Word: spacek
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...sisters that too often expresses itself in shrill hectoring. Jessica Lange is Meg, the singer, free spirit and hot number, who has come home to suture the family wounds and relive an affair with her old beau Doc Porter (nicely played by Lange's real beau Sam Shepard). Sissy Spacek is Babe, under arrest for the attempted murder of her husband, who had discovered her frolicking with a black teenager. Spacek comes off best, perhaps because she gets to flash her radiant smile after a plethora of roles that forced her to bear down and save the world...
...emotionally more subtle matter: an archetypally vexatious mother-daughter relationship. In adapting play to screen, Norman and Director Tom Moore have been somewhat undone by their new medium's imperatives. The realism of camera close-ups turns probability into utter implausibility. And the casting of Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek, who cannot help projecting intelligence and the will to prevail, is inimical to the story's cause. Still, the painful honesty of the play's psychological observations survives and remains worthy of attention...
...OPENING scenes of 'night, Mother, we observe the quiet, orderly, evening rituals of Jessie Cates the night before she kills herself. As the sun sets over a small, lower-middle-class ranch house in rural America, Jessie (Sissy Spacek) gives her full attention to the monotonous, ennerving tasks of refilling the candy dishes in the living room, taking the clean towels out of the clothes dryer, cancelling the daily paper, setting the electric light timer...
...Spacek who carries the film. Her portrait of a woman who calmly plans her own death, going so far as to suggest how her mother should handle herself at the funeral, is utterly convincing. Her cool exterior, absent of regret or emotion of any kind, obliterates any pity which we might feel for her. We don't end up wishing for her death, but rather realizing, as Jessie seems to have realized all along, that death is nothing more than an aspect of life which is sometimes delayed by forces beyond our control. All she is trying...
...there." She notes: "I don't believe in living and becoming the character off screen. I find that a little sophomoric. But your mannerisms and speech are affected. The two older sisters, for example, are tremendously protective toward Babe, little Babe. Diane and I treat Sissy the same way." Spacek says that Babe "taps a real part of me. The side of me that's Babe got me into a lot of trouble in school. Teachers couldn't get me to shut up. I have so much fun playing her that sometimes I get carried away. Watching myself at dailies...