JA from MNPP here to wish Bridget Fonda a tremendously happy 50th birthday today.
Indeed I hope that hitting 50 is such a momentously joyous experience for her that it stirs a renewed something-or-other inside her belly and reignites Ye Olde Acting Bug, because I don't know about you all but I really miss this lady.
It's been a full twelve years since she last acted - twelve years! Can you believe that? She side-stepped all of her 40s in the public eye - her last acting role was as the Snow Queen in the 2002 tele-movie of that name, about that same Hans Christian Anderson tale that inspired this year's hit Frozen. Maybe Bridget took her son to see Frozen and was all "Hey, I remember what it was like shooting icicles from my fingertips, that was fun! Acting ho!" If Frozen reinvigorates Bridget Fonda's acting career it'll be the greatest thing to come from that movie - yes, even better than "Let It Go."
Anyway to celebrate just a smidge of the twenty or so years of her career that we do have, for now, I figured I'd single out a few of my favorite scenes from her movies. The ones that come right to mind when I think of her....
First up...
... the part in Singles where she goes to see Dr. Bill Pullman about getting her breasts enlarged. I figured we'd start off classy. What sweet chemistry these two have. I can't be the only one who watches this scene screaming for her to dump grunge rocker Matt Dillon, who's driven her to this place with his big-boob desires, and end up with the doc, right? This scene showcases Fonda's undervalued comic chops delightfully - her back and forth with the (hilariously dated) cup-size enhancing graphics, eager as a pup with that plus button, as the doc tries to talk her down a size or three, makes misplaced self-worth and body-sabotage positively endearing.
And then there's Single White Female, the other half of Fonda's smashing 1992 "Single" duology. 1992 was The Year when Fonda became more than "the girl that Michael J. Fox doesn't want to date in Doc Hollywood." I mean she also did a cameo in Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness this year, so right into my good graces she went. Sure Fonda's got the less showy by a mile role in Single White Female - she's the straight line to Jennifer Jason Leigh's squiggle. But Fonda still manages to give us an empathetic lead that we slowly unravel the monstrous secrets of the nightmarish roommate Hedra (that name!) alongside - horror of horrors, she masturbates! - and she's somebody we can totally understand getting a little obsessed about. I'd probably swipe that silver raincoat of hers and go boff Steven Weber too, if given the chance. Does that make me crazy? (Don't answer that.) My favorite moment in Single White Female is towards the end when it's become all out war between the two dueling roomies...
... and she pops out of the ceiling like a jack-in-the-box to stab that maniac! That is movie magic. Everybody always remembers the part with the high heel from this movie (and with good reason, admittedly) but I feel as if this part deserves the love as well. How did she get up there? When did she become a gymnast? Who cares? Magic! And it leads us right to Fonda's next big role in 1993...
... as the super assassin in Point of No Return, John Badham's hugely silly but highly entertaining, I think, remake of La Femme Nikita. My favorite bits are all the scenes where Bridget learns about being a lady from Anne Bancroft, but then... Anne Bancroft. Come on. Anne Bancroft is in a movie, those will be the best parts.
(Especially if she's wielding a wig.) But really, amid the scenes where she's mashing caveman-like on a computer mouse or doing cartwheels while wearing hooker boots I really do think Fonda gets some lovely acting in here, where she expresses this woman's hopeless position trapped amongst death and destruction. There's a scene opposite her adorably floppy-haired stoner love interest Dermot Mulroney where she's just had to covertly kill somebody as he proposed to her fruitlessly outside the door in which you can really feel her anguish. But then she's in short shorts wrestling with Harvey Keitel underneath a falling car and we move on.
Melanie Break!
There's just one more performance that I want to delve into but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention her outstanding work in Jackie Brown - if I were listing my top ten performances in Quentin Tarantino movies Melanie would totally be on there (but hell half of them would probably be from Jackie Brown, which has been my favorite QT joint since it came out and has yet to be displaced). But the thing about Jackie Brown is it was a flop, and maybe that's the thing about most of Bridget's movies - they kept failing to connect over and over. The spectacular folly of Monkeybone in 2001 could probably be blamed at least in part for the end of both her and Brendan Fraser's careers. And I wonder if that's at least part of why she gave up the business? It had to be exhausting, time and again. Nowhere moreso than with...
... Sam Raimi's great 1998 film A Simple Plan. The film only made back about half of its budget; it did manage an Oscar nomination for Billy Bob Thornton but it's criminal that Bridget Fonda wasn't up in there too - she gives a marvelous sharp-edged performance as the pregnant Lady Macbeth pulling Bill Paxton's strings. Watch the scene where the hypothetical story of found money's revealed as truth as her husband dumps stacks upon stacks of cash on the dining room table and you can see a woman change in an instant - all of her buried fears and tension exploding into a wild-eyed release, like she's awoken from a dream. We see this play out in a ferocious scene later in the film as she details what giving the money up would do to each and every member of their family in harrowing detail in a chilling display of manipulative desperation. Even as we see that what she's saying is making her sick, there's no going back. The rest of the film we watch her pushing that old self under, the one who'd settled - she's not ever settling again.
I know how she felt. Bridget Fonda was just getting better and better, and then poof - she was gone. And now we're just expected to settle for the movies without her? Not fair, Bridget! Not fair.
What are your favorite Bridget Fonda moments?