On Marianne Jean-Baptiste: A Modern Screen Tragedian
Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy in “Hard Truths” (image courtesy of Studio Canal)
written by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
Liberation comes at a cost. So does good art. So does, one could argue (weakly) a career.
Eh. Careers are worthless where there are no lives. “You can have a life in the theater or a career,” Judith Malina of The Living Theatre once wrote. Seldom can one have both. If you do, it was how that cookie crumbled. Something novel occurred; an artistic career is aberrative, although they exist.
But these notes here are for the actor or the performance artist – be it a dancer, comedian, monologist, mime, etc – any solo artist who uses their body as an instrument of self expression and has something to say besides the words of a writer forced into their mouths; it’s this artist who I address. The way I did during the beginning of 8th period - or after lunch - in high school, when at some point after my conversion (my trip to Russia, where we visited the Moscow Art Studio) – I knew that art and whatever art I held inside myself would be enough to base a life on, enough to create a criterion for integrity and what was “good” and “bad.”
I realized my neurosis was nothing to be terrified of, but something to acquaint with. Something I could befriend, not tame, but accept and find a way to make something positive out of it. When I realized that acting was just rock and roll without the literal music and guitars, that monologists were poets and hip-hop artists without adherence to an external beat or aural rhythm – I understood where revolution lay or at least where it could be found.
I suffered for many years because of this and I went through more nervous breakdowns and suicidal moments than I care to recall; but the sobriety of my insight was always that the Actor was an artist unto themselves. They do not need a director, nor a playwright. If the actor has something to say, to express, a desire to illuminate, entertain and reflect or warn – then the actor will always be a force for liberation.
And all great performances, especially the fleeting and temporal ones in the theater, are moments of revolution: they open up doorways of liberation and sometimes coerce the audience to walk through. In fact the great performances on stage are seldom remembered: it’s the overall presence you remember. Something the performer did, an entrance or exit perhaps; a moment, a hand gesture, the sound of her voice, how the eyes moved in and out of light…the way their shoulders heaved in a touching moment.
If film is incredible at all, dramatically, it is because it captures – imprisons – an actual performance. And it allows one to relive it over and over again, the way you can experience your favorite recorded song. A powerful performance in a movie does more than rouse the viewer, it nearly shatters the framework of cinema altogether. Some astounding movie performances break the picture, the molding around it, even the shelf it is put upon. Others are less explosive and draw us into…something implosive. Either way they are “captured” poems, poetry in motion that either a very adept director, editor and/or cinematographer can reign in. Sometimes one or all three are just lucky.
If the comedian, the Holy Fool, The Satirist - is driven to expose hypocrisy, the Actor’s job is to reveal human behavior and ALL aspects of war internal and external that give birth to hypocrisy. The only capable artist to go head to head with a stand-up comedian is a stand-up tragedian.
Like the poet, the job of the actor is to interrogate both himself and his audience. His character and his own involvement in a society that gave birth to that character.
The Actor must express the best and worst of human behavior and trust that we reflect on it…but only if he does. If he is even capable.
The actor’s energy, their persona, their sheer magnitude on stage or screen is all we have to go on. And all we have to learn from. Like a singer’s voice, we are full converts immediately just due to the truth we hear, or we resist and reject the lies the way we do when we may turn off a song we can’t stand or cringe when a singer vocalizes.
The responsibility of the actor is to remind us that we are human and that there is both a privilege and a right that comes with that; we encourage catharsis only when a somewhat solvent human being has remembered they have a soul, that's the hope.
Otherwise we are sociopaths just receiving platitudes and nonsense from narcissists and passionless individuals who hold no real convictions.
Except where money is concerned. And if money is all that drives the moral, imaginative and social fiber of the actor - what good are they?
Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths reminds all actors what acting is about: revealing all the dark hard truisms that life bellows out into us while we try hard to keep it under wraps.
A truly effective performance always lends itself to an embarrassing admission and a vulnerable confession.
There is courage in it, even when it “fails.” But there is no such thing as failure in art even if something doesn’t land. Sometimes it just takes time. In film, one has the privilege of repeated viewings. Theater, much closer to life, either brings you to your knees or to your feet in that very moment. Screen acting can also linger differently because you are being presented a moving portrait that is actually projected in front of you. A painting or photograph that just hangs in front of you for two hours. In the future there will be more intrepid and adventurous writers - even critics - who dare to do an ultrasound on the differences, similarities and uniqueness of both screen and stage acting. Right now we will just focus on the glory of Marianne Jean-Baptiste's exquisite performance.
Michele Austin, left, as Chantelle and Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy in “Hard Truths”
Jean-Baptiste (best known in the USA for her work in the procedurals and TV shows, Without a Trace and Blindspot – hefty reliable paychecks that enable her to make art films with outliers like Leigh) gives us a swivel of emotions and thoughts that are difficult to digest and watch because they are honest reflections of not just the character of Pansy, but ricochets of human behavior we seldom see executed and expressed with such precision and finesse.
