Thursday, September 08, 2005

Monday, September 05, 2005

Pauline Kael

“It's the dark cloud--Jane Fonda's stubborn strength, in glimpses of her sitting at the typewriter, belting down straight whiskey and puffing out smoke while whacking away at the keys, hard-faced, dissatisfied--that saves the film from being completely pictorial. It's a cloud-of-smoke performance; Bette Davis in all her movies put together couldn't have smoked this much--and Fonda gets away with it. It's in character. She creates a driven, embattled woman--a woman overprepared to fight back. This woman doesn't have much flexibility. You can see that in the stiff-necked carriage, the unyielding waist, even in the tense, muscular wrists, and in her nervous starts when anything unexpected happens.... When she's alone on screen, Fonda gives the movie an atmosphere of dissension, and she sustains this discordant aloneness in her scenes with everyone except Julia, with whom she's soft, eager, pliant. Her deliberately humorless Lillian is a formidable, uningratiating woman--her hair sculpted out of the same stone as her face. If you like her, you have to like her on her own implacable terms....

“The most difficult thing for an actor to suggest is what goes into making a person an artist.... [I]n the case of Lillian Hellman, ... anger seems to be her creative fount. If Julia's last advice to Lillian actually was to hang on to her anger, it was bad advice. Anger blinds Lillian Hellman as a writer. But anger is what holds the story "Julia" together, and the movie doesn't have it. At moments, Jane Fonda supplies something better, because she understands how to embody the explosive Hellman resentment. She gets at what anger does to you. It won't let you relax. It boxes you in: you're on your own. When--as Lillian--she walks into Sardi's on the opening night of her hit, twitching slightly from drunken nervousness, reveling in the attention she's getting while stiffly living up to her own image of herself as the distinguished playwright, you want more of her. You feel that Fonda has the power and invention to go on in this character--that she could crack this smooth, contemplative surface and take us places we've never been to. The film's constraint--its not seizing the moments when she's ready to go--is frustrating. Perfectionism has become its own, self-defeating end.”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, October 10, 1977
When the Lights Go Down, p. 306-10

Friday, September 02, 2005