What a Fantastic Sentence!

I just read this sentence about the upcoming movie "Synecdoche, New York ". Look who's in it! It's a dream come true for a guy like me who loves middle aged (or thereabouts) women in movies:

Jennifer Jason Leigh will next appear in Charlie (Adaptation) Kauffman's directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. Phillip Seymour Hoffman stars as a playwright but the true draw for some viewers might just be the delicious actress smorgasbord layed out to devour: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Hope Davis, Michelle Williams and Dianne Weist. The movie can't arrive soon enough even if Jennifer Jason Leigh's first Oscar nomination continues to take its sweet time coming.

Okay. Michelle Williams is in her twenties and Samanta Morton is only thirty-one, but both are superb actors.

I love Hope Davis. I didn't mention her in earlier posts about favorite actors. I went on a Hope Davis tear about two years ago and loved her work.

And Emily Watson. Superb.

I love Catherine Keener and it's been a while since I've watched Dianne Wiest.

Jennifer Jason Leigh, of course, rules.

I can hardly wait for this movie.

I Love the Work of Jennifer Jason Leigh: The Machinist

"The Machinist" created a stir four years ago because Christian Bale starved himself, reduced his body to a barely fleshed skeleton, in order to play the role of Trevor Reznik, a machinist suffering from a year long bout with insomnia who is going insane.

As with "Margot at the Wedding", this movie felt like an actor's workshop, this time for Christian Bale. He's brilliant portraying Trevor's descent into madness and his descent toward the truth of what has kept him awake having paranoid delusions for a whole year.

But, when I finished viewing the movie, I wondered what would happen if I turned the movie around a bit and saw it as Stevie's story, as the story of the call girl played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Stevie, especially as played by Leigh, is the movie's central embodiment of desire and longing. She's tired of the call girl gig. She longs for a man she can rely on, who will free her from her life of prostitution.

She decides about half way through the movie that Trevor could be just the man for her. Over the course of the movie he buys time to talk with her, not have sex. He longs for her companionship, for more than a trick. Stevie likes feeling needed.

Seen from Stevie's point of view, the world of this movie is one soulless transaction after another. But Stevie's soul hasn't died. Her soul longs for union. She sees hope in Trevor.

Trevor, however, stamps out this hope when he suffers a delusion in Stevie's apartment just as they have begun to live together. He flips out in a violent rage, breaks a bunch of dishes, and fires crazy accusations at Stevie.

Stevie rages in return, kicks Trevor out, and sobs. She's devastated. If this movie could be seen as her movie, Leigh plays Stevie's vulnerability brilliantly when she offers herself as a real girlfriend to Trevor. When Trevor flips out, she is making him breakfast. She's light, enjoying the feeling of domestic union.

In a moment, Trevor shatters the whole thing.

Stevie's anger and inconsolable disillusionment expresses the emotional soul of this movie. Once we learn why Trevor can't sleep, can't love, can't eat we understand the power of guilt to erode all that makes a person human.

We also see how such guilt devastates Stevie. Trevor's guilt made him not only unreliable. It made him insane. Stevie suffers the physical expression of Trevor's guilt and insanity.

Having trusted Trevor,she ends up the focal point Trevor's unexpressed, unacknowledged guilt, shame, and self-loathing.

I found this aspect of the movie more compelling and more engaging than the main story line where the cause of Trevor's insomnia and insanity is ultimately revealed.

I cared the most about Stevie's story.

I Love the Work of Jennifer Jason Leigh: Margot at the Wedding

I experienced "Margot at the Wedding" as a 92 minute actors' workshop with two of the finest actors working (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kidder) supported by Jack Black who held his own, whose absurd spirit and outrageous physical outbursts relieved the tension between Leigh and Kidder's characters.

The question for me, then, in writing about this movie is whether this is what I want from a movie. Do I want to spend 92 minutes experiencing brilliant acting and listening to a snappy script, but not have the pleasure of experiencing a plot being developed?

"Margot at the Wedding" presents a situation: Pauline (Leigh) and Margot (Kidman) are estranged sisters. Pauline is about to marry Malcolm (Black). Pauline, we find out, sorely wants Margot to attend the wedding, but doesn't know if she will.

Margot arrives.

