Assorted bits and pieces

Now this is surreal: Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh on the cover of, uh, Ladies Home Journal. Here's the link, complete with amusingly awkward photos and a few snippets of predictably mundane interview questions:
http://popbytes.com/archive/2007/09/nicole_kidman_jennifer_jason_leigh_do_ladies_home_journal.shtml

A more interesting new interview with JJL, conducted during last week's Toronto Film Festival, can be found here: http://www.torontosun.com/Movies/Film_Festivals/Toronto/2007/2007/09/12/4489450.html (Now isn't it exciting to see an article titled "Jason Leigh film brutally honest"? Doesn't it feel so very 1995?)

And sweetest of all, on 14 October, Jennifer will receive another career-tribute award for her contributions to independent cinema at the Mill Valley Film Festival, billed as "the only prominent fall film festival in the San Francisco Bay Area". More info here:
http://mvff.com/node/2669

Margot @ TIFF

Hello to everyone who reads this blog - good to see all three of you again! Firstly, I must apologize for my silence of late. Some unexpected stuff came up which limited my net access. A lot has happened in JJL land since my last little missive in July!

Margot at the Wedding had its low-key world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on 1 September, and last week it screened at the higher-profile Toronto Film Festival. Both festivals were attended by Noah and Jennifer (pics above), though sadly Nicole Kidman and Jack Black couldn't make them due to other film-shooting commitments. Perhaps they will be on board for the New York Film Festival screening which takes place on 7 October.

The two-minute trailer we saw in June seemed to emphasize the charm and comedy, but word is out that this film is actually a lot darker, colder and angrier than it first appears. Much darker than The Squid and the Whale, allegedly, and that film was hardly your typical breezy indie dramedy. The comedy in this one is said to be black as tar, and the drama to be bordering on the tragic. Some have voiced concern about the principal characters being far too neurotic, unsympathetic, self-absorbed and, well, whiny for mainstream audiences to want to spend time with. Nicole Kidman's character, Margot Zeller, is said to be a monstrous egomaniac who casually makes cruel, insensitive remarks to her sister, is shamelessly snobby and xenophobic, is a lousy mother to her son, and is not above exploiting her unhappy childhood in the successful short stories she writes. JJL's Pauline is needy, insecure, and full of her own bitter resentments and unresolved anger. Is Baumbach saying, "Jeff Daniels wasn't enough of a pompous asshole for you? Wait till you get a load of these two bitches!"? Alienating mainstream audiences who'd rather flock to 300 is one thing, but there is also concern in the award-prognosticating blogosphere that Margot's dark, bitter nature could hurt its chances of getting noticed by the ever-conservative Academy voters. The Academy do like their indie dramedies of late, but even Alexander Payne's excellent Sideways and About Schmidt had a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down; You Can Count on Me was tough and honest, but Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo's troubled siblings were essentially likeable, good people. Margot probably won't be as cynically difficult to take as, say, Todd Solondz' Happiness - a film which really repelled and angered as many critics as it impressed (and which Leigh, incidentally, auditioned for) - but it does look like it will be a firmly divisive film.

In an interview with the Toronto Sun newspaper last week, Leigh had this to say: "In fact, people can leave the cinema very, very agitated and almost unable to speak. Or they're angry, very stirred up. [The film is] about things you don't want to acknowledge about yourself, that you don't want to see, and I think that can make people very angry." Oh Jen… you're a great actress, but you still have no clue how to sell a film... or maybe you just don't want to? Either way, Margot at the Wedding looks like the most interesting film Leigh has been involved in for a long, long time (Kidman and Black too, for that matter). This is, after all, the métier in which Jennifer works best – lost, troubled characters, messy interpersonal dynamics, scathing emotional honesty and open wounds, dark humour, and no easy answers... ever. This is the story of her career.


And now a few of the best reviews the film has gotten so far... including the most exciting raves JJL has gotten in years!

