The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (262 page)

He had the male lead in the film of
Oleanna
(94, Mamet);
The Client
(94, Joel Schumacher);
Murder in the First
(95, Marc Rocco);
Mr. Holland’s Opus
(95, Stephen Herek);
Down Periscope
(96, David S. Ward); hideously frustrated in
Fargo
(96, Joel Coen);
Ghosts of Mississippi
(96, Rob Reiner); on TV for
Andersonville
(96, John Frankenheimer);
Air Force One
(97, Wolfgang Petersen); superb and suicidal in
Boogie Nights
(97, Anderson);
Wag the Dog
(97, Barry Levinson);
Pleasantville
(98, Gary Ross).

He was Arbogast in the remake of
Psycho
(98, Gus Van Sant);
A Civil Action
(98, Zaillian);
Happy, Texas
(99, Mark Illsley);
A Slight Case of Murder
(99, Steven Schachter), a very amusing inside-movies story which Macy wrote, and which also starred his wife, Felicity Huffman; the aged and wretched Quiz Kid in
Magnolia
(99, Anderson); the lead, and good, in
Panic
(00, Henry Bromell);
State and Main
(00, Mamet);
Jurassic Park III
(01, Joe Johnston);
Focus
(01, Neal Slavin).

He was in
Welcome to Collinwood
(02, Anthony and Joe Russo); actor and cowriter on
Door to Door
(02, Schachter);
The Cooler
(03, Wayne Kramer);
Stealing Sinatra
(03, Ron Underwood); on TV in
Out of Order;
very funny as “Tick Tock” McGlaughlin in
Seabiscuit
(03, Ross);
The Last Shot
(04, Jeff Nathanson);
Spartan
(03, David Mamet);
Cellular
(04, David R. Ellis).

He had a big success on TV in
The Wool Cap
(05, Schachter), which they cowrote, and he was in
Edmond
(05, Mamet) and
Thank You for Smoking
(05, Jason Reitman). But then a “cooler” crossed his path:
Sahara
(05, Breck Eisner). It was a big flop and nothing has worked since:
Bobby
(06, Emilio Estevez);
Inland Empire
(06, David Lynch);
Wild Hogs
(07, Walt Becker);
He Was a Quiet Man
(07, Frank Cappello);
The Deal
(08, Schachter);
Bart Got a Room
(08, Brian Hecker);
The Maiden Heist
(09, Peter Hewitt).

Guy Maddin
, b. Winnipeg, Canada, 1956
1986:
The Dead Father
(s). 1988:
Tales from the Gimli Hospital
. 1989:
Mauve Decade
(s);
BBB
(s). 1990:
Tyro
(s);
Archangel
. 1991:
Indigo High-Hatters
(s). 1992:
Careful
. 1993:
The Pomps of Satan
(s). 1994:
Sea Beggars
(s). 1995:
Sissy Boy Slap Party
(s);
Odilon Redon, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity
(s);
The Hands of Ida
(s). 1996:
Imperial Orgies
(s). 1997:
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs
. 1998:
Maldoror: Tygers
(s);
The Hoyden
(s);
The Cock Crew
(s). 1999:
Hospital Fragment
(s). 2000:
The Heart of the World
(s);
Fleshpots of Antiquity
(s). 2002:
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary; Fancy, Fancy Being Rich
(TV). 2003:
Cowards Bend the Knee; The Saddest Music in the World
. 2006:
Brand Upon the Brain!; My Dad Is 100 Years Old
(s);
Nude Caboose
(s). 2007:
My Winnipeg; Odin’s Shield Maiden
(s). 2009:
Glorious
(s);
Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair
(s);
Night Mayor
(s).

Defiantly and sublimely personal, surreal and amateur, avant garde yet Winnipegian, Guy Maddin is one of most splendidly self-contained artists in world film. When footage on one picture was damaged at the laboratory, he relished the blotchy deformation and discovered the high place of chance in his work. That is not calculated to attract significant money, or star performers. And yet, by
The Saddest Music in the World
—a droll work that threatened to break beyond Maddin’s normal festival range—he had Isabella Rossellini and Maria de Medeiros, and the story was that Rossellini had persuaded Maddin to make a picture about her father! This is a little more than chance—it looks like lunatic opportunism.

