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EDSEL An educated non-conformist who hated her mother, an open critic of the phoniness of Hollywood, an avid cop-hater, Frances Farmer was a beautiful and willfully free-spirited actress whose infamous instability may have been sparked not only by her privately held demons but perhaps also by a then-medically unrecognized intolerance to liquor. (She would at some stages of her life deny being an alcoholic or a drug user.) As Kenneth Anger writes in Hollywood Babylon, Farmer’s loud anti-social eruptions and violent skirmishes with the law—clear warnings even then she was headed for a breakdown—could have been intercepted by a lawyer who, aware of her outsized reactions to booze, might have pleaded the Court’s mercy. Tragically, she had no Hollywood studio support and little if any serious legal representation—only a mother who, bent on control via persistent power plays, signed away Frances’ legal protections, thus pushing her into years of horror in the snake pits, where in succession she was given insulin and shock therapies, and possibly sexually abused. Rumors she was lobotomized, which came from a fabricated biography, would undergo official investigation, concluding she never had one. Looking at pictures of Farmer, there’s no question Jessica Lange in Frances comes close to resembling her—ratty hair, disheveled clothing, bruised lip and all the rest. More often, however, Lange suggests Tuesday Weld doing Farmer—and Tuesday, without inference, is closer to her as an actress than Lange, whose healthiness and no-nonsense demeanor are ballast keeping her stable. For the first hour or so, Lange is counterfeit—connections to the character and a connection to the audience are missing; she’s a blank. Entering the nuthouse, becoming a recipient of its treatment methods (including ones she never had), she’s got small battle victories, but by end, when appearing on This is Your Life as an ad for the wonders of psychiatric hocus pocus and is rewarded with an Edsel, she can’t really bring a convincing difference between Frances’ old fire and her new somnambulism as the crypticly inexplicable that was there from the start still remains. (Lange has better luck with the loons in Blue Sky and A Streetcar Named Desire.) With Kim Stanley, indicted as yet another Mommie Dearest. Directed by Graeme Clifford; produced by Mel Brooks, who’d likely have done wonders for the audience had he played the lobotomist.
Text COPYRIGHT © 2000 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