"The absolute highlight of the daring film is the loving way in which Baumbach directs his spouse Leigh to perhaps the most nuanced, relaxed role of her accomplished career. The actress has been known to get down and dirty with her roles, and really disappear; but here she seems so poised and ordinary, it's easy to forget that she is acting. Margot is the showier part, but as is the case here, and in countless other films in which people take the more quiet supporting roles; showy doesn't always equal better. Leigh has somehow never been up for an Oscar, despite at least ten viable roles throughout the last seventeen years and it is beyond a crime she wasn’t up for one in 1995 for her tour-de-force in Georgia. This year, hopefully will not add to the shameful list of egregious awards snubs towards one of the most challenging, honest actresses I can think of. If anyone has paid their dues, it is Leigh." - http://www.popmatters.com/pm/blogs/notes-from-the-road-post/48399/tiff-07-day-five-contemporary-classics

"She has always been a performer of rare gifts, with an unerring instinct to make the unexpected but absolutely right choice in a line reading or a bit of business. And as the bruised, resentful sister, she's perfect."- http://blog.nj.com/whitty/2007/09/casting_about.html

"Leigh, who is always a pleasure to watch, should be up for the Oscar that has eluded her for more than fifteen years (in a just world). Her Pauline is one of the actress's finest creations: earthy, natural, and soft; a welcome change from the risky actress known for her portrayals of intense, damaged women. The range and maturity that Leigh conveys is astounding." -http://www.popmatters.com/pm/blogs/notes-from-the-road-post/48608/tiff-07-the-wrap-up-woman-of-the-year

"Brilliantly assisting him [Baumbach] in bringing it all to the forefront are Kidman and, especially Leigh, who render brittle, hilarious yet moving performances... Leigh, meanwhile, gives one of the best, and certainly most intriguingly complex performances of her career, as Pauline, a perennial lost soul who, despite all the friction, still idealizes her sister as a potential best friend."- http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film/reviews/article_display.jsp?&rid=9712

"Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh both turn in energetic - and possibly award-ready - performances that are at times difficult to watch for the way they so nakedly show people at their worst." - http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/torontofilmfestival/2007/09/chop-shop-and-m.html

MARGOT - the poster, the trailer, the website!

Over the past month there has certainly been a lot of exciting news for those of us who are eagerly awaiting Margot at the Wedding to hit our screens.

The poster is here! (see above)

The official website is now up at http://www.margotatthewedding.com/

And, best of all, the trailer has been released and it looks pretty damn special: http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2007/06/trailer-preview.html

Now, I was hoping Margot would be good, high-quality stuff, but my excitement increased tenfold when I saw that trailer. It looks hugely exciting and promising to me. This project is shaping up exactly the way I've been hoping it would all along. It looks like it will be a funny, intelligent and genuinely charming film. I couldn't help but think of classic movies by the likes of Woody Allen, John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, and, for some reason, the great French directors François Truffaut (Jules et Jim, The 400 Blows) and Eric Rohmer (My Night at Maud's, Pauline a la Plage, The Green Ray). Rohmer shouldn't be such a surprise, because Baumbach has acknowledged his influence on Margot from the outset, but I was still pleasantly surprised by how Rohmeresque the whole thing looks. Nicole Kidman looks great, Jack Black looks on terrific form... and Jennifer looks, even by her usual high standards, superb from what we can see in the trailer. You can tell she is relishing the opportunity to dig into the juiciest role she's had in several years, since at least 1999's perverse David Cronenberg fantasia eXistenZ, maybe further back than that. I'm sure the role of Pauline will go down as one of the crowning achievements of Leigh's career.

Given that it's only July, it may seem ridiculously early to talk about next year's Oscars. But when you're a rampant Jenny-phile who's wanted to see the great lady get her dues for a long, long time, and you hear she's making a film with Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman, written and directed by her Oscar-nominated husband Noah Baumbach, and you hear that its script is getting positive early feedback, and you see a gem of a trailer like that one... well, it's kinda hard not to think about Oscar nominations. Especially when you check out a few Oscar-prognostication sites like http://www.thefilmexperience.net/Awards/2007/suppactress.html or http://www.theoscarigloo.com/SupportingActress.html, and you see Jenny listed as a possible frontrunner for 2007's Best Supporting Actress Oscar! Or when you see an early test-screening review like this beauty from Aint It Cool: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33135

Suffice it to say, I am at a fever pitch of anticipation and can hardly take anymore :)

Synecdoche, New York

News finally emerges of a new Jennifer Jason Leigh project and probably the first movie we'll see her in after Margot at the Wedding. The following was published on Screen Daily last month, and it sounds exciting indeed:

Charlie Kaufman started production last week on his first feature as a director, Synecdoche, New York, with a cast led by Philip Seymour Hoffman. On the eve of the shoot, Kaufman and Spike Jonze, one of his producers, talked exclusively to Mike Goodridge.

