Remarkably Bright Actress: Sally Field

Not long ago, I read Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus, a 2016 non-fiction study of one of the most fascinating of all sea creatures. Montgomery’s book, based on the author’s years of interaction with giant Pacific octopuses at the New England Aquarium, gave me a new respect for an undersea critter with eight limbs, several hearts, and a good deal of intelligence. One of Montgomery’s many fans is Shelby van Pelt, whose debut novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures, became a worldwide best-seller. One of its unusual features: an octopus named Marcellus serves as its narrator.

 Van Pelt’s novel has evolved into a new Amazon made-for-TV drama that’s now nominated for two Emmy awards, including Outstanding Movie. Moreover, star Sally Field is up for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. Despite her two Oscars and multiple other prizes, Field is by no means a shoo-in: also in the running are such bright—and much younger—Hollywood stars as Claire Danes (The Beast in Me) and Carey Mulligan (Beef).

 But for Emmy voters, Field will be hard to overlook. In a poignant tale that somehow avoids being cloying, she’s a widow living in a small costal town of what looks to be Washington State. Having survived her son’s death and other heartbreak, she has turned inward, taking an after-hours job as a cleaning lady at the local aquarium where she identifies with the frequently on-the-loose Marcellus. Though she resists most human relationships, she remains spunky (in that irresistible Sally Field way), even after she’s sprained her ankle and seen her janitorial job claimed by an unhappy young musician. Cameron, a drifter, is on the lookout for the father who’s missing from his life. Of course Field’s character, Tova Sullivan, ultimately gets involved with his quest; both eventually find rewards in unexpected places. At the end it all ties together, perhaps too neatly, but the sincerity of everyone involved comes through . Kudos to Alfred Molina who gives the octopus an acerbic, authoritative voice, and to all the technical wizards who make a sometimes puppet/sometimes CGI cephalopod seem to have a life of its own.  

Field’s career has been one of Hollywood’s longest, starting off when she was barely out of her teens with such lightweight TV fare as the title roles in Gidget and The Flying Nun. Trying to break away from these “cute” performances, she fought for the role of a young woman with multiple-personality disorder in the acclaimed TV film, Sybil (1976), winning her first Emmy. She went on to win two Best Actress Oscars, one for her role as a spunky union organizer in Norma Rae (1979)) and a second for her portrayal of a (yes) spunky Texas widow in Places in the Heart (1984). Always tiny and youthful-seeming, she gradually evolved into a mature on-screen wife and mother, notably as Mary Todd Lincoln opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg’s 2012 Lincoln. For this highly dramatic performance she was yet again Oscar-nominated, but lost out to Anne Hathaway for Les Misérables.

Now almost 80, Field seems in interviews both as sweet and as spunky as ever.  Which doesn’t stop her for being convincingly crochety as Tova Sullivan. There’s an ornery side to this character that stops her from appearing overly twee, and we’re meant to recognize that at times she can be totally exasperating. No wonder that the hyper-sensitive Cameron, well-played by Bill Pullman’s son Lewis, at first considers her merely a pain in the neck. Marcellus the Octopus, though, is smart enough to see Tova as the caring friend she is.

 

Two for the Show: “The Ballad of Wallis Island”

 

Every once in a while, it’s a pleasure to go to a cozy neighborhood theatre and watch an unheralded indie from somewhere far away. It helps, of course, if the actors are spot-on, the scenery is beautiful, and the message is life-affirming, though not corny. That’s how I felt after seeing The Ballad of Wallis Island, filmed on the rugged coast of Wales by a British director I know nothing about.  (His name is James Griffiths.) The story is an expanded version of a BAFTA-nominated short from way back in 2007: "The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island" I don’t know that film at all, but it obviously got enough attention that the talented Carey Mulligan signed on as female lead in the expanded film. But the real key figures are two friends who both wrote and starred in the original short version, and now fill the same roles in The Ballad of Wallis Island.

When an actor writes a leading role for himself or herself, there’s always the danger that the film will come off as a vanity project. Such is not the case here: while watching the film I had no notion that two men I’d never heard of were behind the creation of the characters they played. I only sensed that both Tom Basden and Tim Key were perfectly cast. Basden, who nicely sings and plays guitar, has the role of Herb McGwyer, a once-popular folk singer who has never gotten past the loss of his performing partner, Nell Mortimer (Mulligan).  (Think of them as the Ian and Sylvia of their day.) Herb may have once been a star, but now he’s something of a sad sack, hurting for money and feeling that the world has passed him by. He’s been invited to Wallis Island by an enthusiastic fan, Charles Heath (Key), whose adoration for the old McGwyer and Mortimer duo has no bounds. Charles—a big lottery winner—lives in solitary splendor, indulging in whims like bringing Herb to his island home for a private concert. What Herb doesn’t know right away is that Charles has also invited Nell, who arrives with her new  husband in tow. Uh oh! Everyone is mostly polite in a veddy British way, but the tension has suddenly ratcheted up to eleven.

 Basden and Key, in particular, are experts at playing off one another. The tall, lanky Basden endures all sorts of bad luck. Upon arrival at the island he falls into the ocean, drenching his luggage. His iPhone gets accidentally immersed more than once, necessitating a bowlful of rice that ends up contributing to the plot in surprising ways. And he never quite manages to take a bath without his host popping in to see how he’s doing. We never laugh at Basden’s woes, because he seems like a man who’s suffered deep disappointments. But Key, as his opposite number, is hilarious. He loves playing the cheery host to his celebrity guests, and—probably from years of living alone—has developed a stream of puns and other babble that he inflicts on anyone within earshot. (Watching him try to play a solo game of tennis is worth the price of admission.)  He’s funny and lovable and extremely aggravating, all at the same time. But it takes a while for us to appreciate how lonely he must be.

 There are a few other important characters, notably the always welcome Mulligan, who beautifully duets with Basden in a key scene. But basically The Ballad of Wallis Island is two for the show, And I wouldn’t want it any other way.

 

 

Maestro: Cigarettes and Love, Lenny-Style

Leonard Bernstein was an integral part of my childhood, and maybe yours too. From 1958  to 1972, he was on television with the New York Philharmonic, explaining to kids in a compelling way the joys of classical music. Then there were the musicals he composed that set our toes a-tapping: On the Town, West Side Story, Candide. I discovered the lively film version of On the Town (about three sailors on shore leave in New York City at the height of World War II) long after its release in 1949.  When West Side Story came out on film in 1961, it was seen by everyone I know, and long afterward the infectious score was still buzzing around in our heads. Though the much more recent Spielberg version of West Side Story may have its virtues, no one can rob us Baby Boomers of our affection for the original.

 But it’s only now that Bernstein himself is on film, not as a composer but as the leading man of a biopic. Bradley Cooper, inspired by the memoir by Bernstein’s daughter Jamie, had long wanted to put his complicated life on film. Ultimately, Cooper was to be a triple (at least) threat: as co-writer, director, and star of this labor of love. Much has been made of the prosthetic nose used to transform him visually from Bradley into Lenny. At the theatre where I saw this film (soon to show up on Netflix), photos of the real Bernstein in various stages of life reveal just how close the makeup artists got in transforming a Philadelphia gentile into a New York Jew.

 Far more important than Cooper’s look, however, is the spirit he brings to this role. His Lenny is smart, funny, impetuous, wildly sociable, nicotine-addicted, and wholly dedicated to his role on the music scene. He’s also far more attracted to men than to women, a distinction the film makes early on in showing a life-changing moment. He’s roused from sleep in the early morning hours by a phone call telling him that the great Bruno Walter, slated to be a guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic, is down with the flu. As the orchestra’s assistant conductor, the 26-year-old Lenny needs to pick up the baton—without rehearsal. He makes the appropriate sounds of regret, hangs up the phone . . . and indulges in a triumphant yell of which Tarzan would be proud. Then, jumping into a bathrobe, he affectionately pats the behind of the young man who had been sharing his bed, and heads for Carnegie Hall. In one of the film’s many surreal moments, he arrives in that grand space, still in his bathrobe, ready to take on the world.

 But Maestro is not solely about Lenny. The film’s focus is his marriage to Felicia Montealegre, played by the always luminous Carey Mulligan. From the start, Felicia knows her husband’s sexual predilections, but is at first willing to overlook them for the sake of home and family. Ultimately the tensions within the home threaten to destroy it (in a scene cleverly staged as the gigantic balloons of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade pass by the Bernsteins’ Central Park West window). Still, the genuine love between these two talented and complicated people is what the film is all about. This nicely fits the genuine Bernstein quote that opens the film: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers." Quite so.

 See this in a theatre, if you can, to revel in the Bernstein score.

 

 

Telling the Woman’s Side of the Story: “She Said”

 

The first time I heard of Harvey Weinstein was back in my Roger Corman days, when Harvey and brother Bob formed Miramax (named after their parents) to produce and distribute international art films. Roger had paved the way by showing that serious foreign-language films like Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers and Fellini’s Amarcord could make money in U.S.  markets. When Miramax came along and upped the ante, Roger went back to genre flicks. Miramax, meanwhile, distributed such offbeat hits as Pulp Fiction and The Crying Game, while also entering the production field. The company eventfully nabbed a Best Picture Oscar for 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, while being involved with many other classy projects.

 If Miramax sealed Harvey Weinstein’s reputation as a strong, hands-on producer, it took a while for the world to discover that Weinstein was hands-on in a more unfortunate sense. In 2020 his apparently insatiable demand for sexual favors from actresses and staffers earned him a 23-year prison term in New York, and a Los Angeles jury has just convicted him of heinous crimes. So it’s no secret today that Weinstein is capable of sexual harassment, even rape, But his behavior was still an industry secret back in 2017 when two female reporters on the New York Times, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, began investigating rumors of his mistreatment of women. Their groundbreaking articles showed the world Weinstein’s dark side, and encouraged scores of additional women to come forward. Eventually Kantor and Twohey turned their reporting into a 2019 book, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. And now that book is a movie, with a strong cast led by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan.is IHis in

 If you’ve ever had a yen to be an investigative journalist, you’ll find She Said both fascinating and daunting. The film makes clear that reporters spend most of their days (and nights) far from their laptops. Before they can tap out the stories that will change people’s lives, they devote days, weeks, even months to tracking down cold leads. They’re forever phoning potential informants who hang up on them, and traveling great distances to have doors slammed in their faces. Somehow, even in the face of rejection, they know what to say, and are able to remain sympathetic to victims who just can’t bring themselves to tell what they know. Which means this two-hour film seems very long indeed, as we watch Jodi and Megan doggedly try to overcome all obstacles that will keep them from uncovering the truth.

 After watching the two cajole members of Weinstein’s inner circle over cups of coffee and glasses of wine, we see them wearily trying to keep their home fires lit. In real life both women have husbands who are themselves involved in writing professions (one a columnist, one a literary agent). In the film, all we know is that these guys are remarkably sympathetic to their wives’ overtime work obligations, despite the fact that there are young children who need attention. (Kantor’s spouse takes it in stride when, on a day’s notice, she jets off first to California and then to London in the line of duty.)  It’s  a far cry from the traditional Hollywood movie in which the man leaves on an exciting but difficult mission, while his wife stays home, worrying about his safety and keeping the kids in line.

 When the breakthrough moments do come, and when there’s finally enough on-the-record material to print a Weinstein exposé, we do feel a real sense of accomplishment. Too bad it’s such a slog to get there.