The workshop begins. For starters, Malcolm is an unemployed musician/artist (of sorts). Margot disapproves of his manners, appearance, ambition, drunkenness, explosiveness, and impulsiveness. She chips away at their engagement through Pauline.

The scenes between Pauline and Margot electrify the movie.

Margot is arrogant, neurotic, narcissistic, cold, voracious, bitter, and, well, difficult. She's a writer, has maintained at least the vestiges of her upper middle class upbringing and is a snobbish nightmare; but the snobbery covers her longing for the intimacy her selfishness makes improbable, if not impossible.

Pauline, on the other hand, works hard to achieve self-actualization. She read self-help books. She and Malcolm have attended a couples retreat and she believes that she and Margot can become good sisters.

The men in Margot's life, her husband and one of her lovers, complicate the situation, as does the fact that she is a cold, self-absorbed mother to her son Claude.

I didn't expect this movie to come to a tidy resolution. It didn't. All the same, I enjoy plots and while I admired very much the soulful, vulnerable, and angry role Jennifer Jason Leigh nailed as Pauline and I admired how beautifully icy and vain Nicole Kidman played Margot, in the end, it felt like I'd been to an open actor's workshop and got to watch wonderful episodes and situations, but taken together, I didn't think they added up to whole lot.

But, I suppose that's the way it is in a fragmented family. The alienation and pain plays out in a series of episodes and the pain just keeps going on.

I Love Jennifer Jason Leigh's Work: Georgia

In the movie, "Georgia", Jennifer Jason Leigh is not Georgia. Mare Winningham is Georgia. Georgia ad Leigh's charater, Sadie, are sisters and their lives have gone in opposite directions.

Georgia plays and sings folk music. She's hugely successful. She's composed, settled into family life on the farm that had been her parents'. She is the picture of serenity. Even when she performs, it seems that a Goddess of Calm as descended upon her.

I don't know what spirit descended upon Sadie, but it's a restless one. Sadie also performs music, for as long as she can stay with a group, before she either leaves it or is kicked out. Sadie loves blues and grungy rock and roll and gets by with her talent.

Sadie is a drunk and drug addict. You might know someone like Sadie: bravado, brashness, and cockiness mask deep fear and her profoundly felt inadequacy. Sadie's music "career" serves as an emblem for her inner life. In both, she desperately desires Georgia's approval, aspires to be as accomplished as Georgia. She fails. Miserably. Painfully. So she rips into Georgia, overtly and covertly, upsetting what is peaceful in her sister's life, and it's this conflict the movie explores.

Jason Jennifer Leigh's portrayal of Sadie is astonishing. It's as if Sadie is the subject of a documentary film. It's as if Leigh's life has been possessed by demons and rocked by self-abuse and she brought it to life in Sadie. But, Leigh's life has not been at all like Sadie's.

Through rigorous study and imaginative prowess Leigh transforms her body into Sadie's, learns her speech patterns and discovers Sadie's mannerisms. It's as if she's given birth within herself to Sadie.

It's painful.

Sadie longs for her sister's acceptance; she longs for peace within herself; she longs to be delivered from herself. The arc of the film's narrative unfolds Sadie's erratic plunges into despair, cruelty, embarrassment and her promising moments of clarity, love, and dignity.

I Love the Work of Jennifer Jason Leigh: Rush

I've written this before in my blog: I almost never watch a movie for escape. I almost always watch movies to learn more about the nature of human nature and the nature of the human condition. It's what I enjoy in movies, much like what I enjoy in poetry, plays, and books. I look elsewhere for escape.

A friend who knows I'm this way emailed me the other day and highly recommended that I see "The Dark Knight". He experienced it as more than an escapist movie. I think I'll give it a go.

One of the rewards of not watching movies for escape is that I have the pleasure of seeing a lot of a lot of middle-aged and older women act in serious roles, usually in independent movies. In other words, these great actors are not being cast in many high budget escapist movies, but are more likely to be found in movies way under the radar of popularity.

I can't really say who my favorite middle-aged woman actor is: Joan Allen? Patricia Clarkson? Catherine Keener? Marcia Gay Harden? Helen Mirren? Laura Linney? Maria Bello? Holly Hunter? Bebe Neuwirth? Sigourney Weaver? Susan Sarandon? Nicole Kidman is approaching middle age. I enjoy her more, the older she becomes.