Oddly, I'm not scared," Charlie Kaufman says on a break from hair and make-up tests for his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, in early May in Brooklyn. "Maybe I'm in a state of denial. I'm just so busy I don't have the time to be scared. That doesn't mean I think I'm going to be good at it. I'm just forging ahead."
Kaufman, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and was previously nominated for both Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, is considered the consummate screenwriter, yet says that he always had directing ambitions. "I started being interested in acting and theatre at a young age," he says. "I went to film school to be a director. I had always written and I figured that writing was the way to get a directing job. Then it became a thing unto itself."
Although he did not collaborate with George Clooney on Clooney's film of Kaufman's Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, Kaufman said that he had a "good education working with Spike (Jonze) and Michel (Gondry) on those four movies (the other was Human Nature)".
"The majority of my involvement was in pre or post. I was there on set but not every day. I would just stand there and there was not an awful lot for me to do. Occasionally something would be needed for the script and I would be available to do that, whether on set or on the phone."
It was actually Jonze who was set to direct Synecdoche for Columbia Pictures. "What happens," says Kaufman, "is that this script took quite a while for me to write and directors usually have to wait for me because I take a while. Meanwhile Spike was developing Where The Wild Things Are and that came into a definite state of being first. So I asked if he would mind if I could direct this. Very graciously, he let it go. Sony allowed it to go into turnaround about a year ago and we got it financed with Sidney Kimmel."
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays theatre director Caden Cotard; at a crisis point in his life he decides to mount an epic play so he can contribute something of artistic value. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse and builds a replica of New York City inside it. The play never gets finished, it only gets bigger and bigger. The film spans 40 years kicking off in 2005 and, says Kaufman, time starts moving "almost irrationally fast" as it goes on.
The film also follows the women in his life. His wife who leaves him is played by Catherine Keener, a woman he meets at the box office and falls for is played by Samantha Morton, an actress whom he marries and divorces is played by Michelle Williams, his therapist is played by Hope Davis, his wife's best friend by Jennifer Jason Leigh and his daughter by Robin Weigert. Emily Watson plays the Morton character within the play and Dianne Wiest is an actress hired to play a cleaning woman in the play.
"Charlie wasn't aware of how much he already knew when he was first starting," says Jonze, who is producing alongside Anthony Bregman and Sidney Kimmel. "He knows all the answers to the questions. I am a sounding board to bounce things off." Jonze will not be on the set all the time, leaving hands-on producing duties to Bregman, who was a producer on both Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine.
Kaufman says that he is storyboarding "all the sequences that are particularly complicated".
"We have production meetings late at night where we can't figure things out because the story taking place is in so many worlds," laughs Kaufman. "I'm trying to be as prepared as possible and do as much rehearsal as we can."
The New York set is being built partially in the Brooklyn warehouse, but much of its scale will be added in post-production, where many of Kaufman's greatest works have been created.
Kaufman and Jonze smile when recalling the 13-month editing process on Adaptation, from which the two of them created 35 different versions of the film. "We were writing new drafts of the movie in post," says Kaufman.
"Although we were bound to what we shot, we did draft after draft after we shot the movie," says Jonze. "We had so much voiceover and footage about the history of evolution and of orchid collecting. It was amazing how much we could affect the movie. You feel it getting closer and working more and sometimes you try things along the way that don't work."
For Synecdoche, Kaufman says he has a specifically budgeted amount of post-time.
As for the title, it is a pun on Caden's hometown of Schenectady, New York, but also refers to the grammatical term 'synecdoche' which is when a part of something is used to characterise the whole. "I like the way it sounds," says Kaufman. "I like moving more in the direction of impossible titles. It started with Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind."
So how is Kaufman coping with the managerial and social aspects of directing? "It's very different from my normal life, which is very solitary," he says. "But I like the more social aspects of doing movies and having a laugh once in a while. It's hard to do that when you're sitting in your office.
"Spike and Michel have been very generous in allowing me to be a part of their movies. Most often, that is not the case. There tends to be a competitiveness between writers and directors on some projects. I must say, I do like the idea of making all the decisions."

