by Cláudio Alves
There's been much talk of this year being a weak one for the Best Actress category. That's nonsense. While it's easy to understand where such dreary thoughts come from, it's a foul myth. Every year has the potential to be great, you just need to look at films outside the Academy's usual favorites and our preconceptions about what constitutes awardable acting.
Take 1994, a year traditionally considered among the weakest for the Best Actress Oscar. While it's true the nominated five aren't a particularly stellar collection, they each bring something to the table. There's Winona Ryder and her anachronistic charm, Jessica Lange's primordial rage and lust, Susan Sarandon's solid reactions, and Jodie Foster's fearlessness. Finally, there's the lead actress of Tom & Viv, a film now celebrating its 25th anniversary…
Miranda Richardson plays Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, T.S. Eliot's first wife. She's the titular Viv from Brian Gilbert's portrait of a famous doomed romance. When the film starts, the gloom of tragedy is still away and Richardson play-acts as a coquette whose crassness and vulgarity are part of her charm. Soon, however, the eccentricity curdles into madness and Richardson embraces all the grotesque possibilities Michael Hastings' script presents her with. Only Rosemary Harris rises above such contrivances, but her subtlety is the exception in a sea of fascinatingly bad decisions.
Throughout Tom & Viv, it's difficult to understand if the filmmakers want us to sympathize with a misunderstood woman's plight or the despair of a sullen writer. Such knots of ambivalence are never untangled by the main performers, too busy going against each other in a one-sided battle of wills. Willem Dafoe's T.S. Eliot is a bloodless creation, deadly subdued, his face a mask of tension at all times; he's an iceberg to Richardson's exploding volcano. Their collision doesn't so much generate sparks as it petrifies the film into a state of beautifully dressed immobility.
This could have been a brilliant portrait of toxic matrimony, but the filmmakers were hampered by the cinematic folly of pathological meekness. In other words, Tom & Viv is too conservative for its subject, both at a narrative and aesthetic level. Richardson, for her part, is having none of it, brisling against the rigidity, flailing about in hopes of tearing a hole of pure chaos in this soulless tapestry.
She's stilted and frustrating, but also genuinely interesting. She moves in brittle bursts, slumps her shoulders and lets her gestures become undisciplined and ugly. Her walk is a nightmare of heavy stomps and her voice a strident storm that never decides at what pitch to attack whoever is unfortunate enough to be in hearing distance. Most actresses would have tried to predigest the difficult character for the audience, but Richardson sharpens Viv's edges and makes all her contradictions more unavoidable, more painful. It might not be great acting in a traditional sense, but it's worlds above stodgy mediocrity.
What could be discarded as a 'weak' Best Actress year quickly starts to look like a great one if you stop to consider that the Academy could have taken risks and made bold choices. Looking outside Oscar's realm, we see how the year was a powerhouse of actressing. In Natural Born Killers, Juliette Lewis gives herself over to Oliver Stone's insanity while Gong Li breaks our heart in To Live. Jennifer Jason Leigh painted Dorothy Parker as a stylish mess in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, while Julianne Moore dissected Chekov with Louis Malle for Vanya on 42nd Street, and Isabelle Adjani let herself be possessed by the bloody melodrama of Queen Margot. Julie Delpy and Irène Jacob gave life to Kieslowski's Three Color trilogy and the duet of Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures' shocked us with youthful mastery.
All in all, 1994 wasn't a 'weak Best Actress year' and neither is 2019; there's no such thing!