The
Academy Award for best actress is particularly competitive this year, and
particularly difficult to predict. My nominees are:
Nicole Kidman for Eyes Wide Shut. Although she must certainly
have been uncomfortable dressed only in her underwear for several months
while shooting Stanley Kubrick's last film, Kidman is spontaneous and natural,
characteristics not always apparent in Kubrick's films. As time passes,
her role will be seen as a defining one and, indeed, one of the best in
any of Kubrick's fourteen films. A classic performance.
Rene Russo in The Thomas Crown Affair. The film is not
much,
a remake of a Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway movie that wasn't very good to
begin with, and the remake is not any better. The co-star, Pierce Brosnan,
is a suit of clothes unable to find an actor to inhabit them, but Russo
is totally, naturally (or au naturally) the complete woman. She is now
in her early forties, and even the paint by numbers script can't conceal
the fact that she is one of the wonders of the screen.
Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted. Jolie, daughter of actor Jon
Voight, plays a psychotic and self-destructive young woman whose sole purpose
in life seems to be to destroy those around her. This is exactly the kind
of performance the Academy likes. It enables a beautiful woman to look
ugly, it calls for rapid changes in emotional expression, and it allows
an obviously sympathetic woman to appear unsympathetic. Jolie is
mesmerizing, and her future looks unlimited. (Rather unfairly, Jolie
was put into the Supporting Actress category and won the Oscar against
actresses in much smaller roles.)
Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted. Although Jolie has the most spectacular
role in the film and will receive most of the applause, Ryder is the core
of the film. Starting out in Heathers as a “a sweet young thang.”
Ryder has matured into an actor of considerable skill and range. The character
she plays is confined to an institution in the late sixties, with so-called
“borderline personality disorder,” and slowly pulls together the pieces
of her fragmented and disordered personality and reassembles them in a
believable fashion. A marvelous performance.
Julianne Moore in The End of the Affair. In the last three years,
Moore has matured into a great actress. Although her earlier roles (Magnolia,
Cookie's
Fortune,
Boogie
Nights, Map of the World) showed her steadily increasing skill,
Neil Jordan's film places her in a complicated emotional triangle which
gives full range to her enormous talent. After
The End of the Affair,
she played Clarice Starling in Hannibal. Who needs Jodie Foster
anyway?
Against this formidable competition, my choice for best actress for 1999
is Reese Witherspoon, for Election. Witherspoon, hardly out of her
teens, is very good, and has been good for some time, but it's hard to
see how she can ever match this role. As a teenage perfectionist running
for high school student body president and willing to do whatever it takes
to win the job, she is completely believable. Indeed, she is so good that
I fear she may be limited to unsympathetic roles. I suppose she gets her
comeuppance in the film, but she takes everyone else down with her. Sadly,
she was not even nominated, but Election will have a long shelf
life on video.