DETROIT AIN’T KENTUCKY AND PARIS FRANCE AIN’T HOLLYWOOD BEL AIR
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
Henry Fonda personified the good American after working all four corners of the stage and screen.
Fonda played American like no actor before and no actor after him from the young President Abraham Lincoln in the Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) to the aging retiree of America’s Greatest Generation in On Golden Pond (1981).
After a long, brilliant career, Fonda received the Honorary Oscar Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1981, and then his first Best Actor Award in 1982 before disappearing from the world stage, except in DVD and streaming replays, on August 12, 1982.
When Henry’s daughter, Jane, began to appear on the stage there was not much space her father had not already occupied. The challenge for the young actress to overcome her father’s iconic stature in global cinema was substantial.
Jane Fonda did find an unoccupied space in Paris, France, and after a few films settled in with the French cinematic world for an active decade of performances and celebrity appearances.
Still though, besides the desperate need to escape from the long shadow cast by her talented father, if Jane’s career wasn’t compared to the acting career of her father, Henry, in America, she was referred to Bridgette Bardot in France.
Jane was from the era of sexual liberation, and ever more gender emancipation, but she shied away from being compared to the international sex symbol from the French film industry.
Henry was from the Golden Age of Hollywood, appearing in such films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Mister Roberts (1955) and The Longest Day (1962).
Jane was moving on by the end of the first decade in cinema, emerging from the cultural revolution as an icon for a generation that had broken free of their parents’ conservative cookie cutter nuclear family social structure and conservative minded expectations.
In The Chase (1966) Jane is cast in a supporting role as part of a back story that gradually merges with the main narrative that is compelled forward by the leading character, played by Marlon Brando. Brando had been considered by many in the film industry and the actors guild as the greatest American actor, although he received many unfavourable critical reviews.
The film featured what would prove to be a slate of the next generation of A-Listed Hollywood actors.
Fonda becomes incrementally more prominent in the film as does Robert Redford, while Brando’s character literally takes a beating as if director Arthur Penn is ushering in a new generation. Robert Duvall has a supporting role in the backstory.
Penn would go on to cast Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the culturally successful film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The anti-authoritarian tone of the biopic gangsters resonated around the world with the very same global audience that was rebelling against their parents like no other generation before them.
Redford would find feature film success again opposite Fonda in Barefoot in the Park (1967) before emerging at the front of the casting line on the marque with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).
Duvalle played a supporting role as Boo in the Gregory Peck film, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). And then Duvalle went on to have significant supporting roles as uniquely composed characters, including in the Godfather (1972) as Tom Hagen and in Apocalypse Now (1979) as Col. Kilgore.
In They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1969) Jane plays opposite her brother, Peter, and earns an Oscar nomination for her performance as one of many Americans so struggling financially that her character tries to get ahead by winning the cash prize of a dance marathon.
Jane still could not find her own footing. So, as the decade came to a close with America’s identity faltering around the world, the actor who has been looking inside herself to find her characters, decided to look outside herself in the real world to find personal inner definition.
That her father, Henry, took a role as a sinister gunslinger in the Sergio Leone’s film, Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), kind of fit as Jane gained greater perspective of the image of a nation that was becoming less flattering on the international stage and even less so at home.
This ruthless wild west killer, Frank, is binary opposite to the thoughtful juror in 12 Angry Men (1957). America never had so much integrity than when Henry Fonda played Juror No 8 and turned the minds of an angry jury to save the life of the falsely accused.
The Fondas and America would again move together on the world stage, but this time, with the next generation, in binary opposite to the nation’s traditionally accepted modus operandi.
A defiant waive of resentment within America had captured the nation’s attention, with protest just shy of rebellion in the streets rising up in opposition to the American military involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia in Southeast Asia.
And civil rights was on the agenda with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and the rising black power movement in the Inner Cities.
The first few steps onto the real world political platforms of activists were about as surreal as Jane’s character in the futuristic film Barbarella (1968). Director Roger Vadim animates with comic book caricature the street fight spreading around the world that was simultaneously challenging sexual barriers, gender inequality, racial bigotry and military involvement in foreign wars.
The wrestles tomboy, who grew up with a world famous actor who often worked away from home on film shoots, stepped away from dramatizations and into a special real world zone of political activism.
America’s illegal exploitation of native American land grants was a parallel narrative to the plight of Vietnam War veterans involved in the GI movement and the fight for civil rights by Black Americans.
