Amy Madigan and Oscar Horrors Past

by Cláudio Alves

Weapons is the talk of the town and people can't stop obsessing over the movie's villainess supreme, the wicked witch of the suburbs, the pied piper of Pennsylvania – Aunt Gladys. Some have even started dreaming about Amy Madigan's potential as a Best Supporting Actress contender, a Ruth Gordon in Rosemary's Baby for the new millennium. While such speculation seems a bit too hopeful for this horror-loving cynic, it did remind me that Madigan is already an Oscar nominee. Indeed, she was one of the acting honorees I had yet to see before biting the bullet on Twice in a Lifetime earlier this week.

So, as part of my journey to watch all Oscar-nominated performances, here are my thoughts on Madigan. And, since horror is on the mind, let me mention a couple of the worst films ever graced with an acting Academy Award nomination, too. You better believe that there are things scarier than witches out there…

Amy Madigan in TWICE IN A LIFETIME (1985)

Nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 58th Academy Awards
Lost to Anjelica Huston in PRIZZI'S HONOR

On his fiftieth birthday, family man Harry Mackenzie is urged by his wife, Kate, to go to his favorite watering hole. So, he does so, venturing alone into the intoxicating night, where he meets a beautiful barmaid who awakens long-forgotten passions within him. Some time passes, and he surprises his wife by asking for a divorce. Unmoored in their middle age, both sides of the split must adjust to a new status quo, learn to live again in the aftershock of their separation. Meanwhile, their adult daughters despair. After all, Helen is about to be married, and Sunny is herself dealing with a marital union that has seen better days. Thus goes Bud Yorkin's Twice in a Lifetime, a divorce story of unusual gentleness, so soft in its approach that potential melodrama wanes into something closer to anti-drama.

Such an approach makes for an experience that risks leaving the audience feeling as if what they've seen was too insubstantial to make much of an impression. The formal construction does nothing to contradict that idea, leaning on solid classicism that staunchly refuses calling attention to itself. Nevertheless, there are merits to consider alongside these demerits. Indeed, it's hard to resent a filmmaker who's so generous toward his characters when so many do the opposite, or a production so intent on foregrounding thoughtful observations of human behavior where there are no villains or heroes, gods or monsters. That remains true when tears, shouts, and broken homes emerge as the inevitable consequences of a man's pursuit of happiness.

In other words, Yorkin puts much, if not most, of the film on his actors' shoulders. Thankfully, the majority are up to the task, fleshing out their parts way beyond what the text suggests. And while it's easy to gravitate toward Gene Hackman's empathetic take on Harry or Ellen Burstyn's portrait of Kate, the Academy of 1985 chose to highlight Amy Madigan from the Twice in a Lifetime ensemble. Which, truth be told, shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's actually watched the thing, since her Sunny practically demands the attention, right from her very first scene. Supporting role she may be, but this is someone who insists upon making herself the protagonist of the Mackenzie clan chronicles.

That's the impression one gets during this patriarch's birthday dinner, when her voice dominates the scene and everyone seems to respond to her as actors taking directions from the head honcho on set. It doesn't take too long for the watchful viewer to detect the airs of someone compensating for an unseen insecurity, a crisis happening beneath the surface of familial harmony. But still, Sunny is in control, and so is Madigan. For instance, I love the way she picks up Kate's doily and sets it on the table, efficient yet overt, almost peacocking in her effortless insouciance. Though the actress' delivery is always imposing a certain theatricality on the scene, her gesture is full of details that make Sunny seem realer than the text conveys.

As aggravating as she often is, the character is also awfully familiar. This is particularly true when the knowledge of Harry's betrayal reveals just how brittle Sunny can be. Rankle the blonde enough, and dissatisfaction easily breaks through the thin veneer of propriety. Regard smiles so fake they're almost comical, and resentful one-liners spat out like backed-up phlegm whenever the target is presumably out of earshot. Once she gets going, a snowball turns into an avalanche. Even the performance of good manners collapses, surliness taking center stage, the irony in the woman's name emerging as this tale's biggest joke. To steal Nathaniel's observation from the 1985 Supporting Actress Smackdown, she's called Sunny but she's all thunderclouds. 

