Birthday Girls: Judy Garland

Judy Garland, A Star Is Born
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1954 Best Actress Oscar to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl)

Why I Waited: Some form of gay honor code, I suppose, though that could just as easily have been a reason to have screened this years ago. Some residual hope that the footage excised by studio birdbrains might one day be recovered, though it seems fairly clear this will never happen. A dream of being in the right place and time for an in-cinema projection, though none has ever come my way. But really, the real reason is that even by the time I had 100 performances left to screen, this was the one that attracted the most reverential praise from fans, and the most durable controversy about just how scandalous it was that Judy didn't win. Plus, she sings, she dances, she emotes, she acts with James Mason (always a plus), she keeps it going for several hours, and she revisits and expands upon the foundations laid by Janet Gaynor, who was the first Mrs. Norman Maine but also the first Best Actress. So doesn't this seem, at least in theory, like an ideal capper to my loving archaeology of this category?

The Performance: Vicki Lester (née Esther Blodgett), as exploded into life by Judy Garland (née Frances Gumm), turns out to be an even more fitting alpha and omega for this project than I had realized. Having seen the previous Star Is Born with Gaynor and Fredric March, I of course should have anticipated that the Academy Awards themselves would figure prominently in the plot of the 1954 version, offering a more than fortuitous leitmotif given the context in which I watched the movie. The scenes at the Oscar ceremony furnish a kind of full, blooming resolution to the central, crescendoing chord of my nutty enterprise, which has been building in slow steps for so many years. As many of you know, Vicki wins the Oscar in A Star Is Born and gives the beginning of a very touching speech before a sudden, scary, and very sad interruption. I would still find this episode heartbreaking, I'm sure, even if I weren't completely over-invested in precisely the sort of glorious moment Vicki is enjoying until, abruptly, she isn't. And of course it's no easier watching Vicki essentially get Kanye'd by her own husband if we're preoccupied, as I couldn't help being, with the knowledge that this is the closest Vicki/Judy is ever going to get to a competitive Oscar. By the end of 175 minutes, and frankly much earlier, a truth for the ages has emerged, and it runs thus: if you're going to charter a peer academy of filmmaking professionals in order to honor annual feats of excellence in popular cinema, and you're not going to bestow one of these laurels upon Judy Garland's exhilarating, athletic, funny, nuanced, and sublimely grief-stricken performance in A Star Is Born, then you can pour, blast, and gild as many of those statues as you want, but you may as well just smash them against a wall or hurl them down the stairs.

Garland is beyond being the best of her group, which is hardly a shabby one. She's one Blanche DuBois away from being the strongest nominee of her decade. (No, I'm not forgetting that miraculous 1950 constellation.) She achieves so exemplary a fulfillment of every formidable ambition ingrained within George Cukor's brilliant film—a supernova of electric pizazz, an acute melodrama that pulls no psychological punches, a fond time-capsule of multiple forms and techniques of entertainment, and a metafilm about the production, the aesthetics, and the semiotics of Hollywood studio movies—that she actually makes you see what's missing, by comparison, in comparable characterizations as stupendous as Barbra Streisand's Fanny Brice and Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles and Francine Evans. Not that I spent a single one of those 175 minutes thinking about anyone or anything else besides Vicki, her husband Norman Maine (made indelible by an equally heart-stopping James Mason), the movie they're in, the movies they make, the people who employ and applaud and punish Vicki and Norman (three categories with multiple overlaps), the private relationship they continually fight to preserve, and the final, catastrophic implosion of at least one of them.

And yet, no Oscar: he's the real Man That Got Away. And while I'd rather sing Garland's praises than use them as a glittering cudgel by which to beat up on the champ in her race, the injustice of this result, even by AMPAS's dubious standards, is pretty overpowering. I know well the look in my partner's eyes that says, "So do you see, then, what a cruel and absurd competition this always turns out to be? Are we ready to move on now to something else?" Sometimes he makes it easier and just says it with his mouth. In the case of A Star Is Born, it isn't just the external voting outcome that engenders disillusion but a message within the story and the filmmaking, holding that the ways in which we revere our actors tend to have built-in expiration dates. And even when this isn't the case, our ardor can look an awful lot like merciless aggression.