So there you have it. Jennifer Jason Leigh in the new Charlie Kaufman movie. It's not actually her first time working with him either - she previously performed in his experimental "Theatre of the New Ear" radio play Hope Leaves the Theatre with Meryl Streep, David Thewlis, Peter Dinklage and Synecdoche co-stars Hope Davis and Tom Noonan at UCLA in 2005. Although the Scottish actress Tilda Swinton is listed among the cast on some sites, she has vacated the project and been replaced by none other than JJL. Interestingly enough, this is the second time Jennifer has replaced Tilda in a film, the first time being her role as Dr. Beth Lorenson in 2005's The Jacket. Although she probably won't have much actual screentime in this one (her main scene partner will likely be Catherine Keener), it's an exciting project for JJL fans as she will be in highly prestigious company. Two of her co-stars, Hoffman and Dianne Wiest, are Oscar winners, while Keener, Morton and Watson are all double Oscar nominees. And although this is Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, he too is an Oscar winner for his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind screenplay, as well as a nominee for both his Being John Malkovich and Adaptation screenplays. In a nutshell, Synecdoche, New York sounds like exactly the sort of project Leigh should be signing on for.

What's it like to work with the JJL?

It's now 1 June and all is quiet on the JJL front for the time being... another four months or so until Margot at the Wedding a.k.a. My Most Anticipated Film of 2007 is released, but hopefully there will be some early test screenings or a trailer to keep us going before the summer is out. In the meantime, here's a selection of quotes from those men and women who have directed Leigh, acted with her, or simply admired her work over the years.

"I had my eyes on her for some time. Tough. Unusual. Not afraid to do strange things. When we started talking she was already working herself into the role. She was acting like a combination computer nerd/goddess… She is the female equivalent of Daniel Day Lewis. She is a brilliant and serious actor, and like a lot of brilliant and serious actors, she is punished." – eXistenZ director David Cronenberg

"I felt incredibly honored and touched to be nominated [for the Oscar for Georgia]. But it was hard to be separated from Jennifer, because she was the heart and soul of that film. While we were making the movie, I thought not only that she would get a nomination, but that she would win. I saw the kind of work she was doing. In my mind she will always be the greatest performance of that year, and a lot of other people thought so, too. Meryl Streep grabbed me at the Academy Awards. She said, 'Jennifer should be here!' and I said, 'I know!'"… I was glad I won [at the Independent Spirit Awards], because I got to get up there on that stage and look at Jennifer and say, 'I will support you any day!' I truly feel it was a privilege to support her in that role. She was the whirling dervish of that movie. She was the center of the film. What a thing to support!" – Georgia co-star Mare Winningham

"Jennifer is a constant inspiration to those of us who view acting as an art and not as a product." – Short Cuts and The Hudsucker Proxy co-star Tim Robbins

"One of the beauties of Jennifer's directing style is that even though she's written the script and has a roughly imagined result in mind, she allows the actors their freedom, while at the same time knowing when to rein in the madness of free-floating invention." – The Anniversary Party star Kevin Kline

"While most actors are attracted to parts that fit them like a glove, Jennifer chooses a part based on how many light years away it is from where she lives." – Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Anniversary Party co-star Phoebe Cates

"That girl is so sexy. GOD! It was a delight to get to know Jennifer Jason Leigh. She's sweet and really stern. And she loves herself and her body – and her tummy... I loved that Jennifer is so together, organized and bright. She's so smart and exquisitely sexy and feminine." – In the Cut director Jane Campion

"She has the same intelligence and mad, creative temperament [as Glenn Close and Faye Dunaway, other actresses he has directed]. It's a combination of being totally possessed and lucid at the same time." – Single White Female director Barbet Schroeder

"What Jennifer gets you to experience is Tralala and her suffering. The fact that she brings such dignity to such a degrading situation is an indication of her magnificence as an actress." – Last Exit to Brooklyn author Hubert Selby Jr. on the controversial gang-rape scene

"She is an extraordinary character actor, and it doesn't mean what it means in Hollywood, which is just people put out to grass playing small parts. She is bullshit-proof. She's got a real strong sense of the real world and of real people and the pain of existing and all that stuff." – Abigail's Party writer/director Mike Leigh

"Acting opposite [Adrien] Brody and Jennifer Jason Leigh scared me. I watch them work and just go, 'Pshoo, wow.' 'Wow' is actually the only word I can use to describe it. In my big scene with Jennifer, I nearly forgot what I had to do because I spent the entire time staring at her, going, 'How do you do that?'" – The Jacket co-star Keira Knightley

