Marisa Tomei makes the transition

from In the Bedroom

Even if you have a hard time forgetting her earliest roles — as the gum-chomping, big-haired Brooklyn automotive expert Mona Lisa Vitti in My Cousin Vinny (1992) or the hopeless romantic Faith opposite Robert Downey, Jr. in Only You (1994) — Marisa Tomei has only become a better actor as she’s grown older and has found more interesting (usually supporting) roles. She has a delicate way of balancing humor and pathos with a slightly heartbreaking eagerness to please that is, in fact, a pleasure to watch even more now that we can see the lines on her face that show the cost of the effort. The way her mouth draws down now when she’s not flashing that eager smile at us — I find this unbelievably touching. Here’s my question: will she earn a starring turn that shows off her chops, or will she be forever relegated to making other actors look good?

from Slums of Beverly Hills

Tomei gradually developed a skill for being that girl — the one who’s fast-talking and gorgeous, but also neurotic and unpredictable and prone to self-destruction. As far as I can see she set the pattern with her scene-stealing supporting role in Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), as the protagonist’s flaky cousin Rita, eager to find prescription painkillers on her flight from rehab. I still laugh when I catch it again on TV, with her in the back seat of the car, engaging in this rapid-fire conversation with her cousin Vivian (Natasha Lyonne) and the older Eliot (Kevin Corrigan):

Eliot: I know this neighborhood. I do a lot of business up here.
Rita: Really? What do you do?
Vivian: He deals drugs.
Eliot: Vivian! Will you mind not going around misrepresenting me like that? Jesus. I just don’t want anyone to the get the wrong idea that I’m like some kind of school yard pusher.
Rita: Oh, I don’t mind. In fact, do you have anything for my nerves? You know, just laying around? Seconal, Demerol, Tuinal, Valium, Quaaludes, Percocet…
Vivian: Rita!
Eliot: Not my merchandise. I deal exclusively in pot.
Rita: That shit makes me paranoid.

from The Wrestler

If her earliest variations on this part had solely comedic goals, they quickly transformed into a kind of sweet pathos. For years a minor rumor circulated that she had not really won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for My Cousin Vinny, and that the aging Jack Palance, who announced it, had simply mis-read the card; but what we’ve seen for 20 years now is an increasingly talented actor who continues to win awards and nominations for her great performances. In Happy Accidents (2000) she played Ruby, who’d gone through too many relationships with loser boyfriends — so by the time she meets Sam (Vincent D’Onofrio, when he was actually a good actor, before his sad descent into Law & Order) she’s got a hair trigger for anticipating problems. In In the Bedroom (2001) and The Wrestler (2009), she appears as even more poignant women, single mothers whose past wild lives have left them in bad circumstances, wary. Don’t get me wrong — in both films she’s decidedly a supporting actress, not a lead (and in both cases was nominated for that award by many film awards institutions; for the latter she received a stunning eighteen nominations and eleven wins). Those many nominations indicate her terrific skill with a fundamentally limited part.

from Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

It’s limited because ultimately these stories focus on the men who offer themselves to her, whether or not she wants their help. Only in the latter movie does she get to reveal much complexity — and she’s wonderful as the erotic dancer Pam. (Let me note here that she might well have won so many awards for her part because she showed no hesitation in draping herself over the hives-inducing Randy [Mickey Rourke] — I cringed almost as much at the idea of touching his freakish body as I did during scenes of Randy’s post-wrestling injuries.) There’s a great scene in which the sad-sack Randy, facing forced retirement from wrestling, spirits her out of the club to talk privately in the cab of his van. The minute she realizes that he wants to date her, she recoils — her sympathy for his health disappears behind her need to protect herself from every single one of those sad joes who fall a little bit in love with the idea of her in her topless, lap-dancing persona. Her performance there was pitch-perfect and so true in its flow that it felt almost like an experience of my own. In fact, I’ll bet you a thousand dollars that this scene split perfectly down gender lines: men respond by thinking, that bitch, why won’t she save poor Randy? while women think, please keep up that determination not to date customers outside the club; it can’t go anywhere good. Unbelievably, of course, her determination cracks.