As Nathaniel pointed out in the comments on yesterday's Country Girl post, one needn't work too hard to align that film with A Star Is Born in relation to a thematic dialectics of success and failure. In lots of ways, A Star Is Born could not be more literal in this respect, given its famous chiastic structure by which matinée idol Norman Maine (né Ernest Sidney Gubbins) sees the bottom drop out of his acting career just as his discovery and eventual wife Esther/Vicki gleams like an arcing comet in the Hollywood firmament. Compared, however, to The Country Girl and to Georgie's crabbed efforts to keep her husband's stage career afloat, A Star Is Born is even more skeptical that anyone's creativity can be nourished or abetted by anyone else. Norman gives Vicki her crucial breaks, yes, and as he singles her out for praise, reapplies her makeup, applauds her routines, and enjoys her success, Garland and Mason alike contribute some of the most sensitive, tender acting in the film. But for all that you can cunningly escort someone into a studio head's office, there is not a single scene in A Star Is Born that suggests that Norman is capable of making Esther/Vicki a greater talent than she is, or that her love can defibrillate his sagging artistic energies.

Still less can you reverse the equation and extend your own creative prowess as a permanent balm to someone else's breaking spirit. But you can sure as hell try, and Garland's Vicki gives this form of exuberant nursing the fullest, funniest, most fiery test-run that anyone ever has. She comes home to a depressed and under-stimulated husband and launches into an impromptu, improvisatory living-room version of the lavish production number she's apparently been practicing all day, as though her virtuosity can lift him up. Temporarily, it seems to work, and it certainly works on us. Norman is absolutely delighted by Vicki's ingenuity, counter to my fears that A Star Is Born would generically require him to sour on Vicki's singing, dancing, and acting abilities once her star began to shoot higher than his. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an on-screen spouse of a hoofer and belter take such mood-lifting, joyous pleasure in his partner's talent, just as I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone conjure the feeling, range, and exactitude of a major production number with the kind of vividness Garland attains, nailing her steps and her notes but, more importantly, implying a luscious series of visual tableaus where only a living room exists. (Granted, it's quite a living room.) Still, her victory is pyrrhic and quick. His mirth evaporates. Her incandescence dims before our eyes, even as she sits there in a rosy flush.

So, she creates tremendous entertainment out of thin air, and then it disappears just as swiftly back from whence it came. It's not just that Garland stops wailing and twirling but that she has to project the strange aura of the superpowered medium who is suddenly, once again, a mortal. Her performance, like the film, thus circles back to some subtly handled questions. What is this strange thing, creative magic? Where does it come from? What can it accomplish? Where does it go as the creator himself or herself starts to dissipate, or when the creator is forced to draw on more practical, more domestic, more emergency energies on behalf of someone else? Even while the story of A Star Is Born preoccupies itself with the practical ups and downs of commodifying, sustaining, and regulating artistic labor, the filmmaking and the acting seem charged at all times with—forgive me—a metaphysical reckoning with the vivid, slashing, booming, scary fact of human expressivity. Norman sees it in Esther, immediately, just as quickly and certainly as she sees that it once persisted, even quite recently, in him. So Mason has got to seem credible as a storied actor in the twilight of an august career, even though his character never gets to do a bit of acting—and this Mason accomplishes, and much else, unimprovably, through manipulations of manner and voice. Garland, meanwhile, has got to seem possessed not just of talent but of phenomenal, turbo-powered self-transportations. If all you do is sing a song well in the company of your buddies, then you'll still seem like a foolish opportunist, and/or like a clichéd character from any number of Ruby Keeler movies, when you quit your band of friends on the eve of a big tour, in order to pursue the eager but soggy promises of a tottering lush with industry connections. But, if you power your way through "The Man That Got Away" the way Garland does here, swelling your voice to huge, muscular volume before your body even looks like it's woken up; and then you start arcing your back and extending your arm in ecstatic, passionate service of the song; and then you power down into a giddy but embarrassed satisfaction immediately after the final note, as though even you cannot believe you can be the conduit for such sonorous, extravagant forces; then the audience will believe that Esther has to take Norman's advice, that their story is about something so prodigious that nothing smaller than the elephantine Hollywood apparatus could ever properly feed it, or be fed on it.

For huge stretches of A Star Is Born, most famously the 20-minute portmanteau of nested numbers called "Born in a Trunk," narrative recedes entirely, and there are no book scenes. Consequently, Garland's notes, her rhythms, her dancing, and her gestures carry the whole burden of showing that Esther's abilities are further burgeoning before our eyes, even though we don't have a lot of preceding impressions to compare these to. These same exertions, though, must also prepare us to grasp the complex ambivalences that start clawing at Esther's life with Norman the moment she leaves the theater. And we have to believe Esther knows most of this, even while she's selling the hell out of her songs and dance routines.... even when the lyric through which Garland has to filter all of this is the astoundingly mundane refrain "Pocatello, Idaho." Try singing that with ecstatic and multi-layered feeling. A Star Is Born, then, and Garland's turn in particular, doubly obligate themselves to set new, enthralling standards in note-perfect, emotionally shaded musical performance while also portraying a woman who increasingly perceives that her mastery in these areas is failing to shield her husband from disaster, or herself from abject unhappiness, even though her talents are in no way causing the disaster or the unhappiness. Her virtuosity gratifies her husband, buoys him up, but it also ensconces her within a profession that is busy sloughing him off. And it puts her in touch with an almost uncanny, purgative, expressive power which is the same one he has lost—or is so widely perceived to have lost that it amounts to the same thing—so in some ways it widens the gulf between them, even though neither of them wants that to happen.