In Klute (1971) a missing person investigation by private detective John Klute, played by Donald Sutherland, leads to Jane’s first Oscar win. Jane Fonda plays a New York call girl, after having embarked on the method acting process of interviewing and spending time with real life call girls.
Jane explores on film the emotional and intellectual composition of the character in detail, as John Klute and Bree Daniels become entangled in a personal relationship during the investigation. Fonda received her first of two Oscars for the film role.
But it would be Jane’s investigation of America’s image, which transcended her film career for the next two decades, that would forever brand her unique legacy as a great American icon.
Fonda joined sit-ins with Native American protests, such as at the Paiute Reservation in Nevada, where the government had begun a water diversion project that took water out of the reservation for use elsewhere by non-natives.
Jane was eventually arrested for trespassing on an army base in support of the GI Movement that was protesting the American Military involvement in the Vietnam War.
Fundraising among her network for the Black Panthers didn’t help her profile that was being compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
Jane at times became her father’s screen characters in real life vignettes.
After a few years of political activism, in Julia (1977) Jane shows how she incrementally became a political activist. Julia is approached by an acquaintance to move money from Paris to Berlin for the Jewish underground in Nazi Germany. Initially, Julia has not put any thought into participation in the underground, but by the time she delivers her package, she has become entirely immersed in the cause.
And then in Coming Home (1978) Jane Fonda costars with Jon Voight, as a volunteer at a Veterans Affairs Hospital rehabilitating severely disabled veterans who had returned from the Vietnam War, all broken up inside and out.
Sally volunteers after her husband, Captain Bob Hyde, played by Bruce Dern, ships off for a tour of duty in Vietnam. Luke is transitioning, while inside the VA hospital, back to the world he left behind to become a soldier.
Jane Fonda won a second Oscar for her performance that brought attention to the poor conditions of the hospitals and the neglect of the veterans. The film was a direct challenge to the image of America at home and on the global stage by focussing attention on the brutality of the war and the horrible treatment of returning soldiers by the American people.
Jane’s character’s incremental attachment to a veteran in the hospital turns to love serendipitously as Jon Voight’s character takes up political activism, once he was well enough to leave the hospital and after a fellow VA patient commits suicide inside the hospital’s pharmacy.
Sally gets emotionally attached to the idea of defiance, which ultimately affects her demeanor and irrevocably changes her inner character by the time her husband returns from the war.
Dern shows how the soldier has become deconstructed by the war, physically and emotionally, while Luke channels his activism into public service by speaking to young soldiers and potential recruits
Home Coming won three Oscars in total. One more for Voight and one more for Best Writing.
In China Syndrome (1979) the nuclear power industry becomes an environmental sidebar to the tumultuous decade of political activism in America after the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island Nuclear plant in Pennsylvania that same year as the film’s theatrical release.
The theme underscores the plight of the whistle blowers as Americans begin to question the good will of unbridled capitalists.
Jane plays investigative television reporter, Kimberly Wells, costarring, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon. Jane received another Oscar nomination for the role, as the film, produced by Michael Douglas, received four nominations in total.
Just when Jane had defined herself and created space between her acting art and the acting art of her father, she confronts the inevitability of comparison in On Golden Pond (1981) where she plays a supporting role to her father.
Henry Fonda plays Norman, with Jane Fonda playing his daughter, Chelsea, who comes to the family’s lakeside retreat to visit for Norman’s birthday. Norman is a retired college professor whose mental faculties have begun to faulter, and the once strong character personifying academia becomes a vulnerable member of the country’s retiring generation.
The film won three Oscars, one for Katharine Hepburn for her role as Norman’s supportive spouse, and one for Henry Fonda for his leading role as a faltering personality. On Golden Pond also won an Oscar for Best Writing by Ernest Thompson.
Everything should logically come to a conclusion now, with the iconic lives and screen personalities of Henry, as father, and Jane, as daughter, finally merging on screen with the greatest of success and international acclaim.
The acting art of Henry Fonda helped define Americana as the America everyone else wanted around the world. Juror No 8 had the greatest of integrity in his relentless pursuit of the truth and justice inside the jury room.
In a way, Jane’s activism defends this image of the Fondas being integral to the American way of life by challenging unjust deviations from what America had become respected for.
Not content to live inside her father’s shadow, Jane Fonda moved forward into the gritty gorilla war transpiring inside the homeland to re-revolutionize politics.
In Comes a Horseman (1978), Jane reconciles her past with her present by playing a lonesome ranch owner. James Caan plays a competing neighbour who comes to the realization that him and Ella will not survive another year on their own on their respective ranches.
