The Film Experience

Each month before the Smackdown, Nick Taylor looks at alternates to Oscar's ballot...

As Cláudio wrote sometime last year (that's how long ago Sunday was, right?), the 1987 Supporting Actress vintage boasts a truly unique set of contenders. Their specific careers, overall narratives, and individual performances and the films they were in could hardly have been more different. Add in the fact that all five were one-and-done nominees and the whole list takes on a genuinely ephemeral, one-of-a-kind quality, even if three of them have the same first name.

The presence of brand names just for A-list star power, would, in most years, dilute this quality. Still, it’s strange to see some of Oscar’s favorite names on the outside looking in during 1987. Top theorists have speculated for decades how Anjelica Huston failed to get cited for her sad, moving performance in The Dead. And what about Vanessa Redgrave in Prick Up Your Ears, who won NYFCC and was the only Golden Globe nominee who didn’t translate to Oscar’s ballot...

Redgrave’s track record with the Academy suggests a performer they hold in high esteem without necessarily feeling the need to nominate each time she shines. Was her absence a refusal to gratuitously recognizing a familiar name, or did the Academy box out a great performance by one of the most venerated British actresses of the silver screen?

“Oh dear. I can’t stand those things” says Peggy Ramsay (Vanessa Redgrave) as she sits down to discuss the lives of playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) and his lover/murderer Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina) with American biographer John Lahr (Wallace Shawn) who instantly pulls out a video camera to record the interview. “Every little word. One can’t possibly be natural” she muses, pouting for a second before asking if it’s on. He says yes, and she immediately begins talking.

It’s a funny scene, not just because Vanessa Redgrave of all people is talking about how tough it is to present oneself on camera, but because Peggy so quickly looks at home as she starts talking about how she met Joe and became his agent while she massages her leg in front of Lahr. Given the few things we see her do before this interview - mournfully walk through the crime scene that is Joe and Kenneth’s apartment, swipe Joe’s diary from under a cop’s nose, lie to Lahr's face about not being able to find said diary and blaming it on her secretary while the woman gives her the stink eye - it’s hard to imagine what wouldn’t feel natural to Peggy.

Redgrave is by far the most fascinating element of Prick Up Your Ears, which is as much a testament to her skill as an actress as to the unevenness of the film itself. Director Stephen Frears has little feel for the seedy, unabashedly gay milieu Joe & Ken thrived in, rarely making his world of moonlit bathroom orgies and debauched vacations seem particularly enjoyable, let alone visually interesting. If we can partially credit him with shaping Redgrave and Oldman’s sly turns, we must also blame him for Molina’s bug-eyed theatrics which frequently threaten to topple the whole picture. It also doesn’t help that Alan Bennett’s script, hopping between multiple perspectives and time periods, somehow makes the ties binding his characters even harder to grasp in satisfying ways as the film continues.

Even in these circumstances, Redgrave offers a succinct, coherent characterization. She plays Peggy as essentially the same woman across the film’s twenty-odd year timespan, lavishing in her exqiusite outfits and forgoing the opportunity to delineate Past and Present selves. Redgrave's trademark intelligence gives Peggy instant credibility as an agent, even as she’s spacey enough to abort a call with an American producer because she can’t remember how to pronounce his name. It’s a subtly comedic performance too, underplaying laugh lines and finding the right tenor for her jokes so that we can't dismiss Peggy out of hand.

She mainly acts as an observer regaling us with tales of Joe’s professional and sexual life, yet Redgrave never reduces Peggy to a voyeuristic audience surrogate or someone living vicariously through their client. The grin on her face and the satisfaction in her voice when she talks about his exploits suggests someone who’s had plenty of her own adventures with late-night liaisons. As they say, real recognizes real, and Peggy sounds plenty impressed by his stories, especially given that homosexuality wasn’t legal in Britain at the time. Her brainy, casually aroused attitude as she recalls Joe’s first sexual encounter while wolfing down a melon is sexier than anything else in Prick Up Your Ears. It’s no wonder Lahr’s wife (a quiet, intriguing Lindsay Duncan) looks worried about how close he’s become with Peggy while writing his biography.

What adds to her magnetism is that Redgrave plays Peggy as a savvy liar without making her an actively unreliable figure. The script certainly makes sure to boldface this, with so many scenes of her blatantly and comfortably lying about something important to whoever she’s deceiving. But even after so many scenes of her withholding crucial information or pretending Joe isn’t hiding in her office, we never really see her as totally untrustworthy, especially since Redgrave refuses to flag for the audience when Peggy is being insincere. She seizes opportunities to reveal Peggy’s emotional depth, most notably in her last interview with Lahr, where she looks freshly upset thinking about how no one would know who Ken was if he hadn’t killed Joe before grinning at one of her own jokes. On a moment-to-moment basis, she’s as reliable in one scene as she is in any other, depending on how much you typically believe anything she says. Maybe she really liked Ken’s cat wall, maybe not. Maybe she had aims on Lahr, maybe not. Redgrave suggests these possibilities while leaving room for us to guess, turning Peggy into one of the film’s only real sources of ambiguity.

All of this more or less happens in the first twenty-ish minutes of the film, surely laying the foundations for an indelibly explored character, right?

Wrong!

Bennett’s script basically drops the storyline following her and the Lahrs, with them cast as Joe and Kenneth and Peggy as the other woman. The total reorientation around Joe and Ken’s relationship more or less pushes every other character out of the film completely. Sometimes Peggy pops back up for narrating duties or cameos in a flashback - we even see that first meeting with Joe she described, where she’s as curt about his play and amazed at his sexual candidness as she said she was. Redgrave is practically handed the film’s ending, but by the time she's front and center again Peggy seems almost arbitrary to whatever story the film is trying to tell.

Redgrave is giving a deftly layered performance, operating on a tonal wavelength that Frears should’ve worked like hell to emulate, but Prick Up Your Ears doesn’t reward her efforts in any meaningful way. It’s easy to imagine voters leaving her off their ballot in dismay of how little she gets to do, but Redgrave nevertheless delivers a sparkling, multifaceted sense of personality in a role that doesn’t automatically afford it, in a far more relaxed register than many actresses would attempt. It’s the kind of rescue work this category is often happy to honor, and more than that, it's a sterling example of Redgrave's singular resourcefulness. A shame the film doesn't let her plumb deeper, but what's there is more than enough for her to thrive.

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