A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1995)
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1995 Ralph Benner
Jessica Lange: Touching Greatness
Playing one of American theatre's greatest tragediennes--Blanche in Tennessee Williams' A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE--actresses tend to go full hog into actressey mode, surrendering to the techniques of breathy vocals, flashy southern belle accent, hair and hankie fiddling, psycho flutterings. The mannerisms are built in, but they can overtake performers. As with Ann-Margret in the 1984 TV version: hers the old community playhouse try, you keep rooting for her even though you know the part's much too large and too grandly maddening for a pop star as sometimes actress. While amazingly watchable as the whoriest version--she does a quite fine attempted seduction of the young bill collector, delivering with slutty exactitude, "You make my mouth water," and, "I've got to be good and keep my hands off children,"--she can't get the flowery language to blossom; she hasn't the power or range to bring pained dignity and restraint to the blooming insanity. Respectable and respectful as she is, at her most dramatic she sounds like Betty White's Ellen in "Mama's Family," only more shrill, and she can't elicit what's mandatory--commiseration for Blanche. The audience has to sense that Blanche, right from the start, is walking a tightrope between crushing realism and magic; in order for the part to get to us, we have to feel her desperation for the latter.
Jessica Lange's interpretation of Blanche in the 1995 CBS Playhouse 90 revival starts out as a super wallow of actressey schtick: the constant hands to the hair, chest and mouth, the twisting and pulling of the hankies. It's already too much and we haven't even gotten to the showier numbers. What saves her at the beginning is that we can hear echoes of Vivien Leigh's incomparable vocal ability to catch the rhytm and flourishes of Williams' floridness. Accidental lift as homage perhaps, but we're sure glad it's there. Not until roughly ninety minutes into the play does Lange finally move into Blanche: looking like the sister Tuesday Weld never told us about, she's sensational--and later, when thinking over the performance, haunting--in her disquieting quiet when she tells John Goodman's Mitch about her husband's suicide. She gets deep into Williams territory--his specialty of exposing torment and vulnerability through poetic dissipation. She manages more compassion for Blanche than Ann-Margret, and we can feel the pain of her embarrassment in the realization that she's got to exit passed Stanley and Mitch on her way to the loony bin, but the tragedy gets squelched. Part of this has to do with the way CBS inexcusably jumped to commercial after the rape, which lessened the impact considerably. Part of it may be that Alec Baldwin's Stanley is too elementarily defined--that is, his motives get rattled off a, b, c--and therefore whatever mystery lurks within his brutish ape is terminated. But mostly, I think, Lange's Blanche is demonstrative challenge as actress, and not a totally successful inward reach for the character. Touching greatness at the conclusion of scene seven, and again during the final, Lange eludes triumph because she's reliant on all the externals.
Yet in spite of the quibbles, the misgivings, I can't get Lange out of my mind. Weeks later and her scenes unexpectedly pop into memory. If it hadn't been for the notes I took about Ann Margret's Blanche, I mightn't have remembered much. But I do recall Leigh's performance--unforgettable in its anguish and slowly revealed nutsiness. The most demanding of Williams' female characters may require that the actresses playing them also be a little gone. It's certainly the key to Leigh's landmark portrayal in Eliza Kazan's 1951 movie. And Geraldine Page's SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH and SUMMER SMOKE and Katherine Hepburn's Mrs. Venable in SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER wouldn't have been nearly as effective without their imperial, theatrical neuro-kinesthesia. Lange, though, isn't the kind of actress one feels borderline about; her healthiness--her full bodied frame, including wide rump--and no nonsense demeanor are like ballast, keeping her stable, especially since SWEET DREAMS, her real comingout. She faked it in FRANCES, a somber, cloudy hodgepodge of SNAKE PIT psychotics and queasy, Reaganesque anti-Communist politics, but she wasn't ready for the assumed depth: looking hardened from the insulin and shock therapies and eventual lobotomy, she couldn't act it. At the end, when Frances appears on "This is Your Life" as an ad for the wonders of hocus pocus psychiatry, she's give an odious consolation prize for all that she suffered--an Edsel; but having to show the difference between the fiery actress locked up against her will and the mental somnambulist she became, Lange can't bring a convincing emptiness because it was already there at the start. She's much more persuasive as Carly in Tony Richardson's BLUE SKY.
A sort of trial run to Blanche--she says to a commander's spouse, "A woman's charm is mostly illusion"--Carly is wife to lifer Tommy Lee Jones, and the ravages of inconstancy, the relentless vagabonding from one base sight to another throughout the years has made her not insane but a little cracked. Her daydreams of wanting to be another Ava torreroing in THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA or a Marilyn wowing the guys in a SEVEN YEAR ITCH dress are her defense mechanism against the dreariness of military living; her bold, flirtatious dancing a plea for attention and physical need. She's longing for escapist fun: when the commander's wife speaks about a base sho w she and the other wives are putting on, Carly festively giggles, "Do you need any dancers?" Unfortunately, the script gets soggy with social, environmental and moral consciousness--Tommy Lee Jones suffers the after-ef fects of post-military McCarthyism--and the movie loses some staying power. But Lange hangs in, valiantly giving credence to the melodrama. And showing that she can do edge: pitching a fit over the dump she has to make a home, she runs to the family car, smashes into a jeep and ends up at a PX, almost losing control as she touches and unravels bolts of fabric. Her despairing leads her to unintentionally victimize Tommy, but, of course, she finally gathers her wits, and, at end, dragging it up as Liz's Maggie from CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, she gets her Brick back and her smile as she exits the base is as wide as the convertible she's beaming in. Carly's mildly dotty but not unhinged; she's able to use her flightiness as weapon without embarrassment.
