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.

Tadpole: The Longing of Midlife

I don't know much about privileged adults in Manhattan who send their children to private school. Nor do I know much about privileged middle aged women who want to have sex with the son of a privileged father and his second wife who have sent their fifteen year old to private school.

So, I decided, as the movie "Tadpole" got under way that I would do what I always do when I watch a movie: Surrender. Believe.

Tadpole is the nickname of the fifteen year old private high school student from Manhattan. His real name is Oscar. Oscar Grubman.

He's precocious. He regards himself as too sophisticated for the other students his age, especially the girls.

"Tadpole" is a Thanksgiving movie and immediately made me think of "Pieces of April", not because the stories have a lot in common, but because they are both Thanksgiving movies, focused on a family through the experience of an adolescent.

As often happens in such movies, while the focus may be on the adolescent, the movie turns out to be a lot about the adults.

That's certainly true in "Tadpole".

It's a movie about the pain and longing of middle age. The marriage of Oscar's father (John Ritter) and step-mother (Sigourney Weaver) staggers along with academic life, academically inflected conversations, and weariness. They long, without saying so, for more, but don't do much about their longings.

The step-mother's best friend, Diane (Bebe Neuwirth) expresses her longing for excitement beyond her work as a chiropractor through sex. In fact, she seduces Oscar (the tadpole, who is not even a frog yet). Post conquest, she shows him off to her middle-aged friends, privileged, also burnt out, and they want their sexual shot at Oscar, too.

It's all complicated by Oscar's feelings: he has a crush on his step-mother. He longs to usurp his father, take over as the lover of his father's wife. And, in her academic loneliness and life of academic routine, Eve Grubman is susceptible. She longs for something more.

"Tadpole" is a comedy, especially in structure. Clarification occurs. Its unusual world of longings and trysts is, as comedy promises, set right.

Watching it, I didn't think much about Oscar. My concern was with the middle-aged adults. In the imaginary future beyond this Thanksgiving weekend, I imagined Oscar maturing beyond his tadpole stage and becoming a successful, worldly young man.

I don't know what will happen to him in middle age.

By the looks of his parents and their friends, my guess is he's headed toward a middle age of aching and longing.

It's sobering.

Longing

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I've been watching a slew of movies lately and I'm going to comment on them in later posts.

Many of these movies made me think of a conversation I had last winter with one of my students about the poetry of Rumi. I've recorded myself on the player above reading two poems by Rumi. The two poems give a slight idea of what happens in his poetry and provide a context for the following conversation.

I opened my office door and heard one of my students say, "This Rumi shit. It's totally fucking with me. I mean I totally love it. My freakin' head is ready to explode. I have to talk with someone and you're the only person I could think of. I mean, it's your freakin' fault for assigning us this dude and his ridiculous poetry."

"Come on in. We can talk."

She then addressed something that I've gotten more used to hearing as a concern the more I teach the youth of the early years of the 21st century. I began to hear my younger step-daughter say all the time: "Today this guy came into Starbucks. Oh my God! He was so totally coming on to me! I just thought, whatEVer, and made him his frickin' double latte with skim and and like looked at him like he was a total asshole and he left and Ellen said, "How hilarious was that" and we laughed our asses off."

So my student walks in and makes it clear that she is so totally not coming on to me, that she just needs to talk.

I nodded. It's what I did for the rest of the time she was in my office. From this point on, I didn't say a word. I just listened. She said the following:

"I sooo know what Rumi means when his poems deal with longing. Things are so sketch with my husband right now. I never thought this happened with guys, but he's totally lost interest in sex. It's okay, right, that I'm talking about this, right? I mean I thought guys were always into sex, but it's like he's on another planet. He won't even touch me and he like jumps when I touch him, you know, like if he's sitting at his desk reading and I come up and put my hands on his shoulders, he acts scared or like I've tased him. It's weird.

"We don't have kids, so we don't have to like quote stay together for the kids unquote, but we take in dogs, like give dogs foster care, and we are tight with that. I mean, when we are working with the dogs things are tight. We're good. Same with money. No problems. We don't fight, or anything like that, but I can't figure out this sex thing. I mean it's not like I'm unattractive, but I got pissed at him one day a couple of months ago and yelled at him, I hadn't been taking my Zoloft, and he said he can't be close to me ever since then.

"Anyways, the feeling I have for wanting to be close to him is just what we've been talking about in class, it's longing. I never thought about it before. I just felt bad and kept beating myself up but Rumi, you know, Rumi makes me think about this as a spiritual thing, you know what I mean? You know, how Rumi says that this longing we have for another person is like the longing we have for God or the Divine or whatever, like the way we've been talking, and I sooo feel that, and I don't know what to do with this longing. I mean my husband won't do anything to be close and I cry at night when he sleeps on the couch and it makes me long for knowing God, too, but somehow knowing that Rumi knows about this stuff and I'm not alone helps me, you know, maybe be patient. I mean maybe it won't always be this way, oh I don't know, I mean I love my husband and I love what we do with the dogs and when the subject isn't sex I love how we talk and laugh together, I mean we're both smart and funny. God.

"So, I guess I just want you to know that I love Rumi and I love this class and it's helping me soo much think about things and know that these things with love and everything have been going on forever and it makes me feel so much less like I'm just being, you know, so 90210, and that maybe my husband feels some longing, too, who knows?"

My student's monologue has stayed with me and I came to understand Rumi even better because of it.

Moreover, as I've been watching movies over the last few weeks, I've experienced most of these movies portraying characters who long for something outside of themselves. These characters are unfulfilled and take their longing into their worlds and act on their longings in a variety of ways.

That's what I'll be writing about in future posts as I explore this longing in the movies I've watched.