Garland's numbers and her deliveries of them are often required to dramatize this kind of crisis, most obviously on the occasions when Norman asks Esther to sing for him and she gently obliges while nonetheless looking scared to go all the way—an unexpected reluctance, maybe, from a woman who belted "The Man That Got Away" to kingdom come after no more than a glance at the sheet music, before an audience of zero. Garland's phrasings of the lyrics and her modulations of sound tell us all we need to know about when she's thinking of the number, or thinking of Norman, or thinking of herself, in more or less that order. Sometimes, she has to run through the same routine twice in this movie, giving her all in the way that is Vicki's job and Garland's job, but signaling different forms of effort or preoccupation each time. The exemplary case here, of course, is the "Lose That Long Face" number which Garland has to put over like gangbusters after arriving on the set looking glum and distracted. Then she has to duck out between camera setups so she can completely decompose herself in tears, panic, and choking helplessness on the semi-warm shoulder of studio-head Charles Bickford (and in very close to one long take, incidentally). Then, after drying her eyes and wiping her nose, she has to reprise the same number for an encore in close-up, cognizant that her audience knows what kind of effort it's requiring for Vicki to bear out the injunction of her own song, especially in the face of an even more intrusive camera. But Vicki has to do that, without seeming lost in her own despondent thoughts, because the whole point of A Star Is Born is that she's a trouper, in work as in love, before she is anything else.

What Garland ultimately presents is an astonishing synthesis of Gene Kelly's indefatigable physical energy and Bette Davis's dramatic intensity, including in moments where her acting stands wholly apart from musical performance. You have to have real mettle to survive the unexpectedly vicious tirade that a studio publicist unleashes on her when Vicki won't attend an Academy benefit in the final minutes of the film, for patently obvious reasons. Garland survives it, and then bellows back with her own redoubtable gust of jealous self-defense, even as the character's nerves are obviously, completely frayed. But not all of Garland's acting is scaled so high or so loud. She's much more simply compelling making an earnest plea to a disgusted judge, and showing up for her bewildering first few days of work at a movie studio. She exercises just the right amount of idolatry, attraction, lucidity, and bashfulness that we believe her love of Norman eclipses her gnawing concerns about his alcoholism and unreliability. It's obvious she's heading into this relationship with both eyes open—in some ways returning the favor of how he "saw something in me no one else ever did," and she refuses to act surprised or victimized when the going gets very, very tough, no matter how devastated she gets. More than once, Garland's odd penchant for reacting to ephemeral little stimuli that no one else even seems to register cuts the daringly high-pitched histrionics of A Star Is Born down to a smaller, more humorous, more offhandedly accessible size: i.e., the way she darts her eyes around now rooms when she enters them, often perplexed, or how she emits a girlish chuckle at the size of a very large sandwich that Norman hands to her.

Garland can uncork a ferocious vibrato, and often does, but she also has the tender comic timing to gently chuckle at her husband when he asks her to perform in private, as though she knows it's an odd way to express love, as well as a stirring one and, for her, an easy one. She can look very moved and serious and only a little rattled during a dingy jailhouse wedding, despite having been pushed to the extremes of despair (and, it must be said, of regrettable overacting) after a similar scene in Vincente Minnelli's The Clock in 1945. She can get laughs singing a jingle about peanuts, accompanying herself on maracas, even while she sings it better than anyone else could. A cartoon drunk saunters by asking incongruously for "My Melancholy Baby" instead, and as it turns out she can also put over "My Melancholy Baby" with creamy, lavender ease. She can react to a horrifying smack as though she knows it's not deliberate and must immediately be covered over, for the benefit of an entire room, and to keep her intimate life sustainable; she can react to someone else's opinion of her husband as though this is the horrifying smack, while nevertheless implying that she cannot in every sense discount what this person is saying. She can charm as much as Irene Dunne ever did by just rattling off a list of hamburger options on a menu. She can look emptied out inside by a splotchy, sluttish makeover she didn't want. She can give three versions of the same dance in a subtly altered costume, in a line of nearly interchangeable and identically dressed women, playing up the ridiculousness of the routine while handily implying just how much time is probably passing between repetitions, and how much she's giving her best while wishing she were somewhere else. Outside a sidewalk box office, she can make the almost silently mouthed words "Thank you" ring just as powerfully as almost anything else in a film brimming with violent colors, bustling Cinemascope frames, tapping shoes, waves of song, lens flares, crane shots, and starkly lit chiaroscuro farewells.

What else could anyone want, AMPAS voter or otherwise? When Garland comes out to offer her final, notorious line reading, it would be specious to give her sole credit for all of the ironies that reverberate from this one sentence. The set, the lighting, the sensitive camera movements, judiciously spaced-out edits, and sublime direction from master George Cukor have all put Garland in a place from which her Vicki Lester, her Esther Blodgett—in many ways, this is a dual performance rolled into one ceaselessly renegotiated package—can saunter out as both the triumphant survivor and the foreclosed bride of death. She says, "I'm Mrs. Norman Maine," and we receive it as both a final tribute to her most voluminous love, spoken by a woman taking her first solo steps toward her own glorious horizon, and as a possible signal that every spark of vitality Vicki/Esther has emitted for 175 minutes is destined to be muffled. What if, from this moment on, she constrains her whole life into an extravagantly humbled memory of his? Is this what she has in mind? You can't, as an actor, read the words "I'm Mrs. Norman Maine" and pour all of that into it without a vivid, ambitious, multifaceted film behind you, one that's ceaselessly doing all kinds of work beneath, around, and in sync with your own performance. But you can give the kind of performance that inspires and grounds such a line, and such a film. If this is the last time Vicki Lester introduces herself as Mrs. Norman Maine, Garland has shown us a Vicki whose fluorescence and resilience we can capably project for years into the future, even as A Star Is Born fades to a close. If, however, this marks the first day of thirty or forty consecutive years of wearing her widowhood like a self-effacing shroud, notwithstanding the jewels and the spotlights in which she currently stands, Garland has shown us just how much the world will lose by losing Vicki, while also forcing us to appreciate her own devotion, edging us closer to accepting her sacrifice of herself. Either way, working in beautiful tandem with her co-stars and her off-screen colleagues, she has completed a detailed characterization in the combined mediums of movement, sound, and dramatic impersonation, and she has carried musical drama to the cathartic, precarious, philosophically provocative plane of opera. If that's not deserving of an award called "Best Actress," I'll never know what is.

The Best Actress Project: Completed!

Actress Files: Edith Evans

Edith Evans, The Whisperers
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1967 Best Actress Oscar to Katharine Hepburn for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner)

Why I Waited: A legendary turn in a category that's shorter on those than I wish it were. In fact, I probably should have retained her as my token representative of the 60s in my final ten performances, but after recently marveling at Kim Stanley and Leslie Caron in films by the same director, I couldn't wait. The long-deferred arrival of a DVD, with a slightly cropped but still exquisite-looking image, was even harder to resist.

The Performance: So let me get my one caveat out of the way, which is more a mark against the movie than against Evans, though it hampered my love for the performance just a bit. The Whisperers, for me, had a hard time working out how deeply it wanted to involve itself in narrative, and which aspects of its story it felt really committed to. Edith Evans is in every scene, often alone, but other characters pass in and out of the film according to very strange cadences. Some stay much longer than you're expecting, some flit in and out and come to naught, some make entrances that reshift the focus of the whole film only to depart it again, and some pop up for recurring appearances, involving themselves crucially with the life of the Evans character, but not finally rewarding either story or theme as much as I expected. In some ways, these diegetic off-rhythms are an intriguing device by which director Bryan Forbes—who has generated multiple forms of unease and dread in several films, without ever repeating the same ones—unsettles our expectations and keeps our sensibilities on edge in yet a new way. But in another sense, Evans is rendered even lonelier than the scenario already requires. She's not just the engine of the movie but in many ways is the vehicle herself, as well as its destination point. Writing these Best Actress profiles has only reinforced to me that, as much as I seem to be celebrating individualist achievement, the greatest performances are those in which the ingenuity of the performer and the formal, thematic, and storytelling work of the film continue to raise each other's game. The Whisperers is a stylish and spindly puzzle, but good as it is, Evans's contribution so enormously overwhelms any dividend the film pays back to her that I felt a slight pang of disappointment by the end. Maybe I'm thinking too much about how Caron's work in The L-Shaped Room takes fullest flight by interacting in such beautifully calibrated ways with other characters, in ways that maintain a profound resonance in the scenes where Caron is left alone in her own thoughts. Or maybe I'm preoccupied with recalling how the criminal, the detective, and the spiritualist strands of Séance on a Wet Afternoon collide so decisively in the final scenes, such that Stanley's character has to reveal her governing priorities once and for all, and her choice was so surprising to me, I was knocked back in my seat.