Not long after making BLUE SKY, ready to tackle a real loon, Lange opened on Broadway with STREETCAR, to a less than enthusiastic reception. Having seen only clips from the box, I can guess why: she was showing the labors of effort--the tricks, tics--and hoping to catch the essence of Blanche in the process. However, friends who saw her toward the end of the 160 performance run say that she seemed to get transfixed, becoming almost motionless before them, and they felt a foreboding about her--about Lange, not Blanche. The thrill of watching her, said one, was "in whether she'd lose it completely. She wasn't Blanche, she was possessed by Blanche." In the April, 1995 edition of US, Lange admitted to being swept away. "Sometimes I'd just sit on the floor and weep. I felt so alone, I felt so incredibly alone. After finishing the run of the play, I actually missed Blanche. It was a visceral sensation. Oh, I miss her so much." (Her kids would know when she was in her Blanche mode at home, complaining that she was in the tub again, with the lights low.) Lange's still seized by Blanche for the TV version. She said, "If you want to talk about the spine of the character, of course, I think it's really about aloneness. Wanting to be able to stop all of this finally. To find a place to fit in. Blanche says, 'I want to rest.' I always think that's the key...She can never rest. Physically or emotionally, mentally, spiritually." And that's central to Lange's portrayal--she never stops. And it is her exhaustion, on top of Blanche's and ours, that makes us give in the inevitable conclusion--that the only way for this Blanche to find rest is to be put to rest. It's likely that the drainage is what keeps us from responding less to Lange than we do with Leigh--that is, the cumulative effect is in effect a wipeout; we're so tired by the transfixion that we're relieved to see Lange's Blanche fyked off. Leigh's Blanche achieves something pitifully supernal: we know she needs the rest cure, but her "aloneness," that which makes her so different from her sister Stella, from everyone, is what will never give her peace, because she is not of this realm. But Leigh's private agonies joined with Williams' semi-self portrait (he saw himself more as Blanche than any other character he wrote) as if an ethereal fusion of souls. We're watching the real thing --a real disintegration.
Lange's no stranger to Williams. She played Maggie to Tommy Lee Jones' Brick in a 1984 TV version that was very faithful to the original play--text-wise. But when things go wrong in bringing Williams back as reverent stage or film revivals, they can go terribly wrong. Treating his text as sacred, playing without cuts, the 50s-style word heaps sound arched, faked, and--because so many of the actors in the revivals lack tonal poetry--induce sleepiness. As Maggie, Lange is so bad she's beyond laughter; one minute she's Tuesday Weld, the next Geraldine Page, minutes later she's Page doing Weld, and then vice versa. She causes self-willed atrophy; we lapse into vegetation, trying not to listen to all the blabber. (This happened to Natalie Wood as well, playing Maggie to husband Robert Wagner's Brick.) With his pocked, savaged face, Jones might look like a candidate for homo hanky hanky with Skipper--something we reject in Paul Newman, and ridicule in Wagner--but he exposes more than the others how under-developed Brick as character is. (It is irony that it took a strong, solid male presence like Newman to bring weak, booze-soaked Brick to movie life; and it's certainly Williams good luck that mostly good to great actors on stage and in the movies played his lead male characters, almost all of them weaklings.)
But Blanche, like Martha in Albee's WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? and Mary in O'Neill's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, is a test of an actress's mettle. It takes courage to be play a role that strips you of the protections of vanity, especially when vanity is all the character has before being raped of it. While many of Williams' women border on the seriocomic, deifying as well as mocking matriarchalism and femininity, endlessly searching for magic but for the most part trapped by male-dominated reality, Blanche is finally destroyed by the realism of an act she may have envisioned as a delusional seduction--that Stanley would succumb to her charms. It's true that Williams wrote himself into Blanche, admitting that "we're both hysterics ... lascivious, demonic," and that both were raped ("I had a very attractive ass," he told Playboy, "people kept wanting to f... me."). It's also true that Blanche's instability comes out of his sister's tragic mental history--she was lobotomized, a fate that may befall Blanche. And during the writing of STREETCAR, originally entitled THE POKER NIGHT, Williams was involved with a male lover who became the basis for Stanley. (A Stanley-like scene: this lover would one day rage at Williams and throw his typewriter out a hotel window.) Though Williams wouldn't come to realize it until years later, Blanche's end was premonition: sloshed and incapacitated on booze and pills, embittered by an unfeeling, foolish press and unappreciating Broadway, Williams would for a time be institutionalized against his will. So watching Lange (and Ann-Margret) get carted off has an unintended, heartbreaking resonance for us now--a reminder of an author's demise, one he never deserved: that even after A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, A CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, after so many other hours of transport, he was considered only as good as his last hit. (Is Gabriel Garcia Marquez less of a master craftsman because he can't top ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE?) While director Glenn Jordan could have achieved for Lange a larger degree of greatness had he not permitted the excesses of her affectations, providing instead a stronger confidence within herself, what may matter more is that Lange's Blanche reminds us and reinforces what Williams is often forgotten as--the female soul of American theatre.
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