Director Allan J. Pakula brings the two characters together, as a bigger brand than they would have been as individuals, to fight the ruthless land holder, Ewing, played by Jason Robards. Jane creates the character of a down to earth generational ranch owner who personifies the struggle between the family rancher and the independent farmer against corporate America and the oil companies.
Henry Fonda had become a cinematic institution who had created a screen character with unwavering integrity, especially after growing up in the nation’s heartland, Omaha, Nebraska, where the myth of rural purity drove the day as much as the Ford Motor Company.
For a time, especially as a child, Jane had become a tourist of the American history that her father had helped define, often finding the most joyous moments when her father, the personification of Americana, would come home from a film shoot, after a long absence, and take her swimming at a public swimming pool.
As Henry’s acting legacy grew, so did America. The great life came to an end with an Oscar worthy acting performance.
This cache helped Jane for a while as she developed her own rapport with the public. But when Henry’s final act came to an end, Jane would continue on with her political activism for another decade, and still continues her acting career during her final act, just as her father did.
Jane had come to realize that the real America existed underneath more than a few surface layers.
In all respects, Jane is Jane Fonda, known in her own right, and not simply as her father’s daughter.
Jane had to work hard for this self definition and independence, but she has become more clearly defined as a result of this on-screen and off-screen struggle for individualism.
For Jane, this struggle required immense personal courage and, as a result, simultaneously defined her, while also setting her free.
CINERAMA 2023
CINERAMA 2023
CHOCOLATE MADE OF DIFFERENT THINGS FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
French actor Juliette Binoche finds a sliver of the personality that distinguishes people apart from one another in a particular stage in life and then channels that sugar or poison, whatever that may be, to create film characters.
Ultimately, Binoche performs the face of love in the various phases one may find love during the different stages of life.
In The English Patient (1996), Binoche plays the face of unconditional love often found in a nurturer. The Canadian military nurse on the hospital train shares her love unconditionally with the wounded.
A most beautiful film, the English Patient does well to survive a plot as complicated as love itself. Hana has the care of a burn victim whose face and lungs and undoubtably the rest of his body has been so severely burned in a plane crash as to have become indistinguishable.
The film is all about love, which seems to have branded Binoche in her career moving forward, having been awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting actress, and all.
Hana’s careful sharing of the ever delicate fresh plumbs and fresh chicken eggs during the rationing of wartime exemplifies Hana’s natural love for others, while any reason not to love, brings tears to Hana’s visage.
Count Almasy spills his journal and then the flashbacks begin to flow on screen from an earlier time before the plane crash when Count Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes, and Katharine Clifton, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, have an affair that unravels a close knit group of cartographers mapping the Sahara Desert for the Royal Geographical Society.
The adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel begins with a third camera overhead view of the sand dunes stretched out like a man’s and a woman’s body deeply in love beside each other.
Love also gets in the way of a life path in the Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). Binoche costars with Daniel Day-Lewis in scenes set in Prague when the resistance begins to revolt against the Soviet Occupation in 1968.
The Prague Spring is a backdrop to the interrelated bursts of emotions when lovers meet and cannot quite settle on the terms between each other moving forward.
Daniel Day-Lewis plays a doctor, Tomas, enjoying spontaneous sex with many women, while Binoche plays the love interest, Tereza, who wants monogamy. The intellectual and emotional game plays out while the political events of the Prague Spring suddenly rise up and fall out just as quickly.
Binoche plays an absolute innocent reaching out almost for her first true love only to have Tomas not quite as committed.
Lena Olin plays Sabina, the third party in the love tryst.
Olin is recast with Binoche in Chocolat (2000). Binoche channels all her character’s love through the chocolates she creates in a small shop in a remote French village. The villagers have limited their emotional experiences and their desire for pleasure so as to have an exclusive devotion to Christianity.
Vianne first reaches out to the emotionally and physically abused Muscat with the gift of a special chocolate. The pleasure of the bursting flavors becomes irresistible, and the two women bond quickly and begin to help each other out with their respective difficulties that they encounter in being single women in a small remote village.
People gradually trickle into the chocolate shop for a favorite treat, and the shop is a great success, but the village elders become concerned that the experience with pleasure will become a moral distraction.
In Wuthering Heights (1992), Binoche costars with Ralph Fiennes in this classic tale of love and love lost. Cathy is true to her feelings and marries the person to whom she has become betrothed. But Heathcliff, her adopted half-brother, becomes enraged that his lifelong soulmate has chosen another lover with whom to spend the rest of her life.