Recently, I've thrown myself into movies featuring Jennifer Jason Leigh, either in starring or supporting roles. I love her work.

I love the way Jennifer Jason Leigh can so occupy, fully embody, inhabit a character, and animate the multiple dimensions of that character's intelligence and emotion, the character's deep, often despicable flaws juxtaposed with, often seen in the same moment as, features that evoke sympathy, even love.

When Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a role, in each moment with a facial wrinkle or a lifted fist or a lift in her voice she unfolds another facet of the character. She augments the character's emotional and physical make up or she adds depth to a dimension we've already seen.

I love our first view of Jennifer Jason Leigh's character Kristen in "Rush". She's running a race at the police academy. The wrists of her chugging arms come nearly to her eyes. It's not a lesbian-erotic Mariel Hemingway run from "Personal Best" or a hetero-fantasy moment with Bo Derek from "10". Kristen is all determination, pushing to advance in the academy, to compete with and beat the men, which she does.

Kristen's performance wins her an undercover assignment with Jim Raynor (Jason Patric) to bust a local drug dealer (played by Gregg Allman).

For all of her strength and determination, Kristen is over her head in this assignment and it's this portrayal of being at once determined and over her head that makes Jennifer Jason Leigh's performace so riveting.

Being overwhelmed makes Kristen vulnerable to love, lust, and drugs, to letting the rush of feelings she has in certain moments supplant her rational and regimented police training.

The runner who looked so indomitable at the beginning of the movie is also fragile. She's powerful and delicate, both physically and emotionally, and within this dichotomy are any number of shades of confidence, doubt, fear, courage, resistance, rage, failure, surrender, loneliness, success, and, most of all longing.

Kristen longs for justice. She longs to be an accomplished police officer. She wants to get the bad guys.

She also longs for companionship and intimacy in an assignment that demands that she be tough and detached.

It's these longings, whether professional or of the soul and body, that Jennifer Jason Leigh embodies and that make "Rush" more than a drug bust movie.

It's a story of deep human need, of temptation, of succumbing to it. It portrays how Kristen's longings are deeper than she knows and that while she is in over her head in her police work, it's really the depths of her own longings that she's the most unprepared for.

Three Beautiful Things 07/24/08: Walking Snug, Running Trail Nostalgia, Writing About Movies

1. I think Snug and I are finding our groove in Amazon Park. Our walk today invigorated me and worked off his excess energy. Now I need to figure out if I can go back to taking photographs while I walk him. A while back I stopped taking pictures on our walks out of concern that we kept stopping and going so much and I thought Snug did better to keep walking, not stopping.

2. EE and I were something together. Lovers? In a relationship? Partners? Whatever it was, it came to an end eleven years ago and then a few years later the friendship we attempted disintegrated. EE has a son with Downs Syndrome. He's also autistic. He makes vocal noises unique to him and while I was walking Snug I heard his noises over at the running trail. They startled me. I looked up and there he was out for a walk/run with young man. I really enjoyed seeing him and watching him walk for a ways and then be ready to tear down the trail, the young man always holding his hand. The guy was taking good care of him.

3. I've trying to get rolling with my plan to write about movies I've been watching and finally got started today writing about longing and about "Tadpole". I started a piece on Jennifer Jason Leigh. I'll get back to it tomorrow. Her genius is difficult to articulate. It's so copious.

Three Beautiful Things 07/16/08: Blood Pressure Relief, The Machinist, Crime Drama Knitting

1. 112/75. My blood pressure was in good shape this morning and Dr. Ghandour seems happy with my current state of health. I'll have blood work done in the morning to make sure other problems are holding steady, not worsening; good news: my crappy kidneys like it when my blood pressure is good.

2. I watched Jennifer Jason Leigh perfectly portray a call girl who falls in love with a guilt-ridden, gaunt insomniac played by Christian Bale in the surreal movie "The Machinist".

3. The Deke has watched about 100, 000 hours of crime drama television in Kellogg since she arrived on Monday. I'm sure she's knitted enough sweaters, hats, caps, vests, and driver covers to clothe my mother's block and cover all the drivers at Kellogg Country Club, too.