Evans's exchanges with characters played by Avis Bunnage and Eric Portman are very involving, but they're hard-pressed, maybe even helpless, to be as interesting as she is in solitude. Is she doing too much? Is the film doing too little? The story of The Whisperers circles around more than it develops or culminates, racing through seemingly crucial plot elements such that I wondered on a few counts whether I'd blinked and missed something. Fans of the movie will assert that these misgivings lie close to the point of The Whisperers. In any case, the predominating issue is that Evans is so magisterial, poignant, discomfiting, and instantly addictive that I couldn't help craving a film that evinced a more fully realized sense of what to do with her. Speaking more generously, Forbes may well have intended an off-center experiment in stalled but cyclical dread and in evoking a claustrophobic environment via an unexpectedly heavy reliance on wide, exterior shots—odd, ambitious goals in both cases, and fairly well executed. Maybe these or other plans for the film just got overshadowed by Evans's brilliance in her role, the proportions by which Forbes had mapped the rest of the movie rendered irrecuperable by such a tour de force.

So, let's get to that tour de force—and let's imagine getting this script and tracing this character on paper, pretending that we haven't witnessed everything that Evans does with it. A woman living alone, 76 years old, long ago abandoned by her husband and seldom visited by her son. She hears voices, probably as a projective coping mechanism after years of isolation, but this isn't the supernatural ghost story I had imagined. We barely hear the "whisperers" even when she does. Her flat is a rat's nest of newspapers, bundles, and empty milk bottles. Her only external errands are visits to a Christian charity for hymns and hot soup, furtive siestas in the library where she can warm her stocking feet on the pipes (tsk tsk, say the guards), and visits to the public-assistance office, where she inquires about huge, clearly imaginary windfall sums that we know are never coming, and pretends to "make do" for the time being with the tiny dispensations that represent her state allotment.

We know how many actresses would flat say no to playing such a sad old lady. Setting those vanity cases and lazybones aside, we know how much art, though perhaps dubious art, could go into making her an "irrepressible" comic figure, or a pathetically terrorized victim, or a Jane Darwell type soldiering on beneath an invisible halo, sporting a phantom sandwich board that reads "ARE YOU NOT ASHAMED? FEED THIS WOMAN!" To curtail the bathos, the generic nobility, or the possibility for mockery might itself require someone as peerlessly stage-trained as Evans, leading to the sorts of reviews where one writes, in earnest awe, "She gets laughs without selling the character short," or "She shows this woman's misery without looking like she's got the full weight of a Message Picture on her," or "She makes us feel desperately sorry for this woman without trafficking in gooey sentimentality." I'd have been thrilled to watch some imagined version of The Whisperers and feel any of those ways.

In some ways, I do wind up feeling those things even about this version of The Whisperers, but Evans flies so far above those frameworks of praise that you practically have to start over. I had expected a virtuosic crack-up under the macabre pressure of supernatural taunts, doubtlessly gumming the line between fantasy and reality—sort of Repulsion for the Hospice set. Indeed, there are elements, too, of this scenario in the film and of this sort of potential energy in Evans's work. But we have to start back even further, because Evans has done more than inhabit one of these tonal influences on The Whisperers and elevated it through consummate technique. She has not even stopped at her breathtaking feat of braiding those registers I've already hinted at, the pitiable, the droll, the frightening, and the humbling, although this she also does, with astonishing and sometimes eerie finesse. Evans doesn't look like she's thought in terms of genre the slightest bit, and the "register" of her performance pivots so continually—often a dozen times within a single scene—that I'm confounded to extrapolate a general description. The humor in the performance has black blood; that is, sometimes the demented and forlorn say the darnedest things, and all of a sudden, but the giggles choke a bit in your throat. The neglect in which Mrs. Ross lives has not made her persona pathetically small, nor blustery and grand in the absence of any pushback. Instead, the disaggregating strands of her personality pass over her like cloud systems: wisps of cirrus, abrupt stormbarrels of slate-gray, patches of clear and windless light, cottony plumps of cumulus. The larger canvas across which these dispositions pass is a disheveled but oddly snooty stupefaction, hanging together but rubbed bare, like the corduroy at an old professor's elbows.