Yet one trusts Maddin to remain himself. Ever since the very striking
Tales from the Gimli Hospital
he has taken possession of material that ranges from the farcical to the grisly. He does a great deal of the work himself, and shoots on a shoestring budget, often using Super 8 and 16 mm, and sometimes throwing splashes of color at the film to convey or signal emotion. His work is known for its evocation of silent, black-and-white cinema, and throughout Maddin there is a wistful feeling for the lost poetry of the late twenties. Nothing seems likely to halt him—except real success. But these days, can one count on the public to leave such a strange genius alone? There is always the risk that he might suddenly be acclaimed, and imprisoned, by charges of being “Canada’s David Lynch”!

Madonna
(Madonna Louise Ciccone), b. Detroit, Michigan, 1959
Imagine that you are watching something that especially moves you—your two-year-old child eating profiteroles; Joe Montana moving down the field; dawn at the Canyon de Chelly; or the close of
Ugetsu Monogatari
, whatever. Your communion with this spectacle is suddenly ruptured by what we will call a commercial break. This is all the more disturbing in that you did not know that what you were watching (the medium) was subject to such intrusions. You did not know the technology was yet available to come between you and the entire air and sky at Canyon de Chelly. But “they” have managed it, and the ad zips up every horizon. In that disaster, the ad—I suggest—should be the insolent, in-your-face “attitude” of Ms. Ciccone. There is no need for a product. There is nothing in Madonna to be advertised, except for her ironic, deflecting contempt. She is an ad for advertising; she is the famousness of celebrity; and a fit vehicle for an unusual kind of serial-killing movie—one in which photography poisons the world.

You know the argument: guns, for example, are helpless things that only serve those who use them—guns may dispose of would-be rapists and murderers; guns permit the animals that provide meat to be killed swiftly; guns allow the exercise and pleasure of hunting; and armaments manufacturers build schools and hospitals.

Similarly, moving images have been a field for the dreams of Ozu, Hawks, Ophuls,
etc.
Photography has brought into being Lartigue, Ansel Adams,
etc.
But in addition, movie and photography are advertising, fashion spreads, and Madonna and
Truth or Dare
(91, Alek Keshishian).

There is no going back, and no way of not wondering whether somewhere along the way wrong paths have been taken. I am reminded of the image of Warren Beatty in
Truth or Dare
, in dark glasses, trying to edge away, trying to defy the camera with nothingness, and eventually marveling that anyone could suppose this Madonna has any life “off” camera. It is one of the great tragic images in modern film, not least because Mr. Beatty has evidently recognized the horrendous question, what is
he
doing there? And what are we doing watching?

Perhaps a case can be made for Madonna as singer and dancer. But as an actress, she is the person who got out of the empty car—I speak as someone who saw her on stage in David Mamet’s
Speed-the-Plow
(where it was possible to lose sight and thought of her even as she walked across stage). But she hardly needs talent, so great is her “artistic integrity,” and there are those ready to call her satire and her indifference the most audacious strokes of Dada. She has her defenders, and I suspect she loathes them even more than she scorns her enemies. She is disappointed about something, and hugely driven by resentment.

She appeared in
A Certain Sacrifice
(85, Stephen John Lewicki);
Desperately Seeking Susan
(85, Susan Seidelman); and
Vision Quest
(85, Howard Brookner). She did a song for
At Close Range
(86, James Foley), and she appeared in
Shanghai Surprise
(86, Jim Goddard)—both of which involved Sean Penn, to whom, briefly, she was married. She appeared in
Who’s That Girl?
(87, Foley);
Bloodhounds of Broadway
(89, Brookner);
Dick Tracy
(90, Beatty);
Shadows and Fog
(91, Woody Allen); and—seemingly furious that Sharon Stone has so effortlessly mocked and surpassed her in
Basic Instinct
—in
Body of Evidence
(93, Uli Edel); as an actress in
Dangerous Game
(93, Abel Ferrara).

The burden did not lighten: she made appearances in
Blue in the Face
(95, Wayne Wang);
Four Rooms
(95, Allison Anders);
Girl 6
(96, Spike Lee); and then all the ads said she was
Evita
(96, Alan Parker)—no matter that she managed hardly any emotional involvement, and again seemed incapable of understanding the nature of acting. Still, nothing before had been as fatuous as
The Next Best Thing
(00, John Schlesinger). Since then—as you may have heard—she has had a child with her new husband, the English director Guy Ritchie. Cross your fingers for the babe and ignore her siblings
—The Hire: Star
(01, Ritchie). She and her husband did a remake of
Swept Away
(02, Ritchie)—and it was, wherever it played.