Binoche and Fiennes show how the love interest becomes a primary motivator for adolescent youths. And that love gone wrong can ruin the lives of all the people involved while those that survive are so disenchanted that they become the destroyer of worlds.
Binoche has become a classic actor being seen on screen performing with genuinely transparent emotional responses to what is occurring along the narrative. The love element is just one part, although an important part to her performances.
Cathy becomes traumatized by the emotional turmoil that love causes.
In Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), Binoche stars in this companion biopic to Camille Claudel (1988) starring Isabelle Adjani.
Claudel has been torn apart by love to such an extent that she can no longer function within the rules of Parisian society, particularly with the emotional and verbal attacks she makes against her former love interest, famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
Without love, Claudel’s world of art and life collapses.
Binoche picks up the story after Claudel’s family has consented to the sculptor being institutionalized in an asylum in the South of France. Claudel becomes traumatized by the lack of freedom and the stubbornness of her famous poet brother to see life her way and have her released into his care.
Claudel moves through the years of her confinement in a bit of a trance while feeling the pain and disillusionment of the lost love of lovers and the abandonment of family and friends.
Binoche has become an established internationally renowned performer with a Silver Bear from the Berlin Film festival and an Oscar for her 1996 supporting role in The English Patient, and 11 French film industry Cesar nominations, including a Cesar for Three Colors: Blue (1993) and a best actress winner at Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Certified Copy (2010).
Elle has begun to express bursts of uncontrolled anxiety after a long marriage, in Certified Copy.
The protagonist meets enigmatic art historian and writer, James, and the two of them become entangled in the idea behind his latest book. Binoche and William Shimell seem oddly cast together at first, but when Elle begins to seem even odder than the casting, the audience becomes pre-occupied with their character development, where the narrative will take the audience and why the two characters are travelling around Italy together after a chance meeting at a book reading.
James’ idea behind the book is that a copy is just as good and even better than the original. Binoche’s gradually develops her character as quietly struggling with relationships. Everything gradually gets muddled as the two acquaintances travel around an Italian town transferring more and more emotional meaning from their relationships in the background to the relationship being developed between the two of them on screen.
The plot turns when Binoche has made a copy of a copy of the screen character, at which point everything begins to make sense to the audience, although everything in the scripts has become confused.
In The Wait (2015) the mother of a young man must entertain a young woman who arrives at the country house to spend time with her lover. Binoche plays Anna struggling to be compassionate but at the same time transparent with Jeanne.
Anna at the same time carries the grief of a recent death in the family, as Jeanne arrives during the funeral preparations.
The classical acting has now become art, and Binoche seamlessly transitions through the script layering on top of unconditional love the extra emotive devices such as grief and regret and suspicion.
The untold tragic truth is that Anna’s son will never arrive at the country house in Sicily to meet up with his fiancé, Jeanne.
Binoche has developed her acting art a long way from the film in which she plays an alluring young actor struggling to establish herself enough to move to Paris. In Rendez-vous (1985), everyone becomes instantly smitten by the young and free, Nina.
But Nina is nothing near to being free with the naked sexual aggression of the people she meets. The love imposed upon Nina becomes disruptive to her career. And the spiral continues downward, with many life paths altered because of love.
Binoche though is having a career of a lifetime that has gone entirely in the other direction.
DANCING WITH THE SCRIPT UNDER STORM CLOUD OF HUMAN EMOTIONS
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
Glenn Close finds roles that require a character to be highly focused on a singular task almost always to the point of being unstoppable.
The talented actor then has her screen persona struggle with the guarded optimism that all eventual outcomes shall be correctly decided in her favor.
In A Reversal of Fortune (1990), the biographical character lays in a coma while the narrative continually flashes back to what brought her to her present condition. When Sunny von Bulow is on camera, she is so pleased with herself, living the life without a care in the word as a rich American heiress and socialite, but the other scenes have her face down in the bathroom, often with her undergarments all disheveled.
Jeremy Irons portrays the accused, Claus von Bulow, who allegedly sought to kill Sunny for her $14 million fortune (a lot of money in those days) by injecting her with insulin and triggering a coma that lasted 28 years.
Ron Silver stars as American defense attorney Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz became a celebrity lawyer appearing on talk shows and as a news color commentator after successfully representing famous people in winless cases.
Irons shares screentime with Silver. Irons plays Bulow as this carefree nonchalant, not taking anything all that seriously, even the life sentence he faces if convicted.
