Despite the perception from many on the right, the Oscars haven’t changed that much in their 98 years. The Academy Awards allow Hollywood to project how they wish to be perceived on the world stage, and since the first ceremony in 1938, the main purpose is to launder the American film industry’s reputation in the face of an alternately outraged and irritated public. After a series of scandals throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood chose self-censorship over government intervention, and created a ceremony that would show movie stars in tuxedos, movie stars with perfect etiquette, movie stars who weren’t debaucherous criminal communists. The Oscars have never been about merit or craft—it’s a political ceremony driven by peer pressure and fear. Hollywood movies have never been worse, but the Oscars ignoring Eddington in favor of One Battle After Another isn’t surprising at all. Paul Thomas Anderson’s film risks nothing and flatters the overwhelmingly liberal media, a description you could pin on dozens of Oscars winners through the years.
Some winners endure—as do the also-rans and the inexplicable snubs—but looking over the most-nominated and most-awarded films in the ceremony’s 98-year history, so many of these films simply didn’t carry on past their time: Gandhi, A Beautiful Mind, Going My Way, The Life of Emile Zola, Shakespeare in Love, Slumdog Millionaire, Argo, CODA. And that’s just Best Picture Winners. A certain kind of movie has always been “Oscar worthy”: didactic, melodramatic, and as far away from what Hollywood does best—entertainment. Comedies and action/adventure films have never done well because they’re not self-serious. Sometimes everything converges and everyone’s happy: Titanic, No Country for Old Men, The Godfather Part II, The Silence of the Lambs. Great movies like Terms of Endearment suffer when they sweep the Oscars, because you assume it’s a certain type of movie, one that’s rarely worth anything at all.
1982’s Frances is an exemplary Oscar biopic: two-and-a-half hours, a powerhouse performance by Jessica Lange as the famously embattled Frances Farmer, and a self-important solemnity you see in similar films like Jackie, Judy, Silkwood, Ray, Hoffa, Ruby, and Oppenheimer. The single word title, especially if it’s just the first name, indicates that the subject is known to everyone, and therefore worth examining. Frances Farmer is perhaps the most infamous “troubled” actress in Hollywood history, a woman better known for her institutionalization and the scores of fabricated “tell-all” books like Shadowland and Will There Really Be a Morning? that came out after her death in April 1970. Frances, directed by journeyman Graeme Clifford from a script by Eric Bergren, begins right before Farmer goes to Hollywood and makes what’s widely considered her best movie, Come and Get It. Contracted to deliver a movie under 150 minutes, the filmmakers cut much of the early material showing Farmer’s life in Seattle. All that’s left is a brief glimpse into Farmer’s teenage flirtation with Communism: the film shows her telling her mother (Kim Stanley) that she’s going to Russia, but in the next scene, she’s back in America, ready to be used and abused by just about everyone.
Like last year’s The Smashing Machine, there’s no clean dramatic arc in Frances; if Benny Safdie’s movie was oddly uneventful, Frances is so dark and so harrowing and, crucially, full of inexplicably bad choices made by the title character that culminated in her icepick lobotomy. Sam Shepard plays a deus ex machina character used as a savior whenever Farmer needs to escape an asylum, or her mother, or Hollywood; “Harry” never existed, and while you can understand Farmer rejecting him to return to her mother the first time, it becomes unbelievable the second and third times. She could’ve ridden out into the sunset with this guy, but she keeps going home. Why? Because that’s what happened. You can make up convenient characters in “prestige” biopics, but you can only futz so much with the actual events of a person’s life. Farmer did continue to return home, and the movie doesn’t really have a central villain. Structurally, it really starts to sag during the second institutionalization, and the only thing keeping the movie going is Lange.
Jessica Lange is a name I’ve known all my life, and while I’ve seen her in plenty of movies—she’s in one of my favorites, Broken Flowers—I’ve never seen anything like her performance in Frances. Nominated alongside Kim Stanley in 1983, she lost, likely because she was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Tootsie, an award that she won. Lange started at the top and has remained part of the Hollywood firmament since the early-1980s: her first movie was the 1976 King Kong (talk about a film that has NOT endured at all), and in the first half of the 1980s she made How to Beat the High Cost of Living, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Frances, Tootsie, Country, Sweet Dreams, and Crimes of the Heart. By the time she made Cape Fear with Martin Scorsese in 1991, she was established, and managed to stay that way despite making dud after dud in the 1990s (Night and the City, Blue Sky, Losing Isaiah, Rob Roy, A Thousand Acres, Hush, Titus). She made seven movies in the 2000s, four in the 2010s, and, so far, two in the 2020s.
In many ways, it’s the perfect career: a bevy of box office hits and critical successes at the very beginning, and then… almost nothing. She’s free to publish books of photography, spend time in her hometown of Duluth, and act as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. It’s a similar career trajectory as Elizabeth Taylor—if Taylor didn’t have to suffer through being a child star. Lange’s mid-career work isn’t nearly as interesting or as eccentric as Taylor (and Richard Burton), but she kept her dignity, and never became a parody of herself. Free of an addiction to publicity, Lange flies low, knowing that her best work—Frances—is decades behind her. The movie didn’t win, but Lange sure did: a star for life, free of all the tortures that fell upon Frances Farmer.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith