Hightide (1987):
"Story about a backup singer for an Elvis
impersonator who re-enters her past when she leaves a tour in a small
town and finds her daughter in a mobile home park." (IMDb)
"Movies are made from the outside in, the inside out, every which
way. But then you have the actor. If all of a sudden he gives you
something so startling and illuminating it throws the whole movie out
the window, ideally the director has to find a new movie in the old
one." (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)
"The Hollywood culture has developed its own subconscious ideas
about what emotion is and what it isn't. Some emotions are permitted to
exist; others aren't. Audiences don't realize this kind of exclusion,
for obvious reasons. They don't see the censored outpouring of feeling;
it isn't on the screen." (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
Yes, we have fine Australian actors like Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman, and the unstoppable Russell Crowe of
LA Confidential.
But for my money, put Judy Davis and Geoffrey Rush down anywhere, in a
café, on the street, turn on a camera and just let them talk and walk
and move in and out of pretending they're other people for six or seven
hours; and I'm there. They're Australian immortals. And perhaps the
two greatest film actors in the world.
Judy Davis was hatched in a different galaxy, the Australia of the
1980s, when filmmakers were young and free and precocious, and knew in
their bones, with no shame or embarrassment, what life-force was.
In the early 1960s, I haunted the Thalia Theater in New York, and
watched dozens of foreign films. I was struck by actors who revealed
what were, to me, alien (non-American) "energies." Gunnar Bjornstrand
in
The Seventh Seal. Monica Vitti in
L'Avventura. Alastair Sim in
The Green Man.
Years later, while living in Los Angeles, I experienced the same strange phenomenon, while watching three Australian films:
Winter of Our Dreams (1981);
Heatwave (1982); and
Hightide (1987).
Judy Davis starred in all of them. See them yourself. She comes alive
in a way that American actors rarely achieve---if they even grasp the
possibility
of her raw emotional recklessness (that somehow reaches blowtorch
focus). It occurred to me there had to be something Australian about
her performances...some kind of power Australians could recognize as
their own (during a period before the country would turn into a
caricature of itself).
Particularly in
Hightide, as she comes upon her long-abandoned
daughter in a bleak coastal town and struggles with that shock, Davis
takes you into feelings, if you're an American, that seem to be coming
from another planet, a place you want to say is completely foreign and
impossible...but you know it's the fuse and force of pre-modern society,
when there was no taboo against emotion pouring and striking from the
electric core of a human out into the landscape.
You suddenly say, because you can't stop yourself, "Well, this is what I've always known. This is what I've been waiting for."
Davis doesn't let down for a moment. There are no gaps, no resting
places. Who knows how director Gillian Armstrong achieved that
victory? And while you're riveted on Davis, Jan Adele, who plays Davis'
mother-in-law in the film, poleaxes you with a volcanic
mother/protector performance from another vector that is so seamless you
absolutely
know she couldn't be acting at all---and maybe she
isn't. Maybe a few Australian actors in those days had some mysterious
hybrid version of performance which, in the American vocabulary, has no
name. I don't have the filmography to prove it, but I suspect Adele
would be on a par with Davis and Geoffrey Rush, had she been given the
necessary roles during her career.
Heatwave, a Judy Davis film from 1982, directed by Phillip
Noyce, is described this way: "A planned housing development in Sydney's
Kings Cross in the mid 70s...becomes the centre of controversy as
tenants and squatters in the doomed, older houses refuse to move. Their
most outspoken member is Kate Dean (Judy Davis), who works with the
publisher of a small but vocal local paper, Mary Ford (Carole Skinner) -
whose relentless rabble rousing against the development is silenced
only with her disappearance. Kate searches for Mary...The union bans
work on the site, but a well timed fire changes the dynamics of the
dispute - but leads to tragedy." (urban cinefile)
In the film, Davis makes solo activism an irresistible wrecking-ball
life. Even when her own emotions have burned out into ashes, she keeps
making war. At first, you don't know what you're seeing. You can't
believe what you're seeing. She's so much more than a movie,
in a movie. It's as if you finally and embarrassingly begin to understand, for the first time (how could this be?), what
tragic
means. Not in the classical sense, but as it comes to the surface in a
single human being. It was always there, waiting to be unearthed; and
then it is. In that respect, I know of no other film that touches on
what Davis is doing in
Heatwave.
Modern society reflexively closes the door on everything I'm alluding to
in this piece. "Don't play with fire." "Don't explore this." The
depth and the free flow of natural emotions are ruled out, because we
now have a better system. Our world is devoted to the good of
everyone. In order to bring it into being, sacrifices must be made. An
area of the soul has to be excised. Amnesia about the psyche must be
induced. For the sake of "equality," humans must be redrawn on a
smaller map.
A cosmic fire department is pressed into service. And for the sake of
efficiency, the department's main function is prevention. Don't let the
flames find incendiary material. Recognize sparks and snuff them out.
Re-channel energies into acceptable boulevards. Hold up the correct leaders, so others may follow them.
From this perspective, you could say the early Australian films are
strange historical documents. They reveal a time that is now retired as
a lost landscape. They remember a possibility that (we're assured) was
once too real to be real.
Except for this---what is covered over and buried is never fully
extinguished. You can decorate an artist with a blooming bar of effects
and embroideries, in an effort to obscure him, but he can eventually
break out. And if he does, if he stands against the artifact of the
landscape, he can even disturb the blind in their beds.
Re the great ones from Australia: never let their films disappear.
Coda: If I could transport one American actor back to the Australia of
the 1980s, to work with Gillian Armstrong or Phillip Noyce, it would be
Ellen Barkin. In America, she's had one basic problem: she's bigger
than every film in which she's performed. She spills over the edges of
the scripts and the story lines. She jumps out of the screen. (Watch
her opening scene in Jim Jarmusch's
Down by Law.) Why waste
time---build a film around her. Understand that she can project
emotional fire power beyond the unwritten rules of American movie
production. It would be a genuine revelation to see her finally go
all-out and take over. Despite her acknowledged "powerful" roles (
Sea of Love,
Switch),
she has as-yet uncalled-for bundles of dynamite waiting for a director
with a match, a director who is hell bent on exploding her full range.
Revisit her American films. There are always "pull-back" moments, where
she's forced to retract some of her unapologetic force. The Americans
just can't conceive of her otherwise. She's too strong. Without
restraints, she would make a tattered shamble of the script, she would
present a character who is beyond the audience's comprehension. Well,
there are always such characters---until they actually come to life on
the screen. And then all bets are off. Then audiences discover what
they've been unconsciously waiting and yearning for. But Hollywood and
its adjuncts operate on fear. "Maybe this is too much. Maybe it'll
flop. Maybe she'll walk right off the screen and yell Fire and drive
the audience out of the theater. Maybe we should confine 'power' to
crashes on the freeway and heavy weapons. Maybe the whole area of pure
emotion is too hot to handle. Because we ourselves are afraid of it..."
Yes, that's it, isn't it?
Go back and watch two American films that were supposed to be iconic "emotional breakthroughs,"
A Streetcar Named Desire and
On the Waterfront. Yes, it's unfair to pull these films out of their historical context, but
Streetcar
is a highly stylized version of emotional and physical violence,
couched in Tennessee Williams' sweet sticky prose, the "inevitable"
conclusion of which is rape; and
Waterfront gives us "the loser
who becomes a winner," even though the mob still controls the New York
docks. In neither case is the Brando character allowed to propel his
emotions into a true victory (or tragedy).
For that, watch
Hightide and
Heatwave. The adequate scripts are permitted to melt, because Judy Davis burns them up, just as she should. Because she could.
No comments:
Post a Comment