![]() ![]() Hunter, Close, Moreno (Today in Supporting Actress.Moreno, Close (Today in Supporting Actressness)."Pronounced like Merrill" - Homo Heritage Fridays.Darwell (Today in Supporting Actressness).Mary McDonnell in Dances with Wolves (1990) - Supp.That said, Ladd's work remains extraordinary, leaving me to marvel yet again at how the hell a performance this strange, confusing, unpleasant and arty ever made it to the Oscar ballot. ![]() Like the Wicked Witch imagined by Dern's Lula, Ladd's Marietta stalks and haunts the film but is never quite allowed into its wild heart. Ladd's performance as Marietta stands as an enthralling, memorable acting experiment but Lynch's film handles it tentatively, embedding Ladd awkwardly adjacent to the film's narrative rather than integrated within it. Yet, while Ladd's work in the role is exceptional, I'm not so sure the performance works. Most simply, Ladd's performance emerges as one of the most startling treatises on the craft of acting that StinkyLulu's yet seen captured on film. Instead of pitching all that silly Southern schtick as "real" (whether through crafty nuance or maudlin sincerity), Ladd opts to unfetter Marietta as a primal, elemental, animal force.Īs a result, Ladd's performance as Marietta is, on the one hand, a fascinating postmodernist deconstruction of Hollywood's performance tropes of Southern white womanhood while, on the other hand, a scalding bundle of raw emotionality. In Marietta, Ladd inhabits a stock character of Southern womanhood - equal parts Scarlett O'Hara and Tennessee Williams and Dallas - a type likely immediately recognized/dismissed by late 20th century U.S. Ladd's performance is also just brilliant. Ladd's accomplishment in this performance draws from her fortitude in fearlessly bringing what might be considered (by another director or performer) subtext, and playing the spectacle of such actorly "motivations" and "objectives" at full throttle for the camera's voyeuristic thrill. To lapse Freudian for a moment, Lynch evacuates the moderating force of ego from Ladd's Marietta altogether, thereby staging an at times astonishing spectacle in which Marietta's superego and id do battle. Indeed, nary a whiff of subtlety informs Ladd's portrayal of Marietta. The polyester fakery of Marietta's outer affect is perhaps the first clue that Ladd's not playing for nuance here. All while adorned with an extraordinary succession of fake nails and faker hair. Ladd's Marietta is a distillation of every trope and cliche of the overwrought Southern woman. But I must admit that this film also contains some of the best actoring at the edges Lu's ever seen (Harry Dean Stanton & Willem Dafoe), as well as the incomparable extraordinariness of.ĭiane Ladd plays Marietta Fortune (aka "Lula's Momma"), a woman murderously obsessed with keeping her beloved daughter (Laura Dern in a brazen, mature performance) from the adoring clutches of the shady-but-sexy Sailor (Nicholas Cage, effective but a little lost here). Rescreening the film now, for the first time in nearly two decades, I'm struck that Wild at Heart remains Lynch's least interesting film, the project most snared in the auteur's transition from Hollywood trope as metaphor ( Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) to Hollywood trope as conceptual device ( Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire). But if Blue Velvet was Lulu's first experience with Lynchian love, Wild at Heart was certainly its complement: my first experience truly loathing Lynch. Moreover, and more than most contemporary directors, I've always really "connected" with Lynch's reverence for actors - as mysterious, possibly mystical beings - as well as his fascination with (extra)ordinary faces, voices and bodies. Twenty years ago, Lynch's Blue Velvet and Fassbinder's Querelle were the first films I truly thought/fought about as passionately about as I did literature or theatre. To say that StinkyLulu has a love/loathe relationship with David Lynch would be simplifying things. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |