Four Women in Search of an Oscar

By RICHARD CORLISS

It is an autumn ritual, like football games and the first frost. America's A team of actresses, who would never accept summer-movie roles as Rambo's guerrilla girlfriend or Michael J. Fox's mom, invigorate Hollywood's ration of serious films. The seminar is in session, film scholars. It is the season to pay attention, even if you want to cut class.

The roster of Acting Professors is inevitable: Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, Glenn Close. The tone of their films can turn turgid in their insistence on beating moral lessons into thick skulls. And in a limited genre one can easily lose track of who is playing what role, and why. Here is Streep as the troubled survivor of a traumatic World War II episode. Sophie's Choice? No, Plenty. Lange stars as a trailblazing country singer of the '60s who has a truculent husband and a few brushes with disaster. A remake of Loretta Lynn and Coal Miner's Daughter? No, this is Patsy Cline and Sweet Dreams. Spacek plays a Southern working-class mother fighting high-level corruption. Wait a minute: that's Norma Rae, or maybe Silkwood. No, this year they're calling it Marie. Not to be confused with a Close comedy called Maxie, which opened the same day.

All of the new women's films (including another Close encounter, Jagged Edge) proceed from the same feminist impulse. Each heroine follows her passions and intelligence into an area where, tradition states, she is not supposed to go. Each dares to be a woman, even if it means not being thought a lady. But within these contours one can spot distinctive felicities and failures. Three of the films sink under the weight of earnestness (Marie), whimsy (Maxie) or scuzz quotient (Jagged Edge). In the others, two fine actresses can be seen at their resourceful best, fleshing out a character (Sweet Dreams) or camouflaging the void within it (Plenty).

Plenty, written by David Hare and directed by Fred Schepisi, traces the degeneration of Susan Traherne (Streep) from her work with the French Resistance in 1943 to her desertion of her husband almost 20 years later. Susan--part Joan of Archetype, part loony from Loonyville--is a bitter romantic who never got over her teenage crush on reckless idealism. During the war there was excitement to spare in her view of the British as parachuting | angels of mercy. Her one great moment of idealistic passion--in a tatty French hotel room with an exhausted soldier-hero--is the memory that sustains and destroys her life. Progressive change seemed possible then, but in domestic harness in the stagnant '50s, she can only rearrange the furniture. When the mood comes on her she can crack the crockery over her considerate husband's head to provoke an explosion of savage vitality. With this "psychiatric cabaret," Susan shows she wants everything on her own terms. Plenty is not enough.

Even when Susan is not quite explicable or sympathetic, she is a compelling spectacle, turning heads and stomachs with her coruscating monologues. The others--her husband (Charles Dance), her bohemian pal (Tracey Ullman), her befuddled lover (Sting) and two of her husband's superiors in the diplomatic corps (John Gielgud and Ian McKellen)--have delicious verbal turns of their own. Among its other virtues, Plenty is the year's funniest film, to those with a taste for English mandarin scorn: the word unspoken, the sneer barely repressed, euphemism as an act of smart-club malice.

As the frustrated housewife with bloody nothing to do, Streep gives her fiercest, most controlled performance since The French Lieutenant's Woman (for which Plenty may serve as the 20th century sequel). When embarrassed, she flushes; when attacked, she shoots back a laser-like stare; when determined to be aroused, she looks carnivorous, at one point bestriding Sting like a tigress over her poor prey. She radiates the odd pleasure Susan takes in being thought dangerous--if women cannot be taken seriously, at least they can be feared. And if she brings her part of England crashing down around her, what a lovely rubble it makes.

With Plenty, Streep was granted the luxury of a character with surprising edges and dark corners. Spacek is not so lucky. Marie, based on Peter Maas' book about a woman who helped expose the corruption in Governor Ray Blanton's administration in Tennessee a few years back, proves the old maxim that a good woman is no dramatic match for bad guys (or bad women). Marie Ragghianti was a whistle blower direct from 60 Minutes' central casting; she was also a battered wife and a loving mother. In the film she is just about perfect--and a lot less interesting than the Governor's cheerful, venal aide (Jeff Daniels) or her lawyer Fred Thompson (juicily played by Fred Thompson). As in Missing and The River, Spacek here is in danger of being strangled by a halo that is a bit too large for the character she plays. One wishes that, just once, Marie had screwed up or screwed around or kicked the dog. Instead, Director Roger Donaldson cues every Pavlovian reaction with soupy music. And Screenwriter John Briley, who also wrote Gandhi, proposes the same drab candidacy for Marie: one small saint for mankind.

Marie, though, is a lowlife slugabed compared with Jan (Close) in Maxie. This metayuppie jogs each day, smiles a lot, loves her husband (Mandy Patinkin) and pretty much runs the archdiocese of San Francisco. And yet a certain thrill is missing. Enter Maxie (Close again), a flapper who died in 1927 and has now borrowed Jan's body for a last grasp at stardom. Alas, the movie is preposterous and relentlessly twee, and Maxie, who ought to bubble, only grates with her high spirits. Here Close is the perpetrator, trying too hard at Director Paul Aaron's urging. In Richard Marquand's rancid, incoherent Jagged Edge, she is the victim, playing an attorney defending a newspaper editor (Jeff Bridges) accused of killing his wife. Neither film is likely to advance Close's claim to membership in the movie actresstocracy.

Lange is already there, and her triumph in Sweet Dreams is especially savory because the film--a sort of Coal Miner's Stepdaughter--promises few surprises. Surely it will trace the sad parabola of show-biz success. Surely Patsy Cline will sing her greatest hits, and her husband Charlie (Ed Harris) will be spectacularly unworthy of her--a weak, brutal tail chaser. Indeed, the script by Robert Getchell (Bound for Glory) caroms over well- traveled dirt roads, and the direction by Karel Reisz (The French Lieutenant's Woman) aims for no solemn significance. But their simple tune is played with such deft authenticity that it sounds like an instant country classic.

Patsy Cline's voice was a wondrous instrument, a plangent contralto aged in whisky and barroom cigarette smoke, with the traditional hillbilly yodel transformed into the gasp of a mature heart breaking. All evidence suggests she earned that voice. In her marriage to Charlie, she shows that she can stand by her man, stand up to him, then throw him out when he gets too rough. Curing the on-the-road blues with a little a cappella harmony on Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms, Patsy finds therapy in music: a way both of transcending her troubles and of registering each semiquaver of pain.

As Patsy's mother, Ann Wedgeworth gives a strong and lovely reactive performance, and Harris, with his Tom Sawyer grin, convinces the viewer that this goof-off has residues of charm Patsy can find intermittently irresistible. Lange keeps on astonishing. Hefty and bawdy, with a macaw's cackle in good times and a face like a fist in bad, Lange plays Patsy as a cracker Wife of Bath, sated with sexual love and hungry for more. Her Patsy would be a subtle stunner in any season. Right now she is enough to make moviegoers forget the boys and toys of summer.