On Jennifer Jason Leigh Part III
Like all end of trilogies, overlong and full of nonsensical galaxy brain statements
I. After The Peak
Jennifer Jason Leigh’s run in the 1990s still feels like something that was not savored enough, if just because it feels as soon as that decade ended, those types of roles for those types of films dried up. She still did movies, yes, a few good ones and a few notable enough to talk about for the rest of this essay. But as for the rest, she was either cast in off-center roles in movies attempting to be off-center (often poorly) or she was cast as the mother or the wife to the lead in the film. Even she was not immune to depressing career projections for Hollywood actresses once they reached the age of forty.
I think about how disposable JJL’s ‘wife’ character was in Sam Mendes’ handsomely photographed but emotionally fraudulent Road To Perdition and get angry again. Was that the point to have a famous face be killed off to make it more ‘shocking’? Sure, fine. But I would buy JJL more in the Mike Sullivan role than Tom Hanks, so why waste my time giving your movie to a man out of his element in a ‘gritty’ role while offing one of your best actors in the picture?
I remember my spirits being broken by just how poorly conceived her character was on the ABC television primetime soap, Revenge in 2012. Revenge had an incredible first season that had the cliffhanger that the mother of lead Emily Thorne/Amanda Clarke was still alive. The tease felt like a redux of the former Jennifer Garner vehicle on ABC Alias and that this would be a Mother-Spy in the vein of Lena Olin (Olin was, in fact, a popular fan choice for the role of Emily Thorne’s mother at the time). When JJL got cast, I was intrigued. Do not think I am above loving a trashy network television primetime soap! Revenge’s first season made it seem like a worthy investment but this botch-job was my turning point. A spy who faked her death and an intrepid global badass was not in the cards.The character was written as a once mentally unstable but now heavily medicated middle-aged woman in an unremarkable but stable life. Fans of the show were disappointed and so was I, especially given how the first season revelation of the mother being alive felt like there was going to be a greater emotional pay-off than Emily Thorne pretending to be somebody else to connect with a woman who she had feared dead. It did not feel like it belonged on a show where planes exploding, paternity revelations, deaths faked, and amnesia served as plot essentials. Maybe on some other program that moment would have some weight. But it was a miss-match and unfortunately JJL was stuck on that other, not very fulfilling version of the show.
Those are just two prominent examples that stick out in my mind. But JJL is resourceful and she found other ways to stretch and test herself as an actress. One was taking to the stage, which I unfortunately never had the pleasure of witnessing (and oh, how I would have loved to have seen her perform as Sally Bowles in the 1990s revival of Cabaret). The other was writing and directing herself. She has only done that once but it is a film I have a lot of love for and one that makes me wish she returned to doing more work behind the camera.
With her Cabaret co-star Alan Cumming, they co-wrote, co-directed, and co-starred among a large ensemble in the LA indie, The Anniversary Party. What is fascinating about this movie is not even its impressive cast or the content but how it looks. After Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, it had to have been one of the most noteworthy ‘Hollywood’ digital films of its time due to the names behind it and the fact it was shot by John Bailey. For my eyes at least, early digital has a certain retroactive warmth to it, perhaps because the earliest digital was still in its infancy stages that felt not that far removed from ‘home movie’ camcorders. But The Anniversary Party was well-shot and framed, while still having some level of experimentation in aesthetics (there is even a point-of-view shot from a dog!). As far as plotting and characters, it feels less of the digital age of Dogme 95 or even subsequent years of ‘Mumblecore’ and closer to the films of Paul Mazursky. Come for ‘California Hedonism’, stay for ennui, hijinks, and l’amour fou.
