"Damages"

SECRET STORMS

With an ever-present anxiety percolating on high, Glenn Close is the personification of dominatrix, never more convincingly than when she’s a disheveled emotional mess, a virtual flesh-eater, or a devious crusader. A friend says she’s so physically a force of antagonism it’s she “who popped out of John Hurt’s tummy in Alien and with whip already in hand.” This has to be why some people recoil: a bloodlessness swirls about her, and often the severity of a rigid anatomy reminds us of Anne Revere—both could be indicted for being persistently, even combatively remote. Revere, though, was a singular type and would earn an eventual acquittal; Close is prolific in facets of type and apparently as well as perpetually guilty of something psycho blurry. Be it Fatal Attraction, or Dangerous Liaisons or Reversal of Fortune. Not unexpectedly the critics started squawking Close has played too many bitches, becoming too de rigueur to cast her as the gargoyle. Maybe, maybe not. When she plays goodie two-shoe numbers like those in The Natural, Immediate Family and the TV Sarah things, you want to barf. (And just what in hell is she doing to herself in Altman’s crapass snoozer Cookie’s Fortune?) Close isn’t and never has been exactly lovable, she isn’t user-friendly; from a huge reserve of feline vibes her claws naturally descend, her purrs not contentment but potential villainy. What seems to have allowed her to escape the trap of type casting is getting us to coax her on—for example, the flaming couture Cruella De Vil and her antics were blissfully over the top, or the zonked Fanny Lieber bit on Will & Grace. But it wasn’t easy to cheer or bliss out during her season on The Shield and it isn’t in her FX series Damages, either. As an anti-big business litigator she has updated the clichés of dirtywork, or, as Newsweek essayed about the vogue phase of antihero, turned into the feminist embodiment of “too much of a bad thing.” She allows us to applaud her charge against the corrupt, while at the same time giving us the shivers over the extent to which she’ll guarantee victory. And not only in actions: some of our discomfiture about her in the series is the way she’s photographed, especially in the second and third seasons. Since Jagged Edge, and on menacing display in Fatal Attraction, we’ve never been able to help not noticing how powerful and protrusive is her chin—it looks like it’s been re-designed by the Disney animators modernizing Captain Hook. In Damages, the camera seems almost arbitrarily uncomplimentary, zeroing in on the near-porcelain face to expose any latency of murderous criminality. The secret storms whirling around Close become our apprehensions—she uses fashionable pathologies to batter down on us the latest rages from the dark side. That’s not anything to bitch about, even as we’re setting the alarm.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com