"I think she's one of the finest actresses I've ever worked with. She brings a tremendous intelligence to the part of Lizzie. Jennifer's strong – and Lizzie was a strong woman. She radiates independence, she has a real rebellious spirit – and that's Lizzie. She's beautiful, with a delicate quality – and that, too, is Lizzie. Jennifer is totally believable as someone who'd refuse to get married just because her father wants it. And she's totally believable as someone who'd fall in love with somebody from an entirely different era. It's just one of those things. She's bringing her whole soul into this piece, and you can see it on the screen." – The Love Letter director Dan Curtis


"It's so unfair. You get so famous that it becomes limiting. I'd much prefer to be a Jennifer Jason Leigh – just for me. There's nothing wrong with being a big movie star if that's what you want. But I'd just like to do roles that are different, challenging. I'd rather do quality work than pack 'em in at the mall." – Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and The Anniversary Party co-star Gwyneth Paltrow

"There's absolutely no ego involved with Jennifer. Now, I'm not saying that I've worked with a lot of young actresses who have huge egos, it's just that she completely immerses herself in what she's doing, but she's also not someone who stays in character during breaks or in-between scenes... She's just wonderful. She's so flexible, amazingly versatile and very hard-working. She loves what she's doing and she also loves whatever your ideas are." – Kansas City co-star Miranda Richardson

"She is a sensational actress, probably the best in America... But socially I felt no connection to her at all. I found her neutral. When she acts, it all comes out, all the devils and the angels. She's tortured. She's diabolical. She can be anything. Yet in real life it's almost as if she doesn't exist, as if she's always waiting for acting, and the acting is the real life. I drove her into a pit of filth and she never complained… She's not in it for entertainment; she's in it for something completely different, which I would call art. When she acts, she is really alive, and in between roles there seems to be a grey area where basically she feels uncomfortable or is not even interested." – Flesh & Blood director Paul Verhoeven

"I try to ask myself about different choices. But when I started to be convinced that Jennifer Jason Leigh would be good, and even great, in this movie, I was sure. She is a very feeling and very deep actress. Sometimes it takes her too far, even, because she's not afraid of taking risks... Some actresses sometimes, I think that they have photogenic souls. They are looking to the camera, and you see something inside, and Jennifer has this quality personally, if she allows herself to open up." – Washington Square director Agnieszka Holland

"Jennifer Jason Leigh is a wonderful actress. I'm a great, great fan of hers. I thought that when Robert Altman had done that fantastic film Short Cuts, that Leigh's performance in that was just extraordinary and on the basis of that I said to Castle Rock "I want her in this movie"... Jennifer is a very intelligent actress and, like Kathy [Bates], she will try anything and go for anything. Great actors go for it, they force themselves up to the precipice, and Jennifer and Kathy are on a par with any actor I've worked with. They are just great actors." – Dolores Claiborne director Taylor Hackford

"I admire Jennifer Jason Leigh for not choosing to be a big movie star – she's having the kind of career I would think of myself as wanting." – Teri Hatcher

"Jennifer Jason Leigh is as intimidating as Rutger Hauer because of her work ethic. I would want to go home and play a video game, whereas she was going home and she'd still be working. She was just incredible. I was learning. Jennifer and Rutger came to work very intense, and that was just inspirational. I was carrying the film, but I didn't have the experience or the tools that Jennifer or Rutger had as actors, and they were passing out a couple of tools to me... And that's the gift that I got walking away from that film." – The Hitcher co-star C. Thomas Howell

"Jennifer Jason Leigh is one of my favorite actresses working today" – Russell Crowe

"The actor or actress it has thrilled me the most to work with was Jennifer Jason Leigh – she is a really incredibly, scarily good actress. I've only been nervous around a few actors and she was one of them, because I knew that she would never screw up her lines ever... She was shockingly, scarily ready." – The Hudsucker Proxy co-star Bruce Campbell

"Well, I'm not an actress. What, you're going to put me and Jennifer Jason Leigh in the same scene and say I am an actress? I don't think so." – Amy Sedaris

"For me it's the chameleon aspect that always wins me over. I get very bored, like every other consumer, when you see an actor or actress and they look the same in every single movie and you tend to start thinking of them rather than the character… It's so lame when actors look the same in every movie. That's why I love Jennifer Jason Leigh so much. She utterly changes herself in every movie. I like her because she's sexy, vulnerable and truthful... She is my favorite actress of all time." – Drew Barrymore