Cumming and JJL play a couple who recently reconciled. They are aging Gen Xers celebrating their sixth wedding anniversary with discord and strife evident. He is a celebrated writer embarking on adapting his own work and she is an actress who serves as a ‘muse’, but somehow will not be in his planned adaptation. They move forward with an anniversary party and the absurdity in celebrating ‘six years’ of their union becomes an open joke. The containment of the central plot and tension does seem to speak to the fact JJL and Cumming are both trained in the stage and make the most out of their small-budget (the film was shot and in the can in less than three weeks) in its limited location and single-night scenario. The film does not become fully debauched histrionics even once drugs and drinking come into play. It involves emotionally fraught, but intelligent people who probably should not be together sizing up the other and trying to get a feel of what their friends and colleagues actually think of them. As far possible autofiction elements, I do get a chuckle out Gwyneth Paltrow’s party girl Sophia telling JJL’s Sally that during her second stint in rehab that Sally’s ‘drug addict’ film was banned because she was ‘too real’, if just because that must have been JJL’s most common feedback about Georgia. Still, although there is an intimacy in the film, JJL is still playing a character and somebody who is one of the most morose and sardonic characters she has ever played. It is quite thrilling to have her get the big tearful monologues, roll her eyes, be vain in front of a mirror, and smirk. The film got mixed to positive reviews and probably made as much money as it possibly could have (over $4 million USD in 2001), and that has long since felt like an abrupt close to that part of her career. The Anniversary feels on the verge of rediscovery and I hope that rediscovery can perhaps push her in the direction of returning to direct and write if she so wants to return to that avenue, because I will be the first in line.
Most recent discussions about Jennifer Jason Leigh have been less about her own work and more about the men she has worked with and men she shared a relationship with in the public eye. Her first ever, and long overdue, Oscar nomination came in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, a film in which she is brutalized, acts in a way beyond human recognition, and vomits racial slurs. It is a film that was received in some corners as Tarantino’s nadir, whose existence made Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood almost come across as a respite. OUATIH swerves noticeably away the thornier aspects of American history on race, sex, and racially-motivated violence from its ‘fairytale’ while The Hateful Eight rolls in like a feral hog in mud. And yet, there is something that still lingers with me, and makes me a continuing defender of The Hateful Eight in that it feels, however unconsciously, like a predictive text of life post-2016 by showing that the worst aspects of this flawed country were always here lying in wait. The darkness of American history feels like a mutating virus that none of its flawed characters can escape. Abraham Lincoln died for somebody’s sins, but not mine. That nihilistic notion is best exemplified by JJL’s Daisy Domergue who lets herself be bait in order for her brother Jody and their proto-MAGA gang to unleash terror in new American territory previously untouched by the Civil War.
It is so easy to dismiss the character as having no dimension, given that she becomes a literal punching bag, acts of violence against her are played for shock and jokes. Yet Tarantino and JJL seemed to be on a page about her. Tarantino had stated publicly that he wrote a separate screenplay draft just in the perspective of Daisy Domergue in order to crack her. Of course nobody would confuse her with the more iconic Tarantino heroines nor his more iconic villains, but there is something so off-putting in her inhumanity that does require more attention and probing that I do believe was done for this movie and is carried well by JJL, completely game for such character treachery. I do not think any other American actress of her caliber would have agreed to this role, much less been able to play it as well. In retrospect, that feels even more evident when comparing and contrasting the fact that Daisy and the two Manson Girls in OUTAIH reach similar endings, and yet, I have to say I ‘get’ Daisy as presented by Tarantino even if she serves to represent more of the existential threat that becomes pure movie monster than a human. I do not get “Sadie” and “Katie” as presented by Tarantino because it is obvious his impulses in dramatizing these real people are for one purpose only in having the sweet, sweet retributive ‘justice’ in killing them off on-screen. I was floored by Daisy as a character, who even if dead, has the kind of evil that does not die with her but instead will move on to another host. Meanwhile I was, curiously, unmoved by “Sadie” getting a taste of Chekhov’s B-movie blowtorch. Most feel the opposite about these films. I think the difference of these deliberately troublesome properties as written and directed by Quentin Tarantino is reflected by the fact I do think Tarantino does not feel necessarily superior or smarter to Daisy Domergue, his own creation, whereas that is not the case in sizing himself up to absolutely repulsive real-life murderers. But back Jennifer Jason Leigh, she managed to make a completely debasing character compelling and a lot more in control in the narrative than she lets on within the film. America in The Hateful Eight is a place of damnation and Jennifer Jason Leigh personifies it with complete gusto in a loathsomely repugnant role for the ages.
