ReportWire

Tag: jessica lange

  • ‘The Great Lillian Hall’ Review: Jessica Lange Is Grand as a Legendary Stage Actress Confronting Dementia

    ‘The Great Lillian Hall’ Review: Jessica Lange Is Grand as a Legendary Stage Actress Confronting Dementia

    [ad_1]

    In “The Great Lillian Hall,” Jessica Lange plays a veteran theater actress — a legend of the Broadway stage — who is always putting on airs, reciting bits from her favorite roles, and carrying on in the tradition of fabled actresses who get known for playing characters like Blanche DuBois because they’ve actually got a lot of Blanche in them. (They believe their own illusions.) Yet just because Lillian Hall is a flamboyant grand dame doesn’t mean that she’s not showing you who she is. Lange, a beauty at 75, has a face that has only grown more expressive with the years. In “The Great Lillian Hall,” that face is a map of emotion we read. Even when Lillian is being deceptive (even when she’s deceiving herself), the majesty of her feelings shines through.

    There’s a moving scene in which Lillian is seated on a porch with her adult daughter, Margaret (Lily Rabe), who she never had time for when she was raising her; she was always acting, doing eight performances a week. At night, though, she would come home in time to sing the young Margaret to sleep, and now, on the porch, she gently sings that same song — “Hush little darling don’t you cry…” Her voice is old now, and it cracks, and what we see and hear in Jessica Lange, expressed in emotions as delicate as parchment, are three levels of awareness: an ache of nostalgia; the regret Lillian now feels over what an absent mother she was; and something new — a quiet chasm of sadness about the fact that she’s now going away, to a place from which she’ll never return. For what no one else knows is that she’s been diagnosed with dementia.

    There have now been a fair number of movie dramas that deal with dementia, and I’ve been on the record as sometimes finding them touching yet dramatically frustrating. As the main character recedes, there’s a way that he or she can also recede from the audience. “The Great Lillian Hall” solves that problem in a simple way. The film takes place during the early onset of Lillian’s symptoms, so that even though she’s in rehearsal for a major new Broadway production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” where she has to contend with memory issues, the movie isn’t some gothic medical soap opera in which she suddenly starts to forget who she is. Rather, it’s about how Lillian, saddled with this devastating diagnosis, makes a peace with where she’s going by taking stock of who she’s been.

    Her symptoms do cause some drama in the rehearsal process. She flubs her lines, screws up the blocking, forgets what act she’s in, and at one point literally falls on her face. Her most dramatic symptom, however, remains offstage: She keeps hallucinating that she’s seeing her beloved late husband, Carson (Michael Rose), a theater director who for some reason looks like an elegant European drug trafficker. David (Jesse Williams), the director of “The Cherry Orchard,” is a downtown star making his move to Broadway, and he hasn’t lost his faith in Lillian. But his tough-nut producer (Cindy Hogan) has. She keeps talking about bringing in the understudy to replace her.

    The movie, written by Elisabeth Seldes Annacone and directed by Michael Cristofer, is a contraption that (mostly) works. It’s stitched together out of devices, like having Lillian’s neighbor, whom she flirts with on their stately adjoining Central Park South balconies, be a cornball Lothario played with jaded affection by Pierce Brosnan, or Lillian’s daughter saying a line like, “You never really wanted to be my mother. You just wanted to play the part!,” or the black-and-white faux-documentary-interview snippets that play like Bob Fosse Gone Cable Lite. The whole suspense about whether Lillian will make it through the rehearsal process and succeed on opening night — she’s the play’s box-office draw — carries you along, even as you realize it’s built around a major tinge of unreality. Is someone who’s struggling the way Lillian is really going to be able to perform this show all week long, for months on end?  

    Yet Lange’s performance is so good that she gives this therapy-corn version of The Show Must Go On a worldly center you can roll with and almost believe in. Lillian relies on her veteran assistant, Edith (Kathy Bates), for just about everything, and these two actors have a cruelly intimate and feisty interplay you could listen to for hours. There are a couple of scenes that tap into the agony of dementia (and Lange, at those moments, is powerful), but “The Great Lillian Hall” is mostly a feel-good movie about using acting to turn the lemons life hands you into a grand illusion of lemonade.

    [ad_2]

    Owen Gleiberman

    Source link

  • Jessica Lange Says Some Of The Best Recent Films Were Not From The U.S.: “We’re Living In A Corporate World”

    Jessica Lange Says Some Of The Best Recent Films Were Not From The U.S.: “We’re Living In A Corporate World”

    [ad_1]

    Jessica Lange is calling out the Hollywood film industry for prioritizing profits over creativity.

    In an interview with Vulture, the topic of Warner Bros. Discovery shelving films as tax write-offs like Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme came up. Lange said, “There should be a law against” such practices.

    “We’re living in a corporate world, and it certainly has rolled over into the film industry,” she said in the interview. “So much of the industry now is not about the creative process. I mean, obviously this is not across the board, but there are many instances where I feel like the artistic impulse is overwhelmed by the corporate profit motive.”

    She continued, “You look at some of the best films of the past year — what do they have in common? They’re not from America. My favorite was Anatomy of a Fall. How often do we get to see a film like that, where the ambiguity of things is never sewn up?”

    With Hollywood focusing on big film franchises, Lange said that “nobody’s ever asked” her to be in one. However, if approached to star in one, she would decline, adding, “I wouldn’t know what to do with parts like that.”