"I don't think there's a better actress working today… She doesn't care whether the camera is up her nostrils, on the back of her head or on her foot. She's absolutely professional, she's very easy to work with and has great confidence about what she does. I just turn the switch on and she does it. I don't know anybody who's better. I think Jennifer's one of the few actresses who doesn't use her own personality; she manufactures these characters and becomes them. When she's Dorothy Parker, she's Dorothy Parker. And when she's Jennifer Jason Leigh, unless the room's empty, she's hardly there…" – Short Cuts and Kansas City director Robert Altman

Forgotten Gems: HEART OF MIDNIGHT (1988)

"Heart of Midnight is a character study into madness, about someone who doesn't like herself and doesn't know why. And through the course of the film she finds out and decides it's easier to be mad than to exist with this knowledge." – Jennifer Jason Leigh, Premiere magazine, 1989


Carol Rivers (Leigh) is a fragile young woman who lives with her trashy mom (Brenda Vaccaro). She hates to be touched, has a leg in a plaster cast, and a history of nervous breakdowns. When her long-estranged uncle Fletcher dies of AIDS, she inherits his dilapidated nightclub and, upon moving in and attempting to renovate, soon discovers its seedy past life as a massage parlour with a clientele of swinging S & M sickos. It isn't long before Carol is struggling to stave off another breakdown: taps drip blood, corridors pant and moan, an apple oozes maggots, a severed rat's head is found in the water system, giant eyeballs float inside her waterbed, and she suffers a harrowing rape at the hands of lowlife workmen. Amidst all this, Peter Coyote shows up as an impostor cop with uncertain designs on her.


Heart of Midnight wears its influences on its sleeve: Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Dario Argento's Suspiria, and Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death. It suffers from obvious plot loopholes and clumsy dialogue, as well as all the limitations of its B-movie budget: poor sound compression, shoddy location shooting, even a boom mic that dips in and out of the frame. But it remains an important early film in Leigh's career, and thus one worth revisiting. She is sympathetic and believable throughout, managing to make Carol a heroine of unusual strength, vulnerability and above all intelligence. And, while most critics didn't care for the film itself, they had by now started paying Leigh serious attention.

"The classic Leigh film," noted Philip Weiss in Rolling Stone, "possesses all the trappings of a B movie, stays in the theaters for only a few weeks, and is memorable mostly for a mesmerizing performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh." All Movie Guide critic Brian J. Dillard wrote, "Leigh, as vulnerable and naturalistic as she's ever been, delivers the kind of lead performance that can just about banish the notion that there's not much really going on in the script itself." According to Hal Hinson of the Washington Post, "Leigh is a marvel. She has some of that feeling of damaged goods that Tuesday Weld used to have, but there's something wholly singular about her neurasthenia – an innocence – that makes Carol seem even more fragile, even more in danger. Whenever the movie leaves you wandering without a map, her performance works as a compass to get us back on track." Perhaps the sweetest praise came from Danny Peary, one of Leigh's earliest supporters, who praised it as "a jolting performance from one of this era's most fascinating, offbeat and daring young actresses", and even went so far as to award her his 1989 Best Actress Oscar in his book Alternate Oscars (billed as "One Critic's Defiant Choices for Best Picture, Actor and Actress – from 1927 to the Present"). Peary elaborated: "Leigh doesn't play her character as an intense woman – Carol's not as mad as she suspects – but she plays her as someone who's definitely strange. And not only because she carries on conversations with herself (especially in the mirror) and imagined guests, or that she races her bike through the narrow halls, or that she sings along to Ethel Waters, a most unusual musical choice. Leigh's eyes and head movements are always slightly askew; even her way of walking is different, because for some reason she wears a cast over one foot. She keeps withdrawing, partly from fear of physical harm, partly from fear of mental anguish ("Don't try to psychoanalyze me," she angrily tells Sharpe/Larry). Yet she keeps forcing herself to return and face her problems head-on: staying by herself the night she is attacked; walking determinedly back into the dangerous club when she knows there is someone else inside; and shuffling along the halls with legs spread, pointing her pistol downward, hitting it aggressively against the floor. "Do you hear that, you little shit? It's the sound of my gun pointed at your head." She's not so timid."

Reportedly, Leigh was disappointed with how Heart of Midnight turned out. She had done her customary extensive research for the project: meeting with women who had been abused as children, interviewing psychologists, attending crisis clinics, writing diaries and back-histories in Carol's voice, and likely felt disheartened when she saw the final product – something akin to a psychosexual haunted-house horror. But her hard work had paid off in a typically rich and vivid performance, one that's well worth revisiting today.