Close had just the opposite role a few years earlier as this aggressive alpha female triggered into various life threatening ideations by what seemed on screen to be a come by chance, one-off passionate sexual encounter with a business associate.
In Fatal Attraction (1987) the screen persona leads the narrative forward while Michael Douglas plays a passive aggressive male who has made a terrible, character limiting mistake.
Close performs at her best with Douglas being mirror perfect as the narrative takes the characters through a rollercoaster of emotions. Alex is initially quite standoffish, focused on her professional demeanor in a business relationship, but when she chooses to embark on the romantic journey her emotional intensity bubbles up.
Dan and Alex have different expectations, with Dan wanting to return to his happy family in a New York suburb only to have Alex begin to follow him about and cause as much chaos and mayhem as one woman can imagine when jilted by a lover.
Close shows how the appetite for spontaneous wild sex may hint at a deeper and deeper hidden madness with Alex first exhibiting suicidal ideations and then decidedly becoming bent on homicidal impulses.
The rage manifesting externally is the outward appearance of Alex’s internal struggle to survive in the world while this emotional hailstorm occurs all around her. Ultimately, Alex cannot regain her focus, having been fatally wounded by love lost.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized this great acting art by nominating Close 8 times for an Oscar in leading and supporting roles.
In Hamlet (1990) Mel Gibson plays the haunted prince confused by his mother’s marriage to his uncle shortly after his father’s funeral. In a supporting role, Close manifests stunned disbelief in the moral objections of her character’s son.
Gertrude having started the whirlwind must nevertheless remain loyal to the present composition of the court as her son creates chaos through a spectrum of emotions.
That same focus then becomes the plaintiff’s lawyer, in a television series about an Alpha female running the litigation department at a well-respected law firm, in Damages (2007-2012 TV Series). Rose Byrne, Tate Donovan and Ted Danson costar in this episodic legal drama.
The self-assured, resilient professional commands various strings attached to various associates and helpers to bring about the desired results for her clients.
Byrne plays the law firm associate managing in her youth all the real world success and failures imaginable.
In the Wife (2017) Joan stands behind her Noble Prize winning husband ever resolutely. The focus becomes a strong character in a position of emotional support, perhaps defying gender roles in that the power imbalance has been neutralized. Joan is quite determined to continue on, having made her decision to support her husband in all his endeavors and be in the role she is in.
The screen persona has a pragmatic approach to the struggle in which the characters find themselves. This character is who the screen persona has to become, and the character is who she is in the given circumstances.
In Hillbilly Elegy (2020), you tend to cringe in awe at just how far down the spectrum the talented actor can take her screen personality to fit in the back of woods lifestyle and all. The screen persona bends from the picture perfect, in all appearances and all actions, defense attorney to the grandmother of a dysfunctional low income family whose daughter is a drug addict.
Mamaw takes in her young grandson when her drug addicted daughter lets his life fall apart unguided.
In Four Good Days (2020) Deb gives her drug addicted daughter one last opportunity, despite her better judgement to do otherwise. Close creates the face of unconditional love after abandoning the tough love disposition that had turned her daughter away at the door when she asked for help for the last time.
Mila Kunis plays the recovering drug addicted daughter, Molly, forever in one rehab situation or another as the two hang about together a lot to keep the reestablished mother-daughter bond functioning.
The characters Close creates at times become pathological by degrees. Initially convinced of a successful outcome, the acting art comes out as the screen persona begins to struggle to maintain that pragmatic positivism despite the limitations that the real world throws at her.
The harshness of life’s unfairness may be the greatest trigger for the screen persona, but the characters proceed down the narrative as best they can so as to manage the best possible outcome for themselves and their causes.
In The Paper (1994), the actor personifies everything going wrong in the newspaper business as the industry transitions to more profitability as the accountants take away control from the free speech icons.
Close has the role of the publisher playing accountant against the editor of the city desk that cares only about delivering the truth to readers. Michael Keaton plays equally fanatical as the editor constantly missing the press deadline and creating cost overruns while waiting for that last little factoid to get the headlines correct.
Robert Duvall and Marisa Tomei costar in this ensemble cast directed by Ron Howard.
In Albert Nobbs (2011) Close gets all dressed up in a butler’s uniform for this costume drama while her character has been so cleverly groomed for service with low pay and little dignity.
Albert though has other plans for personal growth and financial fortune.
Close goes through a dialectic in which her character creates and then subsequently suffers as her progress is undone by outside forces. Ultimately, the screen persona learns how to conduct life with a much more limited expectation for success in the best and in the worst of situations.
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