We're revisiting 1986 this month leading up to the next Supporting Actress Smackdown. As always Nick Taylor will suggest a few alternates to Oscar's ballot.
It’s been a while since I wrote about someone who had actual Oscar buzz, right? We can argue how Anna Magnani and Kimberly Elise should have contended in their years, but Cathy Tyson’s cryptic and involving turn in Mona Lisa definitely appears to have landed in the sixth spot of the 1986 Supporting Actress lineup. Tyson won LAFCA (tying with Dianne Wiest for Hannah and Her Sisters) and was first runner-up with New York. She scored Globe and BAFTA nominations, as well, before missing out with Oscar. Given the strength of her performance, the degree of precursor attention she received, the way her role fits in well-worn paths for ingenue recognition, and the ... um... quality of some of the actual nominees, I’m surprised Tyson didn’t make the cut.
Tyson plays Simone, a high-class sex worker. Her shadowy employer suddenly gives her George (Bob Hoskins), a hot-tempered ex-convict fresh out of jail, as her driver/bodyguard...
Simone isn’t happy to have this uncouth man foisted upon her to escort her from one client to the next. He, in turn, is upset at having to put up with a woman half his age and a head taller than him, with too many airs for a prostitute, let alone a Black prostitute. Simone being Black is a significant if rarely vocalized influence on how George reacts to her, and though it would be too much to say Mona Lisa is “about” race, it remains central to how Jordan has conceived her, and how Tyson and Hoskins play their relationship.
Writer/director Neil Jordan helps situate their first interaction from Simone’s point of view. She takes a minute to pause and size George up from the main stairwell of a very nice hotel while putting on a long, gray, semi-flattering coat, and this minute is as much an excuse for the audience to acquaint themselves with her sharp features, straight-backed posture, and asymmetrical hairdo. Next thing Simone knows, she’s dragging George by the arm and speed walking out of a nice hotel while the manager pesters them. George is entirely caught off guard by this skinny Black woman pulling him around and acting familiar with him, and can only meet her plea to “act like we know each other” by sputtering out “Well I don’t know you, do I?”. Tyson plays Simone's anger like a business partner dismayed at her coworker’s sloppiness, completely forgoing the “shrill hooker” routine a lazier actress might’ve settled for. We spend Mona Lisa’s first ten minutes learning how George is regarded as a menace by virtually everyone. As a result it's a bit thrilling to see this woman tear into him so openly, let alone someone as charismatic as Tyson. We can’t help wondering how long before George lashes back at her.
This confrontation happens the next day, when Simone is dismayed to see that George has used the money she gave him to buy nicer clothes on a leather jacket, a Hawaiian shirt, and a gold chain. She insults his taste and when he finally has enough he barks right back at her, stops the car in the middle of a busy street, and kicks her out. She looks affronted but also a bit panicked as she tries to get off the road, batting her purse at a passerby catcalling from his car. George watches all of this, and ashamedly goes back to pick her up. He apologizes and she brusquely accepts to be driven to her next client. Afterwards, they have their first pleasant conversation. Simone reflects on how her clients fall in love with their idea of her as a Black prostitute, and George responds that he thinks of her as a lady. He looks bowled over by the sight of her grin.
More than any other engine of its story, Mona Lisa is centrally premised on Simone’s relationship with George. What does she think of him, and how does he imagine her in turn? Are they purposely sending each other these signals? If so, why, and how are these signals being interpreted? What do they need each other for, beyond the parameters of their working relationship and personal companionship? Without transforming Simone into a sphinx, Tyson nevertheless makes these questions hard to answer while still depicting an active, shifting relationship to George, in direct response to an inner life we aren’t privileged to witness. There’s room for viewers to speculate what Tyson is thinking, and we understand that this corresponds to Simone allowing space for the men in her service to project their fascinations onto her thoughts and body, an action she either actively invites or passively permits. Jordan will occasionally shoot Simone from the rearview mirror of George’s car, emphasizing her status as a refracted, not-entirely-knowable figure, no matter the assertions either character makes about what they mean to each other.
The baseline for Tyson’s performance after Simone and George get on each other’s good sides is a tranquil, even placid expression, in tense contrast with her watchful eyes and melodically inflected voice. When Simone tells George he fancies her, we see she’s right but wonder when exactly she clocked this, and how much she has already surmised about him. She’s not unreadable, exactly, but Tyson makes it clear that Simone is showing only as much of herself as she wants to. Even in scenes wherein she shares details of her history, Tyson is able to negotiate Simone’s apparent emotional sincerity while leaving open the question of how of her expressions and movements are spontaneous gestures or for calculated effect.
When Simone talks about her work, Tyson plays it a mundane, lived-in key that suits Mona Lisa’s mixture of unsensational lives traversing a lurid, dangerous environment. After Hoskins’s revelatory work, she’s handily the film’s most inspired asset at carving out a vivid personality within and around a generic cliché. You occasionally get the sense that Tyson is working hard, maybe harder than she would need to in a better film, not to lean towards an eroticized, scheming portrait of black womanhood that Mona Lisa sometimes encourages. Her “still waters run deep” approach feels as much like a mechanism Simone has adapted as well as a course for Tyson to avoid Jordan’s more dubious pitfalls. Tyson fulfills the demands of her role as scripted, while injecting Simone with more mystery and nuance than other supporting roles in Mona Lisa suggest was demanded of her.
Tyson’s resourcefulness is made even more apparent in the final quarter of her film, where Jordan’s insistence on Simone’s ambiguity evaporates. George is blindsided by the new revelations, which betray every imageof Simone he’s built up in his head.
Tyson’s performance would probably play even better in Mona Lisa’s last act if the film didn’t seem unilaterally on George’s side by this point. When Simone finally gets the chance to take revenge on her employers, her violent desperation ultimately plays like a conceit of George’s story as he decides whether she’s worth his continued loyalty and fascination. Tyson gets a great last shot, helplessly looking around her hotel room as the camera zooms in claustrophobically on her face, but the film’s truncated finish strands the actress and the character in its final minutes. Not only that, it retroactively calls into question whether Mona Lisa’s distancing of Simone’s is reflective of George’s POV or if the film simply cannot imagine an inner life for her when he isn’t around.
You can see why BAFTA would categorize Tyson as a lead, rather than a supporting player, since the parts of Mona Lisa that don’t have her in it are far less memorable. Yet her structural significance is increasingly undermined by the predetermined beats Jordan assigns her. In a way, Tyson’s skill at handling Simone’s arc is even more remarkable, but it’s disappointing to wonder how much of the character’s humanity rests primarily on her shoulders. All of this, on top of the barely-missed Oscar nomination, gives her last minutes in Mona Lisa a sad afterglow. Still, it’s a disservice to Tyson's work to characterize it on these terms. Her performance is fantastic, matching Hoskins’s unbearably naked star turn every step of the way despite operating with an utterly dissimilar acting style. He's good enough that the film functions as a character study no matter what. But Mona Lisa truly comes alive when Tyson is beside him, giving Hoskins a real partner to play off and her film a reason for being. It's essential, film-rescuing work that speaks for itself.
