The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (149 page)

Remembering the spontaneity of the bandstand dance in
My Sister Eileen
and the exhilarating “Once a Year Day” picnic sequence from
The Pajama Game
, it is no wonder that as a director Fosse is at his best with dance. But did he ever really do a “new” musical—a musical work with story, like Sondheim?
Sweet Charity
had a soft, romantic bittersweet center—it was taken from Fellini’s
Nights of Cabiria
—that permitted Shirley MacLaine to be lovable. In the same way,
Cabaret
built up the women’s-pic story to suit Liza Minnelli’s mannered gaucheness. In both cases, there was a maudlin overemphasis on trite stories that seriously slowed the films. This tendency is the sadder because in musical numbers Fosse had a clear-eyed and witty grasp of the exploitation in both films: “Hey, Big Spender” in
Sweet Charity
and “Money, Money, Money” in
Cabaret
are brilliant routines, revealing a major talent. But
Cabaret
is slack and shabby in the long narrative sections: in the club, it is as precise, acid, and lewd as Joel Grey’s emcee. “Money,” “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,” and “Mein Herr” are numbers not equaled since
Pajama Game
, even if they owe a lot to the iconography of Dietrich and George Grosz. One has only to imagine all of
Cabaret
within the club, and seen through Grey’s eyes, to recognize how it compromises.

Another version of Grey’s master of ceremonies is the American poet of desperate humor, Lenny Bruce, impersonated for Fosse by Dustin Hoffman.
Lenny
has no real songs or dance, but Bruce “sang” to his audience, acidulous blues that dared interruption; arguably only a director of musicals could have handled the subject.

Star 80
proved one of show business’s bleakest self-portraits. Mariel Hemingway made a blank, siliconized heroine, while Eric Roberts was a frenzied lover/killer.
All That Jazz
had been a delirious, romanticizing account of Fosse’s own flirtation with death—but at least the danger there was offset by the excitement of dance and work. Glamour was
Star 80
’s equivalent, and few American filmmakers have looked on that ghost with such loathing. There is a mood of Nathanael West in the film. With more humor and less helpless despair, it could have been a black masterpiece.

Jodie Foster
(Alicia Christian Foster), b. Los Angeles, 1962
Little Man Tate
(91), Jodie Foster’s first directing job, is a decent, thoughtful TV-like movie about the dilemma of having and being a brilliant kid. It shows skill, care, and an absolute liberal regularity that is the more welcome and endearing from someone who has led Jodie Foster’s life. Consider what she has been through: she has been a young American in tumultuous times; her mother and father separated before she was born; she was very smart—at least as difficult as its opposite; she was a child actress, in commercials, TV, and movies; at the age of thirteen, she had to understand and present the character of Iris in
Taxi Driver
(76, Martin Scorsese); she then became the helpless goal of John Hinckley’s insanity—and of all the press attention that followed; she became an adult actress, though without any conventional glamour; and now she has won the best actress Oscar twice before the age of thirty.

Of course, such lives teach us the fallacies of conventional causation and the virtues of unique character. Jodie Foster is her own person, able to benefit from the Lycée Français and Yale, ready for the challenge of directing, resolutely articulate, and generous enough to make
Little Man Tate
a bow to mothers like her own.

Her movie career began with
Napoleon and Samantha
(72, Bernard McEveety);
Kansas City Bomber
(72, Jerrold Freedman);
Tom Sawyer
(73, Don Taylor);
One Little Indian
(73, McEveety);
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
(74, Scorsese); and
Echoes of a Summer
(76, Taylor).

Taxi Driver
required her to say things and be in actions that were shocking onscreen—and which are unthinkable (if everyday) for a child in real life. Her performance seemed unconscious of its shock value; indeed, Foster made Iris amazingly mundane and petty. Obviously she had help—from Scorsese, Schrader, De Niro, and Keitel—but no screen child had ever been so stark or so resistant to our need for sentimentality.

Bugsy Malone
(76, Alan Parker) was a bizarre return to real childhood acting grownup. Then she did
Freaky Friday
(77, Gary Nelson);
Moi, Fleure Bleue
(77, Eric Le Hung);
Il Casotto
(77, Sergio Citti);
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
(77, Nicolas Gessner);
Candleshoe
(78, Norman Tokar);
Carny
(80, Robert Kaylor);
Foxes
(80, Adrian Lyne);
O’Hara’s Wife
(82, William S. Bart-man); and Trilby to Peter O’Toole’s
Svengali
(83, Anthony Harvey) for TV.

She was clearly a young adult in
The Hotel New Hampshire
(84, Tony Richards), and in France she was in
Le Sang des Autres
(84, Claude Chabrol). She coproduced and acted in
Mesmerized
(86, Michael Laughlin). Then came
Siesta
(87, Mary Lambert);
Five Corners
(88, Tony Bill);
Stealing Home
(88, Steven Kampmann); and
The Accused
(88, Jonathan Kaplan), for which she won the Oscar as the raped woman who goes to court. Again, she was startlingly coarse and tough—so few actresses can put the ladylike aside as thoroughly.

Then after a flirtation with sexiness in
Backtrack
(90, Dennis Hopper), she played Clarice Starling in
The Silence of the Lambs
(91, Jonathan Demme)—another Oscar. The surprise here was her gentleness and naïveté, the slowness of a country girl, and the very subtle receptivity to the scent of romance, or allure, between her and Hannibal Lecter.

She was the wife in
Sommersby
(93, Jon Amiel), given her first real screen romance, with Richard Gere. It didn’t work, which means that Foster may never be easy casting. It is hard to know why she agreed to be in the futile
Maverick
(94, Richard Donner).

The encouraging thing about Foster in recent years is her wise opting for life. Why not, when you have had a “career” so long, and come so close to several forms of celebrity disaster? So it’s more positive, I think, that she has had two children, and made it clear that the means of birth are her business, and hers alone. I’m sure she means to be a real mother, and I think she has succeeded at most things she takes on. That is the best explanation for the new mildness in her film work—directing the undisturbing
Home for the Holidays
(95) and acting in
Contact
(97, Robert Zemeckis),
Anna and the King
(99, Andy Tennant) and
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
(02, Peter Care). She is young and strong enough to be back one day with something remarkable. She was at her best again—under threat—in
Panic Room
(02, David Fincher).

Coming up on fifty, Foster can look beautiful still—or sick from exercise. She is not easy to cast, but she has a major presence: a small part in
A Very Long Engagement
(04, Jean-Pierre Jeunet); demented in
Flightplan
(05, Robert Schwentke), perhaps her silliest film; loyal to the cheerful mystery of
Inside Man
(06, Spike Lee); but tortured and very smart in
The Brave One
(07, Neil Jordan), a film that catches her strange sense of anguished secrecy;
Nim’s Island
(08, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin).

James Fox
, b. London, 1939
Could Tony in
The Servant
(63, Joseph Losey) be a son of Lord Darlington in
The Remains of the Day
(93, James Ivory)? The question is prompted by the unusual way in which the actor James Fox has mined the uneasy ground on the fringes of the English upper class. He’s so good as someone who doesn’t quite understand quickly enough what’s happening, and as guilty (rather gloomy) privilege that sees its own ghost in the mirror.

He got his start as a child actor, under the name William Fox, in
The Magnet
(50, Charles Frend)—he was the son of an agent, Robin Fox. Then he came back as a young adult:
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
(62, Tony Richardson); very good in the cockpit of
The Servant
(he was amorously involved with Sarah Miles at the time);
Tamahine
(63, Philip Leacock);
King Rat
(65, Bryan Forbes);
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
(65, Ken Annakin); playing an American comfortably in
The Chase
(66, Arthur Penn)—but a Texan with the English disease of feeling inadequate;
Arabella
(67, Adriano Barocco);
Thoroughly Modern Millie
(67, George Roy Hill);
Duffy
(68, Robert Parrish); as Edward Gordon Craig in
Isadora
(68, Karel Reisz); and trying his best to be a gangster, with Mick Jagger, in
Performance
(70, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg).

Did that scabrous movie shock Fox himself? He gave up acting and joined a religious sect for nearly ten years, working only once, in a film made by the Billy Graham organization:
No Longer Alone
(78, Nicholas Webster). In that time, it was his older brother, Edward, who seemed likely to be the best-remembered actor in the family—it is a pity that no one has cast them together.