from Cyrus

That’s the weird thing about Tomei’s parts: she seems to have become America’s #1 Attainable Girl. All those years ago on Seinfeld, George Costanza spent an episode or two trying to get a date with her, believing that he was just her type; she’s since had on-screen relationships with the gamut of shlubby Hollywood dudes, from Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) and John C. Reilly (and Jonah Hill, for that matter) in Cyrus (2010). Maybe it’s helped by the fact that she’s been willing to do nude scenes; by googling her one can find any number of fans’ screen caps of her in various states of undress from a range of films, making her nude body available to shlubby real-life men everywhere. Considering her remarkable beauty and serious acting skills, Hollywood seems to have decided that she is the last remaining hope of all those insecure, balding, and neurotic average guys out there.

One final note: the next time you see her, watch how much she can do to express her character via her admirable head of hair, that unruly mop of hers. Time and again, she uses her disorderly hair to convey both her beauty and yet also an abiding willingness to forget the lessons she was supposed to learn from past mistakes. (In those roles, she could be the poster child for Steve Earle’s haunting song, “Sometimes She Forgets.”) Her hair sends mixed messages, always pulling against her mind that knows better; it seems to signify that her body is tempting her toward more bad decisions in life. That, in conjunction with that eager smile which can so easily turn to disappointment, makes her compelling to both men and women.

Marisa Tomei will be 47 this year. Hollywood, can you find a leading part for this actor, or will she be forever relegated to supporting-actor limbo before she hits her 50s — a dreaded age of fewer and even more limited roles? Can we watch this sweetheart of ours become something more?

The beauty of smoke

I’ve never smoked a single cigarette — not even a puff. Yet I love watching people smoke onscreen. There are perpetual movements afoot to end images of people smoking, since critics announce that it makes us want to smoke (and yet look at my history!) — such that I’m sure this blog dedicated to photographs of famous people smoking cigarettes must be the most popular blog in the history of the internet. There I found this poignant image of Bette Davis in a cloud of smoke:

…as well as this image of Cary Grant, looking ever more dashing with the cigarette:

So what can I say? After a long day in the classroom, after all that talk, talk, talk, I feel enormous vicarious pleasure in these images of beautiful people looking ever more glamorous behind a puff of smoke — being quiet, being contemplative or melancholy perhaps, but always evoking the mystery of their celebrity. It doesn’t make me want a cigarette, but I love the pause, the possibility for zen.

I almost forgot to mention: this is my perverse response to the news that Pres. Barack Obama has quit smoking. I’m glad for his lungs, and a bit wistful nevertheless.

Great movie still of the day

It’s a busy day and none of my half-written drafts are cooked yet, so I’m offering you this still from 1945’s Fallen Angel with Linda Darnell and Dana Andrews, the latter of whom is lurking outside the bar in a great, evocative shot. This image comes in celebration of the upcoming film noir blog-a-thon coordinated by the Self-Styled Siren and others to help promote the preservation of film. Something to look forward to indeed. I’m also looking forward to having the time to finish a few things once I survive a particularly busy few days.

“Network” (1976): prophetic satire

Maybe I saw Sidney Lumet’s Network in high school — I remember the “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” scenes — but I wasn’t prepared to find its satire so brilliant 35 years after its initial release. What I’d completely forgotten was all the other satirical elements, from the sex scenes between Faye Dunaway and William Holden to the subplot of Dunaway’s attempts to sign a group of violent radicals, the Ecumenical Liberation Army, to a TV contract. Considering that it’s a satire of the TV-ification of America I can’t believe it’s so fresh today, and so prescient of what we experienced in television during the last generation. From the opening scenes to the conclusion, this film is perfect.

