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COMING OUT Karel Reisz's Sweet Dreams will come to be known as the coming out for Jessica Lange. The zonked-out, never-quite-there features in some of her previous work -- King Kong, Tootsie, Frances and parts of Country (when the camera moves in on her) -- are gone. For the first time she's right for a role -- absolutely right for playing the legendary Patsy Cline, and for the first time I believed in her as an actress. The achievement is all the more striking because Lange has to do what's been the bane of many performers before her--lip-synch to pre-recorded music. If at the beginning we're all too aware of it -- because Lange can't sing; because the music is state-of-the-art enhanced; and because Cline's voice is inimitable -- the accomplishment is, long before the end, Lange convinces us to accept Cline's singing as her own. Due mainly to how she gets into Cline's life and her songs for a movie character, not as clone, which would have been easy, but as a full-bodied icon, so vivid and likable you simply have to have more of her. (She has said this was "the best time I ever had making a movie" and we believe it.) Any real complexity in Cline has been removed; the story is straight forwardly about the relationship between Cline and her second husband (Ed Harris) and how her rising career interferes with wedded bliss. Simplifying all of this helps Lange. So does the plaintiveness in Cline's lyrics -- "I've got your picture, she's got you," "Why can't he be you?" -- saying she's a sucker for love but won't give up. Indisputable emotional core of country music, it's also the reason she was a successful crossover to the pop charts. She remains as powerful a conveyer today as when she left us, a day sixty years ago many of us haven't forgotten. Audiences still feel her honesty and it's what Lange embraces. Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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