Evans clearly has a complex and practiced take on old age, and is interested in the atmospheric and psychological tensions generated by slowing things down. Mrs. Ross doesn't whip from reveries to indictments to fogginess to paralysis with Three Faces of Eve suddenness. She's not interested in putting on a light show. The effect is closer to that of a cloudy crystal ball, in which one side of this woman emerges for a moment before singing back into the whited-out mist, from which some other face emerges a beat or two later, and often quite a different one. Mrs. Ross lags into weary dumbfoundedness, staring at nothing and not moving for a few moments in a row, before leaping with sudden dispatch to pound her broomstick against her ceiling, in protest of the upstairs neighbors and their noisiness. She casts a mistrustful eye at a neighbor in the welfare office, and then passes into a sort of human fadeout (but to gray, rather than black) and then she starts offering a random chapter of fruity-voweled autobiography. "You see, I married rather beneath me...," she expounds, listing heavily to one side, as though her posture has aphasia; she is vehement in her pronunciations, as though she's a deaf old beast trying to hear herself but also as though she's taking patrician care in making her own life story, which is fascinating if she doesn't mind saying so, perfectly pellucid to other people. Few of these vocal, bodily, or attitudinal habits feel like anything I've seen before, and the enigmas or the brazenness or the stillness or the unexpectedness of each of them only lends more mystique to the others—but always with the effect of playing Mrs. Ross, not playing "mystique."

Evans can do anything: hug herself with the dumb, indolent satiation of the fetus in the womb; sag into silence; retreat from insults and dangers in a spirited panic; faint dead away; put on ladylike airs, stone-seriously though they're laughably misplaced; take gumsmacking slurps of honey from a jar, like some Faulknerian idiot, or a high-culture spin on Edith Massey; achieve a Giulietta Masina expression of clock-faced hyperalertness, then drape a mothy veil of dementia over top of that, then peer toward the edge of the frame at something that probably isn't there but has you immediately dying to know. When she's menaced by a cadre of thugs, who have either taken some money or are trying to find out who did, she doesn't play the defiant old battle-axe or the terrorized septuagenarian, but a five-year-old whose fear takes the shape of annoyed incomprehension: "He hasn't come home," she protests, in a high, tiny, but weirdly substantial voice that neither the criminals nor the audience have any idea how to respond to. But that petulantly plaintive five-year-old is trapped in a body that's the very shipwreck of the aging poor. She sometimes has an insane, mischievous sprightliness, like Miss Marple as played by a barely made-up Charles Laughton as played by an inmate from Marat/Sade, under constant threat of the hose. She confounds any organizing border among madness, indigence, and solitude. In the case of this woman, they mean the same thing, but without reducing the sense of their being reinforcing rather than identical or successively causal problems. Tim reflects, brilliantly, that Evans's is essentially a Beckett performance, and sometimes a trio of monosyllables (we're not friends..., you left me...) are all she needs to transform a sleek mid-60s kitchen-sink chiller, as though those are a dime a dozen, into the bare, planked stage of absurdist existentialism. She's Winnie from Happy Days buried in a more realistic mound of her own life's refuse, but then she gets out and ambles into who knows what, and then she finds herself quite literally back in the gutter. And then she's locked up. And then she's let back out. Is she the same woman she was before, or has she been cured, soothed, further deteriorated? Evans hints but she won't come out and tell.

Doesn't it sound like an awful lot is going on in this performance? Are you wondering as you read this how insufferably fussed it must be, how hard the movie must be pushing her around, or how flamboyantly Dame Evans must be pushing the character around? It's a huge task to evoke the extremities, the ambitions, the eccentricities, and the weird fusions of this performance, much less the bafflingly simultaneous payoffs of bemusement and profound sadness. The only character I can think of to set aside Edith Evans's Mrs. Ross is Ellen Burstyn's Sara Goldfarb, but where Burstyn has to exemplify the loud rhetorical yawps of a hyped-up writer, a heavily-amped director, and a pugilistically unambiguous moral, Evans confounds any final "message" in the performance even more than the script does. She finds all of this tumult not in a harrowing downward spiral, but in the mystery of a ruined person, as untended as a graveyard garden. Burstyn grimacing at her grapefruit breakfast, or wondering if her son hears her teeth knocking against each other, before either of them has mentioned it: those moments, if you know them, suggest a bit of Mrs. Ross, but everything else about Sara Goldfarb is a fever-red or a mold-green explosion, whereas Evans seems to heighten and underplay, suggesting years of unenviable living within the poses, rhythms, lies, and fluting vocalisms of a lady who's all whites and grays, against a forbiddingly sooty backdrop. Without a smash-cut in sight, Evans offers a pause-giving nightmare of riding out one's years in deranging solitude, with hallucinated comforts and with predators less imaginary than they might appear. But there's also something ...happy about Mrs. Ross? Could this be? Evans thinks of even more questions than the script does. She dignifies the character even when she's drooling or in the grip of delusion. She's conducted deep, private investigations into the woman's unwritten backstory, and she supplies and obscures the evidence she has unearthed with equal constancy, and equal aplomb.