One of the film’s themes is the generation gap; so how perfect that Holden — anti-hero star of Stalag 17 and Sunset Boulevard, whose cynicism helped create such 1950s anti-establishment protagonists as Holden Caulfield — would play Max, the head of the United Broadcasting Service news division. Now in late middle age, he’s found himself defending principles and idealism against the über-cynical corporate types who are taking over UBS. Of these, Diana (Dunaway) is the worst: a gorgeous series programmer with a preternatural gift for repackaging TV to get a bigger market share. She can see that “the American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression; they’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp, and nothing helps.” Whereas Max and his news anchor, Howard Beale (Peter Finch) joke darkly about a new program like “Terrorist of the Week”:

Max:  We could make a series of it. “Suicide of the Week.” Aw, hell, why limit ourselves? “Execution of the Week.”
Howard:  “Terrorist of the Week.”
Max:  I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: “The Death Hour.” A great Sunday night show for the whole family. It’d wipe that fuckin’ Disney right off the air.

Diana is utterly serious about such plans. She hires a radical black commie feminist to wrangle the crazy members of the Ecumenical Liberation Army into creating a popular new show (the scene of their contract negotiations is worth a Netflix subscription). Most of all, Diana can see that the newly insane Howard, with his TV rants about all the bullshit in American society, can be repackaged as The Mad Prophet for a new-and-improved news hour that also features Sybil the Soothsayer. Diana is television: for her, all publicity is good publicity, all political agendas can be transformed into catnip for audiences, there is no meaningful distinction between news and amusement. She doesn’t care in the least that Howard tells viewers to turn off their televisions, because she knows that his show gets more viewers than any competitor.

Even more dark is the film’s portrayal of Howard, who really is saying something important about TV — even though no one pays any attention:

Man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We’ll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds… we’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF… (He collapses in a faint on the set. The studio audience explodes with applause and cheers; the studio cameras pan out from his limp body.)

They don’t turn off their sets, as Diana well knows; they can hardly wait for more. The script by Paddy Chayefsky — his third to win an Oscar for Best Screenplay — is perfect at every turn. When I watched this last night with my friend Susan, we commented on one of those mini-moments in which Diana’s assistant (a very young Conchata Ferrell) pitches ideas for new series:

The first one is set at a large Eastern law school, presumably Harvard. The series is irresistibly entitled “The New Lawyers.” The running characters are a crusty-but-benign ex-Supreme Court justice, presumably Oliver Wendell Holmes by way of Dr. Zorba; there’s a beautiful girl graduate student; and the local district attorney who is brilliant and sometimes cuts corners. The second one is called “The Amazon Squad.” The running characters include a crusty-but-benign police lieutenant who’s always getting heat from the commissioner; a hard-nosed, hard-drinking detective who thinks women belong in the kitchen; and the brilliant and beautiful young girl cop who’s fighting the feminist battle on the force. Up next is another one of those investigative reporter shows. A crusty-but-benign managing editor who’s always gett… (Diana cuts her off there.)

No wonder the film won so many awards. Watch it again — it’s gone right up to my list of Best Films Ever.

No country for old “Alexandra” (2007)

Don’t laugh: I really did intend to watch a wintery film, but was misled by the poster for Alexandra by Russian director Alexander Sokurov. Turns out, that bleak whiteness on the DVD cover wasn’t supposed to invoke a Russian winter but a stiflingly hot summer on the front of the Second Chechen War. Not that I’m complaining, as it turns out this is a terrific, surreal film that could be the female equivalent of No Country For Old Men, except without the Coens’ violence/black humor nexus. It follows Alexandra as she travels out to the front to see her grandson, Denis, now a captain at a depressing military barracks. Occasionally the film offers an anti-war message — certainly it takes a dim view of that War that began in 1999 and continues today, not unlike the U.S.’s own endless Afghan War — but its goals go further and deeper. It’s deceptively slow, poetic in its dialogue, utterly compelling. I loved it.

