by Jason Adams
I think it was Roger Ebert who once said about Geena Davis she seemed difficult to cast in the movies as a normal human being because she always looked more like a Valkyrie come down from Valhalla than she ever did a simple waitress. And, Roger Ebert thinking with his hormones aside, he wasn't entirely wrong. For every Thelma there was a pirate, an assassin, a gigantic vampire countess waiting in the wings. Even in a reality-based movie like The Accidental Tourist it was her proto Manic Pixie character that represented a break in the mundane -- Geena Davis sweeping in always feels like an occasion!
That's why I think some of her absolute best work came in films where the reality rose up to meet her on her larger-than-life level. Her six full feet of rosy-cheeked goddessness needed a heightened world to roam most comfortably within, something like the afterlife wackiness of Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, or as with today's subject, the deranged splatter romance of David Cronenberg's 1986 The Fly remake...
In The Fly Davis plays Veronica Quaife (Cronenberg films always have the greatest names), a reporter for a science magazine who we meet at film's opening in the smack dab middle of being picked up at a party by Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum). Or so he thinks, that he's picking her up -- turns out she only agreed to go to his lab because he's just promised her an unrivaled scientific discovery and she's sniffing a scoop. Either way, besides being a perfect match height-wise (nobody standing on a box here), from this very first moment Goldblum and Davis (who were dating in real life) have enough chemistry to fill their own laboratory of bubbling tubes and beakers to their brim -- they're the lightning that reanimates Frankenstein in couple form.
Which is vital, because Cronenberg's about to ask an awful lot of them. Stuff that might otherwise, in more simple, human-sized hands, strain credulity. I don't speak just of the, you know, barfing fluorescent goo onto miniature doughnuts -- The Fly is somehow all at once a romance, it's a gross-out comedy, it's a creature-feature, and it's also an operatic tragedy in the vein of an old-fashioned Disease Melodrama. Davis said Cronenberg told her to play her scenes as if Seth Brundle was dying of cancer, and she absolutely breaks your heart in the film's final act as Seth succumbs to his mutant malady.
If you watch Davis' wondrously expressive face as Seth's final form, half BrundleFly, half Telepod, holds the shotgun to his head to relieve him of his monstrousness... well, first off its a testament to Geena Davis' wondrous face that you can manage to look at her face opposite the jumble of concepts and oozing liquids that I just described. But watch her wondrous face you can, you do, because she's selling every ounce of it -- both her heart and her mind seem absolutely broken, but beneath that pools a kindness, a strength and and an empathy, a genuine frisson existing between attraction and repulsion that is perhaps the platonic ideal of the Cronenberg brand. She did that.
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