Great '90s Performances: Anjelica Huston (The Grifters) & Tom Cruise (Magnolia)

Here are write-ups on two more performances from the 1990s for the blog 'performance showdown' at Encore's World of Film.

Anjelica Huston as Lilly Dillon in The Grifters 

Dressed in sharp blood-red or off-white suits, and with a tight peroxide perm that barely moves, Huston’s long-time matriarch of con Lilly Dillon trembles from adrenaline or nerves in Stephen Frears’ 1991 The Grifters. Huston is magnetic, ferocious and daring; it’s arguably her best and most complex performance. With an impersonal poise and rigid posture, Lilly enters The Grifters’ unforgiving world as a woman who’s constantly evading detection; her appearance pre-altered before the events of its narrative unfold. The cheap yet still glamorous get-up she wears is like a front for the crooks and a disguise for the cops. Lilly’s a mother in name, but not in nature. Her feelings for and about her son Roy (John Cusack), maternal or, particularly, otherwise leave a lot to be desired, shall we say? In the world of pulp-noir Lilly could be a direct descendant of Gloria Grahame’s Debby Marsh in The Big Heat: both got burned by the men in their lives; both got their revenge. Only Lilly’s left with a survivor’s internal scars, deeper and more searing than the reminder on her hand. Watching Lilly ceaselessly stalk and fret her way from one tricky engagement to another – phone booth to hotel, racetrack to apartment – induces a nerve-shredding restlessness; her anxiety is infectious. Huston motors the movie and takes us along for the ride, turning us into unwilling accomplices. Huston successfully manages to transfer both Lilly’s minute mannerisms (twitchy chain-smoking, deceptively vacant glare, her “Los Ang Gleez”) and her grandest, fiercest altercations through a veil of life-eroding, nervy apprehension. It’s not a good idea to be caught up in Lilly’s world, but watching it unfurl from afar is a vicarious thrill. Huston’s tremendous performance ensures we’re right there anyway. She plays if it as if it were a soul-stripping game of poker.

Tom Cruise as Frank T. J. Mackey in Magnolia 

Tom Cruise may have searched and destroyed, and respected cocks and tamed cunts, until he was blue in the face in Magnolia, but four small words cruelly defined his “master of the muffin” Frank T.J. Mackey: I’m quietly judging you. Mid-film, in an interview with female reporter Gwenovier (April Grace), he plays up his role as a spoiled and infamous infotainment megastar to a tee. Gwenovier cuts deep with her questions regarding his elusive family situation. When she presses for a particularly tricky response, he sits silent for what feels like an age; then utters those four words. This comes after some playful yet tense interaction wherein Gwenovier, defiantly immune to his charms until this point, appears to crack; in coy fashion she mentions one of his (deliberately?) undone shirt buttons. Knowingly, like a hunter having ensnared his ‘prey’, he acknowledges her mention and teasingly buttons up. It’s a queasy scene, played perfectly by Cruise and Grace, and points to Mackey’s ability to be snakily duplicitous. Mackey is perhaps Cruise’s best screen creation to date: an arrogant and spite-filled showman spouting invective to all-male crowds on how to “make that lady ‘friend’ your sex-starved servant.” Cruise expresses every one of Frank’s manipulative actions with oily hubris. Early on in the film, when we first see him on stage, he’s lit in stark silhouette, his arms positioned in a robotically phallic stance; he immaturely presents himself to appear like an evangelistic man-god. But really he’s just a spoiled boy with daddy issues. That Cruise makes him intricately complex, troubled and, saddest of all, trapped in a self-imposed emotional coma, is concrete proof that he’s often more than capable to burrow well below his surface action-star persona to convey raging heartfelt depth in a performance.

Note: the Huston write-up has been edited and reworked for this post from the Take Three piece I did on her.

Anjelica Addendum: a few extra notes on Huston and The Grifters

My latest Take Three column over at The Film Experience (where each Sunday I write about three films/performances from a character or supporting actor or actress' career) is the wonderful and always watchable Anjelica Huston. As an addendum, a supplementary addition to the column, I wanted to post up a few tidbits and pictures that I didn't include there; a few things I liked and wanted to make mention of, but that would've made the piece longer than it already is. In my research I came across many fantastic images of Huston that I hadn't seen before and, through looking further into The Grifters (1991) in particular, there were some further thoughts I wanted to share. 

This enticing image below - a publicity shot for The Grifters - captures the right mood and feeling of Huston's character, Lilly Dillon. It perfectly echoes the film's screenwriter Donald E. Westlake's description of Lilly in his second draft (March, 1989) of the film's script: '39 but looking younger, beautiful but cold and watchful'.