The performative ease of her domestic acting gives way to a series of staccato bursts, hard lines to punctuate hard words. And then, for one beautiful bit of humanistic filmmaking, the camera lingers on Sunny as she comes down from a public shouting match against her father. It's not that shame overwhelms the fury, but that self-reflection surges in her expression, how she holds her daughter, how she chooses to leave a parting word to Ann-Margret as the other woman. And, in that moment, the adult woman sounds like a kid again, begging a stranger not to take away what she sees as a fundamental part of how the world works.

It's as if her parents' marital crisis made Sunny regress, from confident 28-year-old to a neurotic teen who makes her anxieties everyone else's problem. Hopefully, my words don't sound too censorious, for that's not my intention. Though Twice in a Lifetime highlights its characters' hypocrisies and faults, it's always ready to extend an olive branch. They're all deeply human. You just have to follow the film's lead and give them a chance to show it. Consider the daughter's attempts to help her mother rebuild a sense of self beyond her existence as Harry's wife. When taking Kate to pierce her ears, Sunny's laugh is something to behold, a spectacle with many layers to it.

Madigan plays the moment as someone desperate for levity, to the point her character overplays the merriment, so relieved to see her mom have fun that she leans on it with off-putting verve. Burstyn makes for a good scene partner, even if the younger thespian tends to swallow every one of their scenes whole. Not selfishly, merely in a manner that feels true to the women they're playing. That said, Madigan's even better with Hackman. The gradations she finds in their father-daughter interactions, even if sometimes broad, give Twice in a Lifetime what slight dramatic shape it possesses. There's a granularity to how she depicts Sunny's hardness towards her father, her anger losing its fire to become cooling embers that can still burn. Unsurprisingly, their last scene is the film's very best, enough to justify the whole project.

14 Best Supporting Actress nominees left…

Brenda Vaccaro in ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH (1975) 

Nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 48th Academy Awards
Lost to Lee Grant in SHAMPOO

The first image we see in Guy Green's adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough is that of a hand polishing an Academy Award. Many things become apparent early on. First, this picture has gal and maybe even some ambitions of prestige. Second, it's tasteless and tacky, trying to grasp at some sort of Hollywood glamour in such naked ways that you can taste the flop sweat perspiring from the screen. Third, this enterprise will try to feign a sense of industry insider-ism in ways that will never convince, always reading more like the affectations of a poser than some incisive look into the business and the lives of those who practice it. Or worse, a bit of flashy evasion, offering visuals that promise a look behind the scenes when nobody involved ever intended to be probing about anything whatsoever that the shot might suggest.

Once Is Not Enough? If anything, Once is too much already!

Anyway, what follows is one of the worst movies ever nominated for an Oscar, acting or otherwise. Nearly nothing works in this sordid tale of a movie mogul past his prime whose odd relationship to his daughter is just a breath away from incestuous obsession. Somehow, he decides the best course of action is to marry a wealthy woman for quick cash, failing to anticipate how awful the matrimony would be or how she'd keep a lesbian liaison on the side. Aghast, his spoiled brat of a daughter jumps into unfulfilling affairs of her own that only highlight her daddy issues, and entertains notions of becoming a writer. It's trashy nonsense, filmed and performed with zombified indifference. 

Well, that is until Brenda Vaccaro shows up. Entering the scene with the outrageous line of "I'd never call you daddy. You're too beautiful," the actress plays a magazine editor living the high life in Manhattan. Funny and fearless, she's like a defibrillator zapping Once Is Not Enough's stopped heart, if only for a scene or two. So loose and so brassy, Vaccaro strikes me as a screwball supporting lass unleashed on 1970s studio-made literary trash. She also looks like she's having a blast, especially when things get messy and ridiculous around Linda. Look at Vaccaro's face during a chaotic dinner with Kirk Douglas' incest-y patriarch and company. The woman is basking in the gossip, the tawdriness of writers' drama, smiling with her eyes and mouth open, probably watering at the prospect of a delicious mess.

