Monday, May 12, 2008
The most ferocious performer on film today is proof there are still big stars -- it's the pictures that got smaller.
Jun 11, 2005 | One of my fondest memories of Pauline Kael was a weekend at her home in Great Barrington, Mass., just a few months before she died. Newsday critic Gene Seymour and I spent two nights catching her up on a fantastic new actress, Angelina Jolie, whom she had seen once in a Mike Newell comedy, "Pushing Tin" (1999), and been delighted with. Pauline didn't care much for "Girl, Interrupted," the film for which Jolie won the best supporting actress Oscar (neither did Seymour, who earned a hearty laugh by dubbing it "Snakepit 90210"), but she howled gleefully every time Jolie reduced one of the other actresses in the film to mere window dressing.
"Those poor actresses," she said. "She's absolutely fearless in front of a camera. This girl would scare the crap out of Jack Nicholson in 'Cuckoo's Nest.'" Kael's favorite performance was Jolie as the doomed bisexual supermodel Gia in the HBO film. "My God," she exclaimed, "this girl could play both the Brando and Maria Schneider roles in 'Last Tango'! Where in the world did she come from?"
From where indeed? One of her earlier directors called her "an extraordinary-looking creature, like some weird, undiscovered orchid." Never having attended college, Jolie is unencumbered by the jargon-riddled baggage that passes for modern education. The instinctual power of her work is refreshingly devoid of the anesthetizing layers that plague so much American acting. Her responses to everything are visceral and direct, a quality that has earned her a fandom that cuts across class, sex and even political lines. While other celebrities exhaust themselves trying to stay hip, Jolie, who offers no indication in her interviews that she has any knowledge or interest in popular culture, defines hip. Apparently oblivious to the mockery of a large portion of the mainstream press (such as the New York Times, which headlined a story "Can Angelina Jolie Save the World?") and even the cheap collegiate cynicism of "Saturday Night Live," Jolie, like the existential man whom French intellectuals used to worship, chooses her own loyalties and responsibilities without deference to conservative or liberal pieties.
She is often referred to in magazines as Hollywood royalty, but Angelina the actress isn't really her father's girl or anyone else's. Like Athena, she seems to have sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus -- except that her estranged father, Jon Voight, isn't her Zeus; she inherited his talent but not his instincts. (Combine Voight with Jolie's beautiful mother, the French Canadian Iroquois actress Marcheline Bertrand, and her uncle, Chip Taylor, the rock singer who wrote "Wild Thing," and you might have something). Jolie is both her own Zeus and Athena, constantly re-creating herself. She may be the first great movie star ever to have no antecedents. Film critic Parker Tyler thought the pantheon of movie gods and goddesses in every era to be new versions of their predecessors; Marilyn Monroe was a reincarnation of Jean Harlow, Liz Taylor of Theda Bara, etc. But Jolie doesn't evoke previous movie goddesses; there is a touch of her godmother, Jacqueline Bisset, who, like Angelina, was considered the most beautiful actress of her time but who was a dull screen presence compared to Jolie.
There is, perhaps, a hint of the spirit of another Hollywood brat, the young Jane Fonda, in her, though it's difficult to picture Jolie ever settling into such a doctrinaire sociopolitical stance as Fonda's in the late '60s. Jolie is so independent she doesn't even qualify as a feminist, unless the definition can be extended to a woman who loved so fiercely that she carried a vial of her husband's blood around her neck. As for politics, Jolie's activism hasn't lent itself to easy answers and finger pointing but to front-line involvement ("My first job today," she wrote in her journal about her U.N. missions, "Notes From My Travels," "was measuring the medicine powder at the therapeutic feeding center. Under the age of five -- extra nutrition. Pregnant -- measured. I wanted to be careful not to measure a spoonful too short.")
Get Salon in your mailbox!