    Lange also made note of how the Hollywood industry has drastically changed with technology.

    “I remember sitting on a film set waiting for hours for the cinematographer to get the lighting right, and it was worth it because the result was spectacular. But that’s changed,” she recalled. “Cameramen don’t light anymore; they’re shooting on digital. You’re not going to watch dailies. It’s a different ball game.”

    “I’m just happy I had the opportunity when I was starting out to actually have those experiences with filmmakers like Sydney Pollack and Costa-Gavras,” she added. “I have to kind of kick myself every time I think, Oh God, it’s not as good as it used to be. Because it’s like the Buddhists say — there are two certainties in life: change and death. You can’t go backward.”

    [ad_2]

    Armando Tinoco

    Source link

  • Jessica Lange on Bringing Truman Capote’s Black Swan Mother to Life for the ‘Feud’ Finale

    Jessica Lange on Bringing Truman Capote’s Black Swan Mother to Life for the ‘Feud’ Finale

    [ad_1]

    It always comes back to the mother. After waging a war on the ladies who lunch, Tom Hollander’s Truman Capote faces the final boss in the twilight hours of his life: his mother, Nina Capote—portrayed by legendary actress Jessica Lange. In the final episode of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, “Phantasm Forgiveness,” it’s not Diane Lane’s duplicitous Slim Keith, or Calista Flockhart’s acerbic Lee Radziwill, or even Naomi Watt’s beautiful Babe Paley, but Lange’s striving and resentful Lillie Mae who looms largest in Capote’s psyche in the last moments of his life.

    Born Lillie Mae Faulk, Capote’s mother always longed to escape her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama and join society’s elite up in New York City. After divorcing Truman’s father when Truman was two years old, Lillie Mae changed her name to Nina and moved north in search of a more glamorous life, leaving Truman in Monroeville to be raised by her relatives. Eventually, Truman joined his mother and her new husband, José García Capote, in New York City, where, despite her best efforts, Lillie Mae was never fully embraced by the Park Avenue crowd that Capote would later infiltrate and set aflame. Lillie Mae would ultimately take her own life when Capote was 29.

    “It’s tough, isn’t it?” says Lange of Lillie Mae’s fate. We’re speaking over the phone from Los Angeles the day before she’s set to present the best-actress award with fellow Oscar winners Charlize Theron, Sally Field, Jennifer Lawrence, and Michelle Yeoh. Regarding Capote’s mother, she puts it succinctly: “That’s the kind of mother you don’t want.”

    As Feud comes to a close, Lange chats with VF about bad mothers, her meticulous research, and her lack of interest in the ladies who lunch.

    Vanity Fair: The finale of Feud really focuses on Truman’s relationship with his mother. What was it like getting that final script and unpacking the complicated mother-son relationship?

    Jessica Lange: Well, in classic Ryan Murphy fashion, I’d [only] gotten the first couple scripts. It was literally two scenes—there was the first episode, and then the Black and White ball. Then he said to me, because they were still writing, “What would you like to play? Because most of your scenes will be in the eighth episode.”

    Having done some research reading the book, Capote and His Women, I thought, Well, what’s really interesting would be Truman’s childhood, which, of course, informs so much of his life and who he became. So I said, “Well, can we do a flashback to his early years?” So we had those couple scenes. And then, in classic actress fashion, I said, “What about her suicide scene?” Not to be maudlin or mawkish, but that would be an amazing scene to play. So we kind of went from there. I haven’t seen it, but I felt like they wrote some really great scenes.

    The one thing that he didn’t agree to, which I had asked for, was to play [Capote’s short story] “A Christmas Memory.” I wanted to see a scene of Truman and his aunt [Nanny Rumbley Faulk, a.k.a. “Sook”], because she was such a primary caretaker, and they loved each other so deeply. I wanted to play that character too, in just the short scene of fruitcake season. But he said no to that one.

    In many ways, Lillie Mae serves as the ultimate swan: The black swan that haunts Truman and antagonizes him, driving him to drink. How did you see her role?

    Well, she gave up everything. She left her husband, the South, her child—which, as a mother, seems inconceivable—but she wanted so desperately to be part of that New York society and to fit in. And of course, she never did. I think that informed so much of her relationship to him, especially when he befriends all the kind of people that rejected her and really, I think, broke her heart.

    It works as a metaphor in the piece—that she believes Truman is trying to get some kind of justice for her, trying to get even in a way. Then it’s just the writer’s imagination that she’s coercing him into drinking. It works in that dramatic context of, yeah, maybe he does drink partly because of his mother. Maybe he does take pills because of his mother. Maybe his disappointment…that life has something to do with his mother. It’s not meant to be literal.

    You’ve collaborated with Ryan Murphy so much in recent years, but Ryan was a little bit more hands-off with this edition of the franchise. What was it like to work on a Ryan Murphy project that he wasn’t writing and that he didn’t direct?

    Well, I missed him. I have to say, I only worked maybe four or five days altogether on the whole thing. I shot two days in New York and a couple days out in Los Angeles, so I wasn’t on the set much at all. But I know that, for instance, when we did Bette and Joan, his presence was constant. He directed some of the episodes, and I always loved working with Ryan that way. I’m not sure on this one because, like I said, I was barely there.

    [ad_2]

    Chris Murphy

    Source link