The Hateful Eight also felt of a piece with her serving the predilections of other auteurs be it David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ or back to Paul Verhoeven’s Flesh + Blood. As the determined Allegra in the Cronenberg, she delivers body horror in a way that comes completely natural to her, that presents a gender-swap of sorts with a woman in control and while the man is in the position of feeling insecure about ‘body penetration’. She pretty much fingers Jude Law in his spinal canal in order for him to play with her game pods. It is one of her funniest and best roles, that manages to surprise even if there was probably no actress readier to play a David Cronenberg heroine than her. I also think about the fact that she is the tragic sister in Jane Campion’s In the Cut that does tie back and feel like a reverb from the earlier roles she played, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High. JJL is not just for male director predilections and Campion is another director you wish she worked with more times than once. JJL’s character Pauline is a woman taking risks- informed and practically cursed by living under her parents’ bad marriage- and allowing herself to be vulnerable to judgment, scorn, and even danger in the name of intimacy and connection. Even though the film was more about Meg Ryan’s Frannie than JJL’s perils as Pauline,the utter shock of her character’s fate as a viewer feels different in the hands of Campion, who with JJL made Pauline an identifiable character in her awkwardness and curiosity. For numerous roles she has played the avatar of a kind of femininity in negotiation with toxic masculinity or existential threat of some kind, and often she gets the most brutal of payoffs and never more so than in In the Cut.
II. Discourse’d To Death
I am going to be short on the fact I have to speak to the elephant in the room about her relationship with Noah Baumbach with the fact Marriage Story came out last year. As somebody who does love a lot of Baumbach’s films, I felt anger for this movie and the discourse it brought because even the best of intentions in bringing JJL into it still felt intrusive towards her. Mostly, I felt deeply depressed and annoyed in how the film’s discourse positioned Jennifer Jason Leigh, an incredibly private person who has already had to deal with some deeply tragic parts of her private life in an already public way. And as referenced in the previous essay, the deaths of her mother and sister were still pretty recent. Yet “Poor JJL” sentiments just felt like tabloid fodder that I could not particularly engage with because it was coming from people who seemed to think expressing that was a currency to critiquing the film. I just found the film too overly mannered and not in the mannered sendup to something like screwball comedies as with Baumbach’s much superior Mistress America. If you asked me about what put me off of Marriage Story, it was that it reminded me of Woody Allen imitating Ingmar Bergman chamber dramas. Those types of films clearly appeal to others, but they are not films for me. I may not have been married, but I have been cheated on, so suffice to say this film left me sore about the whole experience and that was even without projecting any autofiction elements from Baumbach as he is wont to do in his work (I was impressed with my own cognitive dissonance on that part, especially given how charmed I was with the autofiction elements of his previous film The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)). I would have been more curious if I had loved the movie. Surely, I could have parlayed that into a meditative piece on loving this movie but loving JJL right in time during awards season discourse. I bet somebody tried that. Ultimately, I was so pissed off that her title in these discussions was that she was relegated to the ‘ex-wife’. A cultural mainstay for four decades, an award-winning actress, and by all accounts a wonderful person just gets presented as a jilted ex? I should not be surprised but reader, I grinded my teeth. Somehow the ‘spirited’ defenses of her just came off so reductive and patronizing. Where were you people when she had her retrospective at the Brooklyn Alamo Drafthouse?
It would seem simple to say she is more than that. I think writing three essays on her is enough to show my adoration and draw to her is a pretty binding one. I continue to be excited by the fact that she does always seem to show up in works I love. She and Robert Pattinson (himself on something of a JJL in the 90s run, but we shall see how that Batman thing goes) were one of the first most ‘name’ actors in Hollywood to be on the Safdie Brothers train before anyone else by appearing in Good Time. And while, I wish she had worked with somebody like David Lynch her whole career, I loved the fact that she was in Twin Peaks: The Return as Chantal who stole moments by just how she read the line, “Mars!” or ate Wendy’s French fries as a seedy contract killer with Tim Roth. Her work in the animated Anomalisa was so wonderfully self-possessed and intimate despite the fact we only hear her voice, a fascinating flipside to the fact she was an actor so synonymous with her body and having a body in the world. Jennifer Jason Leigh clearly has a throughline in her career in testing and pushing herself to the limits as an actress that for me still has no other Hollywood rival. If these essays did anything to spark or affirm your appreciation for her, I consider this madness that I have been writing to be worth it.