks reinterpreted as a mini-epic, but it was the preternaturally talented Winger who benefited most by playing the part of Aurora Greenway’s only child Emma Horton. Emma, as written, offers the performer a steady challenge as she is not as detailed or rigidly-constructed as Aurora, who is full of quirks and ticks. Emma is a natural, nurturing presence in the film who must alternately be sympathetic, acidly funny, and heartbreaking. Winger, on a very hot streak in the 1980s, defined a new type of motherhood: unsentimental, at-the-end-of-one’s-rope, and independent. Saddled with a philandering husband, a needy mother, and three kids, Emma’s biggest challenge comes in the final act of Terms, where she also has to fight cancer. Combining melodrama with a modern sensibility, Winger’s deathbed goodbyes to her children ensure that her scrappy performance will be the thing viewers remember most about the sometimes maudlin film, even more so than MacLaine’s histrionic hysterics. Winger’s coolness and bravery in the face of death, combined with her character’s search for an identity apart from her mother and family, make Emma one of the most intriguing female characters of the decade. MM
Teresa Wright
Shadow of a Doubt
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)
Thornton Wilder, author of the austere, homespun staple Our Town, was a playwright who dared to look deep in the crevasses of the most ordinary places. He thought evil was lurking in suburbia, in the towns we live in, even, as in Wright’s character Charlie’s case, in her own family. Named after her dangerous, charming uncle, Charlie shares a somewhat incestuous bond with this man who she really knows nothing about. She sees the good side of him but never any more. He might be family, but he is hiding a gruesome secret that his niece is about to be accidentally exposed to. As she finds more and more out about her uncle, the young woman’s life is put at risk and Thornton’s script cranks out the suspense. It seems Uncle Charlie can’t have a clever little niece running around talking about his crimes for fear of being put away forever and he is willing to go so far as to rub her out. The interesting thing about Wright’s performance is her anachronistic strength — her character is scrappy, bright and inquisitive without being obnoxious. More than a match for a petty murderer, a quick-witted young woman with a sense of decency, honor and justice like Charlie was Uncle Charlie’s worst nightmare. Thornton crafted a twisty, ambiguous morality play where a curious, smart young lady could literally fight the monster. A fresh conceit in 43. MM