Are you still reading, or have you marched off to rent it by now?

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 12 to Go

Birthday Girls: Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn, The Nun's Story
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1959 Best Actress Oscar to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top)

Why I Waited: Lack of allegiance to Audrey, and to Zinnemann, and to nuns, and to midcentury "values" pictures, especially when they stretch over two hours.

The Performance: First off, if I may enumerate: Audrey Hepburn, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Patricia Collinge, Mildred Dunnock, Beatrice Straight, and Colleen Dewhurst (as a psychopathic inmate!), all in the same picture. Such a constellation of legendary actressing that whenever Barbara O'Neil apparently passed through, I missed her. Top work, too, by Peter Finch and Dean Jagger, and by actresses previously unknown to me, like Patricia Bosworth, Ruth White, Margaret Phillips, and Dorothy Alison (one "L," and so not the one you're thinking of).

But let's not bury the lead: among the very highest pleasures afforded by this whole exercise, being wowed by performers to whom I was previously indifferent runs a close second to having my expectations surpassed by wizards I already adored. Some fans of Audrey Hepburn maintain that everything she ever touched was perfection, and though I can easily see how the swanlike, elegant, superhumanly gracious woman could inspire that level of fealty, I have never seen how such a case could be made for the actress. Among fans who permit distinctions, though, Hepburn's turns in 1967's Two for the Road and 1959's The Nun's Story far surpass all her others as pledged conversion experiences. I admit, my curiosity about the possible truth of these predictions has been outweighed by my worries about discovering myself the human exception to this cosmic rule. One hates to know for sure that one just doesn't "get" Audrey Hepburn, because the ideal of serene chic, sari'd in peerless and simple humanitarianism, is an epitome to which anyone would want to show favor.

Conversion and belief take unexpected forms, though, as I came to learn for different reasons but nonetheless at the same time as Sister Luke, née Gabriella van der Mal, the Belgian girl who takes orders in a convent at the outset of The Nun's Story, Fred Zinnemann's handsome, high-minded, and surprisingly rich film about Luke's experiences as a woman of the church. Among many smart, principled decisions Robert Anderson makes in his script is his excising of any but the slimmest impressions of who Gabrielle is or what she is like before taking her vows. Starting in the convent might have lessened our sense of what Gabrielle renounces by assuming this formidable challenge to her soul's provenance, her self-perceptions, and, increasingly, her minuscule but torturing "vanity." We'd be denied the flawless tact but the obviously etched regret of her father (Jagger), whispering as though in plaintive warning, "I don't want to be proud of you, I want you to be happy!" We would lose out on witnessing the prim, cool, frankly eerie resolve with which Gabrielle strides into her new life as Luke, and plays her lapses in protocol (sprinting when she's late, speaking when she oughtn't) not as jokes or as exposés of institutional dourness but of lamented errors in a craft, an ethics, that she means very much to honor. Sister Luke craves and sets quite a high bar, and so too does the film, for itself and for its star. The religious life must be articulated and revealed on its own intricate terms, not through opposition to some simplified vision of bouncing secular life, as prologue or parallel plot; Hepburn cannot use some impetuous sketch of green or narrow youth as a foil by which to cultivate new, tactical mannerisms representing faith, tranquility, or submission.

As it happens, none of those capacities comes automatically to Sister Luke, and the prodigious charge of a deceptively placid-looking film comes from the fact that Audrey Hepburn, of all people, has to scour her heart for trace elements of doubt, unrest, and arrogant assertion. But here, too, Hepburn and Zinnemann resist the logic of the foil. The Nun's Story does nothing to conjure the ghost of the Givenchy-clad gamine so that, as in so many other change-of-pace performances across the decades, we tick off our congratulations to the actor who has opposed one avatar of herself with another one, strenuously and self-regardingly constructed. This isn't an officiously revised or a diametrically different Hepburn so much as a firm, latent aspect of Hepburn that no previous role has probed. So often, a premise for a strong performance arrives in a seemingly cosmetic concern. We find such a revelation in the sere, bone-white face that emerges when Hepburn's brow and jaw are framed by the sharp lines of her white wimple. Suddenly, she presents the bare, pallid architecture of the human that the very different contemporary figure of Tilda Swinton has often been used to show us. The face is that of an icon in a religious painting, something remote but troubled, seemingly filtered of blood but not of worry. The mystery, then, is not how Gabrielle has come to lack her interpreter's seemingly innate endowments of poise and rectitude, because we aren't even thinking about her interpreter. The mystery is how her body seems regressed in time and broken down—simply, unhistrionically—into its barest ingredients, and yet this emblem of asceticism still feels the agony of something inward, something designed to provoke unrest, like a splinter that pricks even after it appears fully removed.