Alexandra Nikolaevna (Galina Vishnevskaya) is a bit at loose ends: her body creaks, her mind wanders, and even though her bully of a husband died two years ago, he seems to have left a void. We first see her being helped slowly, gently into an empty boxcar on the train by heavily armed soldiers, as if she can barely manage the unexpectedness of it all. This is misleading, as she displays a terrific curiosity about everything once she arrives, even as she gets confused. The barracks soldiers are all dirty, slightly menacing, and because it’s so hot they stand about shirtless, rippled with muscles. But they’re so, so young. We watch them as Alexandra does, baffled: what are we to make of these manly children carrying such big weapons? Alexandra’s perpetual scowl begs us to look on these soldiers with strange eyes; it also, occasionally, veers into a childish fascination with brutality. When Denis maneuvers her inside a tank — smelly with oil and metal and the body odor of too many men — she picks up his rifle, positions the butt against her shoulder, and pulls the trigger of an empty chamber. “It’s easy,” she announces, with a sudden sang froid.

Out here in Chechnya, her views of the world get skewed. When she asks the handsome 27-year-old Denis when he plans to marry, he warns her not to get her hopes up. It’s not for lack of women, he confesses frankly. It’s that he’s killed too many people. The other soldiers look on her with a strange mix of disinterest and longing for such a maternal presence. When she trudges down the road a bit to the market run by Chechen women, she has an unexpected meeting of the minds with an elderly woman who operates one of the stalls. Yet even as Alexandra relaxes in her presence and even makes a gesture to the ways that women are always “sisters,” the two women know well how much they are divided by ancient tribal barriers between Russians and Chechens; no sentimental line can ease the anger between those peoples. The film proceeds by using such beautiful contrasts, all swirling around Alexandra’s muddled mind.

Sokurov has explained that this film is about “the eternal life of Russia,” yet what he means by that is clearly quite complex. Is it Alexandra’s worn body, waddling through a minefield with her wheeled shopping cart? Is it the sad hubris of a military dedicated to quashing the rebels in Chechnya? Is it Denis’ hard life contrasted with his gentleness in braiding his granny’s long hair? You can see why this film offers so many pleasures; even more so when I learned afterward the back story of the star actor here: after a long career as a celebrated soprano, Vishnevskaya and her husband Mstislav Rostropovich (a cellist and conductor) were dissidents in the 1970s whose protection of the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn led to their exile and being stripped of their citizenship; they only returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fact that in her role as Alexandra Vishnevskaya partly symbolizes this Russia makes the film’s messages all the more compounded, ambiguous.

So what will I do without a wintry film to watch? I’m thinking of celebrating this cold day with the 8-year-old girl across the street by reading Joan Aikin’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase or Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. Way back, I remember how the chilliness evoked in those books helped me cool off during hot summers; now I simply want to enjoy the rare Texas cold for the few minutes we’ve got left.

Action against H.R. 3 (abortion/rape)

Dear Representative X,

I am writing to urge you to oppose H.R. 3 (the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act), for which you are currently a co-sponsor, for the following reasons:

1) The bill changes virtually nothing having to do with abortion; because of the Hyde Amendment of 1976, tax funds currently do not pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or in cases when the mother’s health or life is at risk. Poor women already pay for their own abortions without federal assistance. The notion that this bill enacts much change is false. The only women affected by this bill are deeply impoverished and have been impregnated by rape or incest, or face serious health problems as a result of their pregnancy.

2) What the bill does accomplish is to radically redefine legal understandings of rape, incest, and risk to a mother’s health or life. It reduces the definition of rape to “forcible” rape—thus dangerously raising the standard of proof for that crime and eliminating statutory rape. Thus, if an impoverished 14-year-old girl is impregnated by her 30-year-old “boyfriend,” she cannot seek federal assistance to get an abortion. The bill limits the term incest to sex with minors; as a result, an impoverished 18-year-old girl raped by her father or uncle is out of luck. It delimits abortions only to those women whose life is at risk rather than those for whom childbirth would seriously damage their health but leave them alive—saddling already impoverished women with serious medical costs at the same time they must mother a newborn. (Thanks to Jill at Feministe for her insights on these issues.)