Vaccaro also gets points for how fantastic she is in her last moments. At the top of the stairs, consumed by anger, Linda is an apparition out of some long-lost horror soap. It's remarkable how the performer evades self-pity for explosive fury that doesn't so much follow into the next scene as it runs out of steam, leaving behind a strange peace, an odd sort of clarity that leads to the mover's conclusion. Admittedly, the whole thing is a fractured piece of characterization that can only make sense within a shambolic project like this. I wouldn't go so far as giving Vaccaro an Oscar nomination or even her Golden Globe win, but it'd be dishonest to state she's an unworthy honoree. Hers is an impossible role in an impossible story. Making it work, if only for an instant, should be seen as a miracle. Step aside, Jude, and praise be Brenda, the new patron saint of lost causes.

13 Best Supporting Actress nominees left…

 

James Woods in GHOSTS OF MISSISSIPPI (1996)

Nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 69th Academy Awards
Lost to Cuba Gooding Jr. in JERRY MAGUIRE 

Based on a true story, Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi considers multiple attempts to put Byron De La Beckwith on trial for the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. With someone like Oscar-winner Whoopi Goldberg playing the victim's widow, stalwartly trying to get her husband some justice for decades on end, one could presume the film would center on her experiences. Or, perhaps, it'd contextualize Evers as a historical figure, examining the man and his legacy in his own community. But no, like the most clichéd Oscar-bait garbage the mind can conceive, Lewis Colick's script makes assistant district attorney Bobby DeLaughter our protagonist and key point of access into the events depicted, the societal tensions at the heart of the tragedy.

The real-life victims of this hate crime are abstracted to the point of evanescence, with Evers becoming a non-entity that's little more than a plot mechanism for the while lawyer's heroic arc. If the screenplay's priorities weren't vile enough, Reiner boggles everything he could in his execution of the material, further deadening a project that was already DOA. Nobody leaves unscathed, not even Goldberg, who doesn't age in a quarter century between scenes and is so criminally underutilized she should have considered suing the Ghosts of Mississippi producers. Alec Baldwin is a sour note as the lead, and poor Virginia Madsen has to contend with being styled like a Southern-fried Hilary Clinton and a racist nagging wife part that's written like a more unlikable impression of Dorothy McGuire in Gentleman's Agreement. At least, Margo Martindale gets to serve Eve Arden realness in ugly 90s office wear. 

But what about James Woods as Beckwith, you may be asking. I'd like to start things off by stating that, despite having no lack of bad things to say about him as an execrable human being, I've always been fond of him as an actor. Between Holocaust, Videodrome, Once Upon a Time in America, Salvador, and The Virgin Suicides, he's one of my favorite American actors from the latter half of the 20th century. And still, he's beyond awful here, cartoonishly so. I'd go so far as saying he's more believably human in his car-salesman-like take on the God of the Underworld for Disney's Hercules than in this cinematic hecatomb of a prestige drama. He's subtler as Hades, too, which shouldn't be possible.

Whatever the case, part of it surely comes down to the horrible makeup job that earned Matthew W. Mungle and Deborah La Mia Denaver a most undeserved Best Makeup Oscar nomination. I'm not mincing words here, for James Woods looks like he's pitching a For the Boys Sequel every time he's on screen. That's when he's not doing the world's best impression of a bloated corpse whose wrinkles solidified into an insectoid carapace, jowls unmoving even as he twists his mouth in odd shapes. The texture is like the midpoint between Styrofoam and a slab of chicken skin that's gone bad in the freezer, which does nothing to make him resemble the real man. He looks more authentic in the flashbacks, even if the performance is still lousy, overegged and hammy, as if someone forgot to direct the actor on a day he decided to indulge in all his worst instincts. 

I suppose the ghoulish expression might stem from Woods trying to compensate for the makeup and bringing that approach into the 1960s scenes for consistency. All in all, he's doing too much, frowning those lips to accentuate every consonant, fighting against the prosthetic cheeks that don't budge, won't budge. And then there's the vowels and stops at the end of sentences, sometimes an arrhythmic point for no reason at all, when Woods will swivel his entire frame and shake his head for effect. He's so over-expressive in the trial scenes that it repeatedly gets him into trouble in the edit, littering the movie with continuity errors. In one shot, his head is swiveling in one direction, and the next one, he's leaning backward and rolling his eyes, a dissonant note of excess.

This isn't just bad for the Oscars. It's legitimate incompetence.

48 Best Supporting Actor nominees left…

Apologies for taking so long with this Oscar completist journey. I promise you won't have to wait four months for the next post.