James did come back:
Country
(81, Richard Eyre);
Pavlova
(83, Emil Lotianou); touching as the father of a runaway daughter in
Runners
(83, Charles Sturridge);
Greystoke
(84, Hugh Hudson); Fielding in
A Passage to India
(84, David Lean);
Absolute Beginners
(86, Julien Temple);
The Whistle Blower
(86, Simon Langton);
High Season
(87, Clare Peploe);
Farewell to the King
(89, John Milius);
She’s Been Away
(90, Peter Hall);
The Russia House
(90, Fred Schepisi); magnificently fastidious and evasive as Sir Anthony Blunt in
A Question of Attribution
(92, John Schlesinger); and
Heart of Darkness
(94, Roeg).

He remains a stalwart of British TV and of any effort to depict Britishness:
Fall from Grace
(94 Waris Hussein);
Doomsday Gun
(94, Robert Young);
The Old Curiosity Shop
(94, Kevin Connor);
The Dwelling Place
(94, Gavin Millar);
The Choir
(95, Ferdinand Fairfax);
Gulliver’s Travels
(96, Sturridge);
Never Ever
(96, Charles Finch); as Karenin in
Anna Karenina
(97, Bernard Rose);
Kings in Grass Castles
(97, John Woods);
Shadow Run
(98, Geoffrey Reeve); as Mountbatten in
Jinnah
(98, Jamil Dehlavi);
Mickey Blue Eyes
(99, Kelly Makin);
Metropolis
(00, Peter Morgan);
Up at the Villa
(00, Franco Zeffirelli);
The Golden Bowl
(00, James Ivory);
Sexy Beast
(00, Jonathan Glazer);
Armadillo
(01, Howard Davies);
The Mystic Masseur
(01, Ismail Merchant).

He was Professor Summerlee in
The Lost World
(01, Stuart Orme);
Shaka Zulu: The Citadel
(01, Joshua Sinclair);
Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairy Tale
(01, Philip Saville); as Lord Carrington in
The Falklands Play
(02, Michael Samuels);
Trial & Retribution VI
(02, Ferdinand Fairfax); Lord Halifax in
Cambridge Spies
(03, Tim Fywell) on TV; the king in
The Prince & Me
(04, Martha Coolidge). Since then, he has had a string of “colonels”—suspects in Agatha Christie mysteries, or the suave hero getting the chaps out of
Colditz
(05, Orme).

Jamie Foxx
(Eric Marlon Bishop), b. Terrell, Texas, 1967
What can he not do? As a matter of fact, in Texas, Eric Bishop was a pretty good high-school quarterback, and it shows when he gets to take over from the battered Dennis Quaid in
Any Given Sunday
(99, Oliver Stone), a farce of such extreme proportion that it asks us to accept Al Pacino as an NFL coach! But for Jamie Foxx, this was good training. He has had a habit so far of bringing a kind of energetic grounding to ridiculous proceedings—thus his dogged cab driver in
Collateral
(04, Michael Mann) where he simply refuses to consider that he’s been drawn into one of Mann’s dafter blue-ray dreams.

Indeed, Foxx is one of those actors who still seems to get a rare, energizing pleasure out of his work. Moreover, he has the generosity and directness that insist on us sharing the good time. More or less it works. I’d guess he was a born mimic, to such an extent that his best actor Oscar for
Ray
(04, Taylor Hackford) goes gloatingly too far in a film that lightens up on the Ray Charles story enough to please the Charles family. But Foxx’s exultation at getting the chance is so apparent that we go with the film.

He was raised by grandmothers and aunts after being abandoned at seven months. He was a bundle of talents, however, and in 1991 he joined the cast of
In Living Color
and changed his name to Jamie Foxx (harking back to the comedian Redd Foxx). He made his movie debut in
Toys
(92, Barry Levinson). He was doing comedy and singing all at the same time, but gradually the film career came together:
The Truth About Cats & Dogs
(96, Michael Lehmann);
The Great White Hype
(96, Reginald Hudlin); in search of condoms in
Booty Call
(97, Jeff Pollack);
The Players Club
(98, Ice Cube);
Held Up
(99, Steve Rash);
Bait
(00, Antoine Fuqua);
Date from Hell
(01, Rashidi Natara Harper).