3) In redefining rape, incest, and risk to a mother’s health or life, the bill has the potential to alter non-abortion related legal understandings of those crimes. Considering that 1 in 6 American women has been raped—and that only 26% of rapes are committed by a stranger—it is radically dangerous for government to limit rape only to provably “forcible” crimes. Likewise, to delimit the crime of incest only to minors has the potential to green-light incest of young women who come of age. Our nation has an epidemic of sexual crimes against women; our government should be making no moves to ease criminal restrictions on those sexual crimes.

4) The bill seeks to impose anti-abortion ethics on entities wholly separate from government:  namely, small businesses, individuals, and private insurers. It contains a stipulation that the federal government can withdraw tax subsidies for small businesses if their private insurance features coverage for abortion (and most private insurers do offer this coverage); likewise, it can withdraw tax benefits from individuals who purchase private health insurance that offers coverage for abortion. All of this appears designed to strong-arm private insurers into ending coverage for abortion; federal government should not be involved in telling private businesses what to believe or how to operate.

5) This bill seriously detracts from the truly important issues affecting the United States right now: namely, an impossibly high rate of unemployment and increasingly troubled state budgets. In fact, the bill only makes conditions worse for some Americans most at risk: those who are already poor, hungry, and under-employed.

As a professor at X University, I have spoken with many young women with histories of abuse and rape—legacies that are nearly impossible to live with. Their feelings of shame and guilt for having been sexually victimized affect them on a daily basis. In short, even with rape and incest laws as currently framed, these young women were too ignorant as a result of their youth, ashamed, or otherwise emotionally victimized to seek help. Because I’ve spoken with such women I find it all the more disturbing that our Republican state representatives would be so eager to make an anti-abortion point that they would come up with a bill as misleading and punitive to impoverished female victims as H.R. 3.

This is not the time to make the law harsher when it comes to policing sexual crimes against women, nor to make conditions remarkably worse for poor women in particular. I beg you to withdraw your co-sponsorship for H.R. 3 and to vote against it if it comes up for a full House vote.

Sincerely,

Feminéma

Read the full text of H.R. 3 here

The cold descends: movies about winter

Living in Texas means never having to be very cold — I can’t remember the last time I really needed to button up my coat or wear a hat. But every once in a while an arctic blast makes its way down the plains and hammers us. This is a problem for those of us who live in houses only designed to stay cool in the summer — and which now feel like Joel and Clementine’s bed in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, dusted with snow and battered by winds. When the wind began to blow in the middle of night on Monday, it was so loud inside my thin-walled little house that it woke me up.

What does this mean for Feminéma? Foremost that I now watch movies late at night covered with a down comforter that is, in fact, so comforting that I risk nodding off. So I’m looking for something that makes the cold into a major theme. It’s too bad I’ve already seen the great Swedish film Let the Right One In, and I’ve promised to wait till the weekend to see the American remake Let Me In. And I’ve already seen the usual snowy suspects — The Shining, A Simple Plan, Groundhog Day, Fargo, The Sweet Hereafter, The Ice Storm, and Affliction. This is clearly one of those viewing moments that requires a Korean, Russian, or Scandinavian film by people who understand the cold. More soon.

Female character flow chart

In case any of you remain unconvinced by my feminist argument that female characters are ridiculously limited onscreen, this should convince you. I love it because as you scan it, you start to realize how many characters simply get sidetracked into stereotype before being allowed to turn three-dimensional. Clicking on the image will take you directly to OverthinkingIt.com, where Shana Mlawski and Carlos A. Hann Commander put it originally — and will allow you to read it more closely and let it blow your mind. It’s not just about Manic Pixie Dream Girls; it’s also the Wet Blanket, Biological Time Bomb, Cutesy Badass, Adorable Klutz…oh my god, Mlawski and Commander should team up with the TvTropes.org people.