Surprise -- It's Laura Dern Week!
With HBO's event miniseries Big Little Lies arriving in less than two weeks (February 19th - wooo) and with Laura Dern's 50th birthday happening even sooner (this Friday!) Team Experience will be celebrating the freakishly expressive Laura Dern, aka "The Face," every afternoon this week.
Though some of her earliest revelatory performances are not as readily available as they should be (none are streaming) let's talk about a few of them with an emphasis on Mask (1985) after the jump...
Baby Laura Dern with an ice cream cone in ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974)
First Appearances!
Laura Dern's first two features were uncredited extra roles in her mom Diane Ladd's films...
The most famous of these was Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974). She's just that little girl eating an ice cream cone at the end of the counter in the still above. Ladd (not pictured) was behind the counter with Ellen Burstyn (pictured) in their Oscar-nominated roles as waitresses (just discussed in our Scorsese post).
After Alice Dern didn't return to screens until she was a credited actor with small roles in features like Foxes (1980... an early Jodie Foster vehicle) and the adult comedy Teachers (1984).
Laura with an ice cream cone again in her first leading role in SMOOTH TALK (1985)
1985 -- The Breakthrough Year
But however you come at Laura's career, the year that revealed that we had a revelatory Oscar calibre actress on our hands, one who had inherited both of her parent's gifts (and then some) was 1985...
That year she appeared in a leading role in the critical darling indie Smooth Talk and a supporting role in a studio hit called Mask. Smooth Talk would be the performance people always cited as Dern's "arrival" IF anyone had seen it. But at least the Independent Spirit Awards did, and she received her first major award nomination for Lead Actress as a confused teenage girl experimenting with her sexuality and starting a dangerous affair with an older man (Treat Williams, who was also Spirit nominated). It's the kind of multi-layered shockingly "full" characterization you only see from a teenage actress about once a decade or so (the peer group for this type of performance is small but includes Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear and Evan Rachel Wood in thirteen). If you ever have a chance to see this movie, take it.
Laura Dern's first scene in MASK (1985)
But for most moviegoers the "introduction" to Laura Dern was in the Cher hit Mask (the 15th biggest hit of 1985), which ws famously snubbed by Oscar but for an understandable "Makeup" win for turning then also-newish actor Eric Stoltz into a boy with a rare genetic disorder which gave his face a "lion-like" appearance. The two films won Laura Dern the "New Generation" award that year from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (beating Whoopi Goldberg from The Color Purple, who was also the runner up in the lead actress category, losing to Meryl Streep)
Mask (1985)
Confession: I had never seen Mask (!!!) until this week, despite its infamous Oscar history. I am not at all sure how this confession is possible but it is true (and why I chose to cover the film for this Laura Dern week). It's the only film I'm aware of that ever prompted an actor to publicly chastise the Academy for not nominating them from the Oscar stage as Cher did when she presented at the ceremony in Bob Mackie headriff/midriff flamboyance and quipped "as you can see I've received my booklet from the Academy on how to dress like a serious actress."
Stolz, Cher, and director Peter Bogdanovich on set
But in the true-story based Mask, all that Cher fabulousness is of a different kind. The icon's external grandiosity turns inward to become warrior confidence of the soul as her Rusty Dennis is at all times a formidable lioness. Cher is so inside the woman that she easily conveys that this woman has been fighting everyone on everything -- even when fights were hardly necessary, sometimes as mere warning -- even before her son was born with a rare genetic disease that caused his strange appearance via calcium formations in his face. The doctors gave him mere months to live but we meet him as a vibrant 16 year old with his own self-deprecating humor and inner armor. Unlike his mother, he's not as gifted at covering up or denying his vulnerability. It's easy to see why she's fiercely protective but the movie, and Cher's performance, is smart enough to offer a three dimensional take. Yes she's fiercely protective but she's also incongruously irresponsible and absent (plagued by drug problems) and he parents her as much as she parents him.
The movie, which is well worth a rental, is the kind we don't get much of anymore: warm funny resonant stories about every day folks (albeit with non-regular life stories) that don't sand off their edges and enchant the public enough to become big hits.
But, oh yes, Laura Dern.
Introducing Laura Dern
Their first kiss
The young promising actress arrives late into the film as Diana, a blind girl and something of an equestrian. Rocky has left his mother alone (for obviously the first time in his life) in order to work as an assistant at a summer youth camp for the blind. When Rocky sees her (and by extension when the camera gets a good look at her) he's a goner.
Instantly Dern's open distinctive face, which has always been the opposite of a mask, incapable of hiding humanity, plays to the unusually specific strength of this particular movie. Because Mask is dimensional enough to allow for conflicting feelings about its characters, Dern is able to really shine in a role that would be merely decorative in a lesser film. And because Bogdanovich and his actors have created such rounded people we find ourselves suddenly split in two, protective of Rocky but also worried for this innocent girl who Rocky pursues as if he's suddenly a threat. Through Dern's sensitive careful work, we understand that she has as little experience and confidence about romance as he does but we also intuit that she's yet more vulnerable, and sheltered in a way he never has been by his hard-living mother.
this is blue. this is green
She doesn't care what he looks like though he's honest with her about his face, after a brief temptation to lie. They both spark to the other's tenderness and fall hard. The scene wherein he concocts a way to explain colors to her in a kitchen -- a concept she warns him has always eluded her -- is a beauty. Dern risks playing this one scene very broadly though she's completely understated elsewhere.
OH ROCKY, I UNDERSTAND!"
Instead of taking you out of the scene, her emphatic line reading underlines how eager this young woman has been for someone to take this much care with understanding her. This, we see, is why Diana jumps in with this complete stranger with all the innocence and defenseless curiousity of first love.
And yet, when we meet her parents a few scenes later and she returns to her horse ranch, she's given you such a clear window into how sheltered she's been that you can't help but feel for her parents. This is a tough play the movie makes. Like so many characters, her parents cruelly reject Rocky, judging him by his looks. And yet, we know that this is from their love for their own child, assuming she needs protection from him. It's another example of how dimensional the actors help Mask to become where most films would merely paint people as good or bad and be done with it as they race towards their "inspirational true story!" finish.
meeting the parents
Dern proves invaluable to Mask's beating wounded heart, even though her role is in a way a short film within a much different film. Whatever the size of the roles to come, she'll keep doing this in film after film. She'll keep serving her movies in all sorts of ordinary and extraordinary ways, all while her acting becomes yet more complex and daring.
To be continued...