Mike Leigh’s masterful and unobtrusive directing outdoes some of the best Chekhov productions you have ever seen. In fact, Hard Truths is more Chekhovian than most American/British renditions of Anton Chekhov because of its militant concentration on the blurred line between tragedy and comedy. Sometimes you are laughing so hard you don’t realize the tears forming are actually from something else – from a recognition of someone’s pain (if not your own). But the tones and moods shift so quickly they disrupt and continue to scare modern audiences. I don’t know why exactly, perhaps it is because audiences are too adept at “watching” movies now, they are losing their own ability to be moved by truthful emotions.
All cinema, all art is manipulation. But not all movies with grandstanding “Oscar worthy” performances have effective acting. The Academy Awards has its own warped definition of a “good performance” and the past twenty five years or so have proven this. The new millennium gave us 9/11, a revival of empiric racism, Islamophobia, the crassest pop music ever imagined and the collusion/collision between politicians and celebrity performers. There no longer is any difference between Donald Trump and Alec Baldwin. There is no longer any difference between the temptation to “convince” or win over a jury - the way an actor must “convince” the Academy of his moral worth in whatever move role he is peddling: this year it’s an immigrant with a drug habit, next year it will be the same - with gender or ethnic variables. The Academy Awards prefers actors who “act” for the camera - not the audience! - and the individual acknowledgment of the rugged terrain Capitalism brings us. It must seal and contain a performance with a bow from beginning to end. And it must “look” like an expensive performance. Doesn’t it bother you now that most movies look like the trailers you have seen for them? That’s actually all they are: expensive, “well made” pixelations of “someone’s story.” If bathrooms, buses and people’s hands were as clean as these movies are, CITY MDS might just be out of business.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste is priceless whereas many of her Oscar-nominated peers (or colleagues?) are wearing severe price-tags around their necks. Good ensemble acting, interesting moments of behavior - outside of script conventions and narratives – is where and how you can tell a “good performance”. They don’t further the plot or reveal a “storyline” surprise, necessarily, they just present you with a blast of truth. A good performance is simply humbling. That doesn’t mean they can’t be fun to watch. It just means that there is an acknowledgment of something inside of us that the actor has shared. Prostitutes and actors were lumped together traditionally in the west for a variety of reasons but one is obvious: both make public what is private.
Good performances are a handful of modern neurosis, urban cry, and the exploration of eyes and ears and hearts in times of echo chambers where the heart is looking for help, if not just an ally.
Hard Truths - the entire cast of actors, mind you - is old-school acting; moment to moment reality, Stanislavski 101 — a return to playing an intention, finding the truth of a scene and most importantly, using YOUR ownInstrument to express it. This will not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Leigh’s work - especially his early BBC plays or films like Bleak Moments, Career Girls, or Secrets & Lies, to name a few. It was in 1997’s Secrets & Lies that Jean-Baptiste was introduced to the big screen internationally; she fetched an Academy Award nomination for a woman seeking her birth mother. She recalls how heady and strange those years were, attending the Oscars while Muhammad Ali was still alive, and the frustration of not being able to land other roles as heavy and complex as the ones Leigh offers.
Her recent collaboration with Mike Leigh, their return to the ring, is a bravura, gut-punch engagement with the quotidian. Every day trials and battles are usually wonderful opportunities for actors to exhibit both their emotional prowess but also their imaginative leaps. Some actors encourage improvisation not to show off but to get closer to the center of the problem, some are strict disciples of the dialogue/script. Mike Leigh encourages his actors, like a repertory company (he always reveals his theatrical background), to run towards and pick at the center. In life we tend to run from danger, in art we must seek it out. Acting is, above all else, the creative expression of illuminating human conditions through modes of behavior.
Sometimes in movies, acting stretches — like a cobweb too large - into the virtuosic (often dictated by the context of the script, but usually a color in the director’s palette — they may USE the actor to tell a story as opposed to have the actor be an end in and of themself).
One of the major problems facing Acting as an art is the lack of directors with an interest in the collision of energy on stage and in cinema, filmmakers who rarely have an interest showing us what they know about life. There are always exceptions. But there is also a tortured parade at the moment thwarting those voices.
Leigh is not a young Turk. And he presents a cinema and a value that may be considered “old fashioned”, even conservative.
Those people who would attempt to demean him as such have missed the point: his politics, style and meanings are as wrapped up in his actors’ faces as are the decisions he uses with his DP. Nothing more radical than that.
Which lens? Which line? Which voice?
Jean-Baptiste has been overlooked by the establishment (thankfully!) because she is a threat to the order. She is an actor, a performing artist who has something to share. That, in itself, is a revolutionary turn for the fascistic and narcissistic times we are living in.
Watch Hard Truths - now streaming on the dreaded Amazon. But watch it. It just might snap you back into realizing what acting - and truth - is.