Where, in that body and face, could it reside, and what is it? It is her faith, but not solely, and "faith" is the question, anyway, not its answer. In laboratory scenes, it is her scientific acumen, cultivated in part by her famous father, and fueling a drive toward philanthropy that Sister Luke apprehends, both from others and in herself, as a slippery slope into self-aggrandizement. In moral dilemmas, as when she faces down a mutual antipathy with a fellow nun, or when she is asked by one Mother Superior to flunk an exam deliberately and disavow any taste for adulation, Sister Luke worries that her sin lies in pride—in a yen, however modest, for approval. The character several times professes to lapses in "charity, humility, and obedience" that we have a tough time perceiving. Indeed, Hepburn makes the performance more interesting by making Sister Luke so earnest in these claims, without pigeonholing the character as a rote reciter of dogma she cannot really mean, or a dupe of misguided zeal, heedlessly making faults out of virtues. The Nun's Story handles sound, lighting, color, framing, and ensemble playing so carefully that it's easier than you might expect to empathize with this pitiless regimen of self-scrutiny. But no one aids our understanding more than Hepburn, whose eyes never rest as windows into pensive animation, even as she marshals that inborn gift for composure into keeping a firm rein on the clean, stark lines of her movements, her posture, her speech, and her thought. A less ambitious performance might have snuck in little heartbeats of jollity or bloom as Sister Luke connects with what she loves (science, knowledge, succor, good work), so that her moments of self-censure are weighted all along with sentimental cues, with our desire for the character to just let it out, Be Free. Hepburn, without ever being boring, is vigilant and self-policing, on guard even against these blips of offhanded pleasure, and only as warm as the lowest gleam of the coal (but never cold). Her vigilance, her inward quest, the stillness and often the solemnity of her face are spiritualized in ways that cinema only achieves when it restrains rather than heightens its allowance of conspicuous emotion. For that reason it's a miracle when you see a portrait of complex thought but also of banked or repressed feeling in as pathos-hungry an aesthetic as that of Hollywood.

Hepburn doesn't withhold from playing the local pressures and demands of specific scenes. She is hit hard, however mutely, at seeing her first sanitarium and her first leper colony. (I'm sure we all remember our first leper colony!) She looks like she's going to gag or shake apart as she tries, tries to force herself to fail that exam, though it's the least histrionic shaking you've ever seen, complete with what appears to be perspiration on cue. She is terrified and necessarily spry at repelling a violent patient who accosts her and tries to kill her, and then humiliated by the telltale scars on her cheek. She is bored and annoyed by the flippant charm and agnostic "wit" of the Peter Finch character, the doctor to whom she reports when she finally earns her long-desired assignment to a missionary outpost in the Congo. But Hepburn is always, always playing the spiritual ramifications of these episodes first, so that they palpably supersede the sensations of a given moment. Her movements, without seeming over-rehearsed from the standpoint of acting, reveal Sister Luke's gradually cultivated self-consciousness about how others will observe her, how a holy eye will assess her, how she will or won't satisfy her own self-inspections ...and whether she will come to feel, as begins to seem possible, that the church's standards are not finally habitable for her, and that she can only make good on her promises to God and on her capacities for helping others by stepping away from God's and others' most revered institution. The Nun's Story, as written, directed, and performed, preserves this as an impossible choice. A baseline of disquiet emanates at all moments from Hepburn's face and movements, though never at a garishly high pitch, and sometimes at such a low hum that you forget about it for a second, or maybe Gabrielle does.

When she finally resolves an untenable conflict by choosing half of her life over the other in the finale, the moment inherits the accumulated force of quiver and contemplation that Hepburn has sustained for more than two hours, without once looking like an actress asking to be lauded by fans or laureled by critics. Her final scenes are played almost entirely in a silent key, and without the same kind of trajectory or scale of test that confronts, say, Adrien Brody in The Pianist, she comes as close as any 1950s Hollywood star could possibly come to the double arc of Brody's Szpilman: surviving as the person he is, yet also ending up as a very comely husk of himself, an inspiring emblem of human will and a tomb of foreclosed possibilities. And speaking of how or whether memory serves, I have "four stars" written down in my notes about this performance, but for the life of me, I can't remember why. I have certain qualms about the film as it rushes through some later chapters with one eye on The War, and there's a certain bourgeois impersonality to Zinnemann's direction even when, as here, he hits his highest heights. In Hepburn's case, I might wrack my brain for qualms or peer again at her performance, as though through a microscope, and remember some wanting element ...but bless me, Father, I cannot presently think what it is.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 29 to Go