by Eric Blume
One of our great screen icons, Jessica Lange, celebrates a big birthday this weekend: 75 years, and thankfully still going strong. Lange is one of only 24 actors to win the Triple Crown of Acting (she has 2 Oscars, 3 Emmys, and 1 Tony).
Lange is a personal favorite actor of mine, and I’ve written about her on the site numerous times, so I thought for her three-quarter-century mark, I’d hold a moment for one of her less-heralded, lesser-known performances, a bit of a departure from her usual delivery: her soft, lightly comic, and sweetly sad performance in Paul Brickman’s 1990 film Men Don’t Leave...
Men Don’t Leave is a quirky, small, lovely film about its three central characters’ lives falling apart after the death of the husband and father. It’s a tricky dance of a script, for Brickman has to keep momentum while these inarticulate, lost characters process unfathomable grief and drift further and further away from each other, in slow, painfully realistic moments. It’s your standard family melodrama in some ways, but the characters are all uniquely drawn, with specific speech patterns and behavior, and the tone is equally just-off-center in a way that feels fresh and special. Brickman only directed two films, this and the classic 1983 Tom Cruise film Risky Business: both movies have a dreamy, languorously-paced quality that was uniquely his own, and it’s a shame he didn’t get to make additional films.
Here, Lange plays Beth Macauley, who out of necessity moves her young boys from their happy family home to urban Baltimore. Brickman brings something different out of Jessica here: she modulates her usual head-on, to-the-hilt approach to make Beth more withdrawn, unable to cope, unclear on how to behave. Lange can be a divisive actress: she’s got her neck-touching, hand-wringing mannerisms that can drive people bonkers. But one of the many reasons I love Lange so much is that she drives into a role like a Mack Truck: she brings a ferocity to her scenes that can make an entire movie catch fire: scenes from Sweet Dreams or Frances or Blue Sky or Music Box take off into the stratosphere because of what she’s doing (and when she’s not onscreen, those movies come crashing down). She basically played almost every single scene in Feud: Bette and Joan as if the character’s life depended on what was happening. Every. Single. Scene. She gives balls-to-the-wall acting that can be scary and dangerous and exciting.
But in Men Don’t Leave, Lange is uncertain and tentative. She speaks in a soft, low whisper, because it’s really a movie about Beth finding her voice. She has a tender, winning rapport with the two young actors who play her sons (Charlie Korsmo and Chris O’Donnell, both spectacularly good). She takes an appropriate back seat to her female co-stars Kathy Bates and Joan Cusack, responding gently to their respective mean and weird energies. Lange plays off Arliss Howard (as her musician suitor) with an inspired zaniness, always keeping in check that this is a woman who has been off the market for a decade and a half, and not fully herself for even longer.
Lange’s Beth is a smartly-crafted and interesting creation. She’s not one of Lange’s incredible tiger women; there is no bigness to her. She has no sense of glamour about her, no sense of how to dress fashionably or even just act cool. And usually Lange brings some form of sexuality or sexual threat to her characters. You believe that Frances, Cora Papadakis, Julie Nichols, Patsy Cline, Meg McGrath, Leigh Bowden, Mary MacGregor, so many of her characters have a full, interesting sex life. They FUCK! And part of the fleshing-out of these women by Jessica Lange is that full-throated sensuality she brings to them. In Men Don’t Leave, Lange brings her sensuality down from her usual ELEVEN(!) to about a three.
She’s awkward in her body here, something unusual for her. She’s out of touch with any sensuality or sexuality: she has a new life to build and doesn’t have the luxury for these things.
Men Don’t Leave also shows Jessica in a more spontaneous, funny place than how we usually see her. Beth is sad, but there’s an affability underneath, a confused desire to join the human race. Outside of Tootsie, it’s her warmest, dreamiest performance, and a completely refreshing turn from her.
One personal story that I think is worth telling in honor of her 75 years. I’ve met Jessica Lange twice, one fairly cursory, but the other was a chance encounter during a work trip about ten years ago. I was staying at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. I’d gone to the pool and realized when I got there that I’d forgotten my cell phone. Since I was simply running to my room to grab it and return to the pool, I just wore my swimsuit, put a towel around my neck, and went barefoot. After grabbing the phone, I pressed the elevator button, only to have it open with one person inside it: 2-time-Oscar winner Jessica Lange. I couldn’t believe it. As the doors closed, she looked at me, practically naked, from head to toe, smiled and said, “I like your outfit.”
I fumbled to explain and as the elevator doors opened she said, in her low-voiced, Blanche DuBois voice: “well now you’ll have to walk barefoot across the cold, hard floors of the Four Seasons.” I died a thousand gay deaths.
Let’s celebrate Jessica’s 75th. Aside from her big Oscar films, try to catch her sexy comic work in Crimes of the Heart; her triumphant Big Edie in Grey Gardens; her weird kinky nun in American Horror Story; her bananas animal communicator in Broken Flowers, etc. There are all kinds of wondrous Jessica Lange performances out there, and I’m hoping we get at least a couple more.