The Chameleighon

cha•me•le•on
–noun

1. any of numerous Old World lizards of the family Chamaeleontidae, characterized by the ability to change the color of their skin, very slow locomotion, and a projectile tongue.

2. any of several American lizards capable of changing the color of the skin, esp. Anolis carolinensis (American chameleon), of the southeastern U.S.

3. a changeable, fickle, or inconstant person.


"The chameleon thing is mine. I like not having a profile, that feeling of not knowing what you're going to see from one movie to the next because you're watching that character, not me. Reading or hearing people write about you is terribly alienating. I don't want attention for myself. I don't get followed, and I'm not one of those people who's whispered about in restaurants. I don't really think that I'm that recognizable. Or maybe that's just some wish I have. My ideal life would be to play all these great characters and disappear, in terms of the world." – Movieline, 1992

"I really like being anonymous. I'm too introverted and uncomfortable talking about myself. The best thing about acting is that it allows you to disappear into someone else." – Premiere, 1994

"I like the comparison to [Johnny] Depp because with him, the way he transforms himself from role to role, he's just this miraculous changeling and people really get behind it. But with me, people sometimes have a problem." - Times Online, 2005

Margot at the Wedding

For those who haven't heard of it yet, Margot at the Wedding is the eagerly awaited new film by Jennifer's husband, writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Kicking and Screaming). According to its IMDb plot synopsis, Margot at the Wedding is "a sharply observed portrait of a family. This film is an unflinchingly honest story about coming to terms with one's family and oneself, a comedic and heartbreaking journey."

Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a troubled, unhappily married woman who hasn't spoken to her older sister Pauline (Leigh) in a few years. Both sisters share a painful past, having been beaten by their father and been in therapy. On the eve of Pauline's wedding to Malcolm (Jack Black) – a man she disapproves of – Margot decides to try and bury the hatchet by attending the ceremony with her son. The film also stars John Turturro as Kidman's husband and Ciarán Hinds as her lover. Even Leigh's real-life mother, the Emmy-nominated screenwriter Barbara Turner (Georgia, Pollock, The Company), will have a cameo appearance as "Aunt Becky".

With Baumbach on board as writer and director, Kidman as co-star, and an acknowledged debt of influence to the great French auteur Eric Rohmer (Pauline at the Beach, Claire's Knee, My Night at Maud's), something tells me this will be an exciting project for us JJL fans. Baumbach's razor-sharp script for The Squid and the Whale deservedly earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, and propelled Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney into career-defining work. Early reports from people who've read the Margot script have been very positive, indicating that it may be the strongest showcase for both Kidman and Leigh's talents in a long time.

The film is hotly tipped to premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September. It opens in NY and LA on 3 October, gets a limited US release on 12 October and finally goes wide on 25 December.

Welcome!

Hello readers, and a warm welcome to a little project I've wanted to get around to making for a while now. I have long held the opinion that Jennifer Jason Leigh is the best American actress of her generation, and certainly the most underrated. Despite starring in over 60 feature films, stage plays and TV productions since the late 1970s, and winning critical plaudits from the beginning, she has somehow eluded the wider attention she clearly merits in terms of her talent. As a famously private and self-effacing person, maybe she prefers it that way. She claims to find it a compliment that people don't recognize her from one film to the next, and she religiously avoids the politics of the Hollywood social scene at all costs.

To respect Jennifer's cherished privacy, this blog will not pay much attention to the details of her personal life. Instead I am intending it as a celebratory tribute to the woman's great body of work. A body of work which has touched a small, devoted army of fans very deeply, and which deserves to be remembered in this era of plastic, over-exposed stars sorely lacking in originality.

Over the next few months, I will be posting news relating to Leigh's eagerly awaited new film Margot at the Wedding, written and directed by her real-life husband Noah Baumbach and co-starring no less than Nicole Kidman. Something tells me this will be a special project for us JJL fans!

In the meantime I will be posting all manner of Jenny bits and pieces to tide us over, having a look back at some of her past acting triumphs, and hopefully building a nice photo gallery.

Tralala, Sadie Flood, Susie, Dorothy Parker, Kristen, Amy Archer, Hedy, Allegra Geller, Stacy, Sally Nash, Selena, Blondie O'Hara... this one's for you.