The two actions that Lilly is most often seen doing in the film are smoking and making phone calls; she's constantly angling for quick deals - weighing up the odds for a fix - whilst furiously dragging on a cigarette on the go. She's jittery and apprehensive for much of the film; but at other times she switches gear into hard-case-Lilly mode, to aggressively scold someone or exchange 'don't-fuck-with-me' glares with various periphery characters. Lilly's a vulnerable woman, fighting her corner each step of the way. She nervously veers from one encounter to the next in an attempt to get herself out of an assortment of tricky situations. She exhibits a stallion-like composure; underneath it all she could bolt at any minute.

The Grifters' director Stephen Frears often shoots Lilly almost pushed to the edge of the film frame. It's a directorial decision that visually emphasises how she tries to secret herself from the dangerously chaotic world around her. It enhances how she attempts to evade detection and insists on minding her own business - that's when she's not minding the business of others. She's shot like a displaced Edward Hopper subject as seen through cinematographer Oliver Stapleton's inky, noirish camerawork. (Stapleton also brought a similar noir tint to Altman's 1996 film Kansas City.)

I think Frears and Stapleton's perceptive, implied nod toward Hopper's more famous, and much cinematically referenced, paintings is far subtler, intrinsic and deftly utilised than many of the directors who have taken influence from him, especially in the case of, say, Wim Wenders' self-conscious mimic of Hopper's 1942 painting 'Nighthawks' in his film The End of Violence (1997), below. Wenders is commenting on the Hopper painting (note the camera present, the film-within-a-film angle), but his blatant evocation of it loses something in the process; by directly referencing Hopper's work the nod is then just a straight-up acknowledgement of influence. He's merely idly creating parody, instead of tantalisingly arousing the feel of the painting, or what it might mean, into the film's world - which is what Frears and Stapleton achieve in The Grifters.

They understand that a retro- or neo-noir film has to set up and inhabit its own world fully, and that an homage only adds to, and doesn't define, the overall effectiveness of a given shot in their film. In the scene in The Grifters above (when Lilly, drinking coffee and taking time out from the grift, is rudely interrupted by, and has an altercation with, a pushy tramp) Hopper's sensibility is present and is as discernible as it is easily recallable. But his influence doesn't overcome either the visual composition or the ideas and feelings that Frears wants to impart or arouse in the audience.

The image above, of Lilly sitting on a hotel bed putting on make-up as she casually glances at a TV screen, readying herself for a particularly crucial encounter, again refers to both Hopper (albeit less so than in the diner scene) and elements of classic Film Noir. But isn't necessarily defined by, or in too much awe of, either reference. And in one brief shot a lot about who Lilly is is revealed.The loneliness, personal private sloppiness and almost regal posture speak volumes about her inner life.

Another way Lilly is shot throughout the film - again it's a particular but often overused directorial attribute in framing shots, though, in my view, not by Frears in The Grifters - is through visual barriers: whether it's with the horizontal lines of venetian blinds (when Lilly visits her son Roy in hospital, below top) or the concertina grid of an elevator shutter (in the film's penultimate shot, below bottom). Such visual divisions, positioned between the character and the viewer, often tend to depict a character as held within their own personal prisons, or perhaps trapped in situations somewhat of their own making.

This idea is somewhat applicable to Lilly, but, more than overstating the commonplace use of these barriers, Frears and Stapleton - and, of course, Huston - show how Lilly is actually forever an outsider looking in (as much as she's an insider on the look out), a woman kept distant from those around her. She's less in a trap than sealed off behind visual obstructions, especially in relation to her son, Roy. Lilly is of the harsh and bruised world of Jim Thompson's The Grifters, but she is also a secluded mother and always at a remove from what she ultimately wants. The allusion to Lilly's interior self is expressed beautifully by Huston in the eternally capricious way she looks at others on screen.

But one of Frears' best allusions/shot references (in regard to that penultimate image of Huston in the elevator, above) is to an image of Mary Astor as femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941). (Note: also in the piece at The Film Experience I make mention of how Frear's depiction of Lilly reaches back through nearly 40 years of noir filmmaking to somewhat chime with Gloria Grahame's character Debby Marsh in Fritz Lang's 1953 noir, The Big Heat.) Of course John Huston was Anjelica's father, and this choice and pertinent noir reference is perhaps the best in The Grifters. There's a plethora of rich and varied pulp-noir lineage nicely contained in Frear's film. One reason of many why it endures as a splendid example of '90s retro-Noir.

Now just for the hell of it, and because the images are some of the best I've seen of Huston, here are some amazing photographs from early on in her career, when she was a model: