Best Actress 1984
Winner: Sally Field, Places in the Heart
Nominees: Judy Davis, A Passage to India
Jessica Lange, Country
Vanessa Redgrave, The Bostonians
Sissy Spacek, The River

The Field: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★


Ranking Oscar's Ballot
 
 My Pick:
Vanessa Redgrave, The Bostonians ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

From There:
Jessica Lange, Country ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Judy Davis, A Passage to India ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It's been at least ten years since the first time I saw A Passage to India, during which time I have come to like the movie even less but Davis's performance appreciably more. My basic grudge against the film, not atypical in my experience of Lean's second career in the cinéma du globetrotter, is that the impressive scale and manicured mise-en-scène, however enticing in themselves, nonetheless detract from any sense of a storytelling point of view, much less from any sense that Lean's camera enjoys an empathetic or psychological closeness with any of his characters. It's all about getting the shot, and not enough about who's in the shot, and what they're doing there. No wonder, then, that Davis struggled to make any impression on me during my initial experience of the movie. I still think she could have performed more vividly as the ambivalent, eventually hysterical, ultimately humiliated Adela Quested. Also, as much as I try not to mar my moviegoing by projecting my accumulated, telltale impressions of the actors' private personas, it's hard to look at the drawn, somewhat stern, "I wish I were anywhere but here" look that frequently occupies Davis's face and not make a connection to her purported "difficulty" and to her habit, even early in her career, of expressing her disaffection with anything prim, conventional, or wrong-headed in her movies. Knowing what we do (or think we do) about Davis, I would lay down money that she found A Passage to India to be annoyingly postcardish, emotionally remote, and politically dubious. Maybe I just wish she did, so that I could have the honor of agreeing with her. But on this go-round, I saw something more in Davis's Adela than a sharp but inexperienced actress trying to make sense of an underwritten role in an only fitfully intelligent movie. As early as the first scene, as Adela books her passage on a steamer bound for India and spies a framed drawing of the Malabar Caves on the agent's wall, she wordlessly but unmistakably implies that Adela already has a neurotic fixation, a complex of attraction and revulsion with respect to the idea of the caves, and to India as a whole. Davis refuses to give a showy performance, despite the plummy overacting happening on almost every side of her, which is almost certainly why I underrated her work as a younger viewer and why she was barely a factor in the awards-season circuit until this borderline-surprise nomination. Watchful but undemonstrative, palpably judgmental but unforthcoming with the lion's share of her private verdicts, Davis turns Adela into the crypt-keeper not only of her own sheltered, contradictory, and highly susceptible feelings. Moreover, she outwits the garish literalism of so much of the movie by refusing to open Adela up by the end—even after the courtroom sequence, which all but invites the actress to release, lavishly and masochistically, whatever she's been bottling up. What does come through, as Adela shivers, cries, and somnambulistically drifts out of the courthouse, is that she's paying a tremendous toll not just for a false allegation and a political treachery but for some inward, guilt-saturated structure of desire that she's never disclosed to anyone, and may only have glimpsed for the first time herself, up there in the witness box. Davis's Adela—wan and compromised, lacerated by cactus needles in her mad flight out of the caves but just as clearly abraded by her immature sexuality and her huffy superiority to colonial ideologies with which she's nonetheless complicit—is a kind of walking victim of the imperial vampire. Her unhistrionic retentiveness—a quality I don't exactly associate with this customarily carnivorous, take-no-prisoners actress—could absolutely accommodate some more nuances and illuminations. Frequently pushed to the background, limited to silent reactions even in some of her biggest scenes (including a paranoid, almost campy confrontation with an overgrown Indian ruin and the excitable, Aguirre-style monkeys who live there), Davis imbues reservoirs of mystery and disquiet into some of her shots but barely seems to try in others. A final coda in which she reads a letter from Dr. Aziz is a total wash, and I'm sure she'd have preferred a film that took a lot more risks with Adela, or at least avoided such obvious whiffs as offering two, nearly identical sequences in the real-time and flashback versions of the much-debated altercation in the Caves. Not unusually in this year's roster of Best Actress nominees, by giving the smartest and most dignified performance that the material allows, Davis effaces her own performance more than a sharper filming of the same story would have necessitated, and truth be told, she isn't always sterling in the moments where some freer rein is possible. But not only is she not just treading water near the center of the film, as I once believed, she's almost single-handedly responsible for whatever provisions of mystique and perversity this flat, scenic, and oddly jaunty Passage to India has retained. Less, in her case, is mercifully more.

Sissy Spacek, The River ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Absent the modest, affecting urgency of Country, but less adept than Places in the Heart at plucking middlebrow heartstrings, The River puts most of its homegrown eggs in the basket of scrupulous technique. The cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Deer Hunter) and the honorary-Oscared sound effects by Kay Rose are proud emblems of this technophile bent, though in their way, they are just as hermetic as the fussy Look At Me Act performance by Mel Gibson and the overweening score by John Williams. If there's any place for one's heart in The River, it's in Spacek's typically understated performance as Mae Garvey; she plays Mae as someone who lives on a farm, whereas Gibson plays Tom, earnestly but without depth, as the star of a movie about a farm. Spacek is the perfect actress for a sequence of quiet desperation like the one where she crawls under the metal cage of a combine to tighten a screw, only to get her arm snagged between a hooked belt and a hungry gear. Her light-headed but strangely modest anguish is a terrific, intriguing choice here, and the comparative intimacy of the camera in this sequence is a boon to the actress, who does most of her best work at very close, almost imperceptible range. Unfortunately, and particularly in a film this Big, she's also a likely actress to give a theoretically flawless performance that so washes itself out and so hews to essentially predictable textures (especially in such an underwritten role) that an Oscar nomination seems like undue compensation. Toward the end of the movie, she has to march through even more compulsory character notes: a single angry outburst against her hothead husband, a melting renewal of love in the water-logged climax, etc. As a result, her proficiency and integrity too often go to waste in a film that keeps gilding the lily (or is it the cornstalk?) of a basically gripping story. Spacek is what I remember best from The River, even in actions as simple as nursing a sick cow or popping a piece of food in her mouth while she stares out her kitchen window. Still, her unshowiness and her discipline are not necessarily a badge of greatness, and even she can't ultimately make a strong enough case for the clichéd role, or for this promising but annoyingly soulless film.

Sally Field, Places in the Heart ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Who gets your vote in this field, and on my dream ballot below? VOTE HERE!


My Favorites from 1984:
(As determined by years of Oscar eligibility)

My Pick: Kathleen Turner, Romancing the Stone
Nominees: Jessica Lange, Country
Nominees: Vanessa Redgrave, The Bostonians
Nominees: Gena Rowlands, Love Streams
Nominees: Sumiko Sakamoto, The Ballad of Narayama

Honorable Mentions: Linda Hamilton, The Terminator; Judy Davis, A Passage to India; Nastassja Kinski, Paris, Texas; Meryl Streep, Falling in Love

Also-Rans (alpha): Mia Farrow, Broadway Danny Rose; Sally Field, Places in the Heart; Cox Habbema, A Question of Silence; Daryl Hannah, Splash; Frances McDormand, Blood Simple; Lena Olin, After the Rehearsal; Sissy Spacek, The River; Ingrid Thulin, After the Rehearsal; Kathleen Turner, Crimes of Passion

Gourmet Prospects: Jacqueline Bisset, Under the Volcano; Geneviève Bujold, Choose Me; Zaida Silvia Gutiérrez, El Norte; Isabelle Huppert, Entre Nous; Diane Keaton, The Little Drummer Girl; Diane Keaton, Mrs. Soffel; Miou-Miou, Entre Nous; Helen Mirren, Cal; Molly Ringwald, Sixteen Candles; Lily Tomlin, All of Me; Lesley Ann Warren, Choose Me

Further Research: Karen Allen, Starman; Anne Bancroft, Garbo Talks; Sandrine Bonnaire, À nos amours; Glenn Close, The Stone Boy; Maruschka Detmers, First Name: Carmen; Daryl Hannah, Reckless; Goldie Hawn, Swing Shift; Amy Irving, Micki + Maude; Diane Lane, The Cotton Club; Darling Légitimus, Sugar Cane Alley; Shelley Long, Irreconcilable Differences; Elizabeth McGovern, Once Upon a Time in America; Elizabeth McGovern, Racing with the Moon; Ann Reinking, Micki + Maude; Theresa Russell, The Razor's Edge; Rachel Ward, Against All Odds; Debra Winger, Mike's Murder

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