She was in
I’m Going to Tell You a Secret
(05, Jonas Akerlund);
Arthur and the Invisibles
(06, Luc Besson);
I Am Because We Are
(08, Nathan Risson). Perhaps that last title rang like an omen. She was ready, and so she directed a feature film—
Filth and Wisdom
(08). It went to TV, to “On Demand”—but there was none.

Anna Magnani
(1908–73), b. Rome
Her face was so ecstatically wounded, so sure of men’s frailty, yet so driven to try again, it was hard to believe that Magnani had ever been young or demure. (She was nearly forty already in the films she is famous for.) Yet there are photographs of her from the 1930s, striving to look like a young Joan Crawford and with that striking sauce of Latin and Arabic looks. (She had had an Italian mother and an Egyptian father, and she lived part of her childhood in Alexandria.) She attended the Eleanora Duse Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was an outstanding theatre actress, in
Anna Christie
and
The Petrified
Forest
, and had a big career in variety as well. Indeed, her husband, film director Goffredo Alessandrini (they were married in 1934) told her to stick to the stage. But she did a lot of films in the thirties in small roles:
La Cieca di Sorrento
(34, Nunzio Malasomma);
Tempo Massimo
(34, Mario Mattoli); a singer in
Cavalleria
(36, Alessandrini);
Trenta Secondi d’Amore
(36, Mario Bonnard);
La Principessa Tarakanova
(38, Fedor Ozep and Mario Soldati);
Una Lampada alla Finestra
(40, Gino Talamo);
La Fuggitiva
(41, Piero Ballerini); and her first good part, as a singer again, in
Teresa Venerdi
(41, Vittorio De Sica);
Finalmente Soli
(42, Giacomo Gentilomo);
La Fortuna Viene del Cielo
(42, Akos Rathonyi);
L’Avventura di Annabella
(43, Leo Menardi);
La Vita e Bella
(43, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia); playing lower class with Aldo Fabrizi in
Campo de’ Fiori
(43, Bonnard) and
L’Ultima Carrozzella
(43, Mattoli);
Il Fiore Sotto Gli Occhi
(44, Guido Brignone); and
Quartetto Pazzo
(45, Giulio Salvini).

So many of those films exploited her as singer and as a rather broad variety favorite. Everything changed with her small but riveting performance in
Rome, Open City
(45, Roberto Rossellini), the passionate death scene, and the film’s reception overseas. She was given a new range of parts, and at her age she was too wise and insecure to take them with less than a wolf’s appetite. In addition, she and Rossellini were famous lovers.

She did
Abbaso la Miseria!
(46, Gennaro Righelli);
Un Uomo Ritorna
(46, Max Neufeld);
Il Banditto
(46, Alberto Lattuada); in a modern
Tosca
, with Tito Gobbi,
Davanti a lui Tremava tutta Roma
(46, Carmine Gallone);
Abbasso la Ricchezza!
(47, Righelli);
L’Onorevole Angelina
(47, Luigi Zampa);
Lo Sconosciuto di San Marino
(48, Michael Waszinsky); with Eduardo De Filippo in
Assunta Spina
(48, Mattoli).

Rossellini then showcased her in the two parts of
L’Amore
(48), first as the woman on the telephone to her lover in Cocteau’s
La Voix Humaine
, and then as the shepherdess, seduced by a vagrant (Federico Fellini), whom she takes for a saint. This is acting in the grand manner, half-realism, half-opera—neither role has a hint of the humor that was so strong in Magnani. But, still, she was extraordinary in
L’Amore
.

As Rossellini exchanged her for Ingrid Bergman, Magnani was a figure in a real melodrama, her woundedness vindicated. She made
Molti Sogni per la Strada
(48, Mario Camerini) and
Vulcano
(50, William Dieterle), a blatant response to
Stromboli
, and a disaster. She was way over the top in
Bellissima
(51, Luchino Visconti), playing a woman trying to get her daughter into pictures. Then, after
Camicie Rosse
(52, Alessandrini), as Garibaldi’s mistress, but trying to rehabilitate her former husband, she made her greatest picture, and one of the finest studies of acting—
The Golden Coach
(52, Jean Renoir). She also played herself in the episodic
Siamo Donne
(53, Visconti).