Frances McDormand: from Blood Simple (1984) to Olive Kitteridge (2014)
Wednesday, August 3, 2016 at 2:37PM 1984 is our year of the month for August. Here's Matthew Eng to talk about a treasured actor that made her on camera debut back then...
For the better half of her nearly four-decade film career, Meryl Streep has managed to compel generations of moviegoers to accept a self-styled character actress as not only an acting heroine for the ages but also a bona fide movie star with mass-market appeal and unimpeachable box office credentials. Like no other actress since Bette Davis, Streep has perfected a once-unfeasible practice of playing the sort of idiosyncratic women she has always drifted towards, but within the safe confines of midrange, studio-supported moviemaking that seems to satisfy audience expectations as well as her own.
Sometimes Streep’s projects—and, it must be said, Streep herself—can disappoint. For every quietly graceful gem (like her underrated Hope Springs performance) or skillfully uninhibited turn (as in the best passages of It’s Complicated), there are another two or three within Streep’s latter-day canon that could stand some sharper finesse or at least more dexterous directorial guidance. Whenever I’m let down to by Streep, I can’t help but wonder what one of her less-viable peers might do with the opportunities that are scarce for any actress born before the Kennedy administration and which Streep barely has to put up a fight for.
The Beginning: Blood Simple (1984); The Most Recent Triumph: Olive Kitteridge (2014)
For as long as I can remember, Frances McDormand has served as the purest and most intimidating embodiment of what a character actor should be. “That woman has no vanity,” my mom remarked with clear admiration after watching her in Lisa Cholodenko’s Olive Kitteridge, where McDormand delivers one of the decade’s most masterful star turns, a perfectly prickly meeting of actor and role that might have been a surefire Oscar winner had the project aimed for a bigger screen...
McDormand’s lack of vanity is one of her hallmarks, in and out of character. Whenever an actor steps out with a slightly, um, altered facial appearance, I am instantly reminded of McDormand’s indelibly vehement take on plastic surgery and performers who “mutate” themselves. On screen, McDormand remains a fearless embodier of characters that read as the top items on an agent’s “Do Not Play” list: frumps, kooks, blowhards, and moms perpetually remain her stock-in-trade.
McDormand has never pretended to be a genuine star and she isn’t exactly a Streep-level chameleon. Her style feels more unusual and somewhat sidelong: she doesn’t so much disappear into her characters as wear them, trying on personal quirks, physical movements, and accents until she finds items that comfortably fit the character, rendering her real through her own unfailing ingenuity. Few actors can deepen “types” with the committed creativity and infectious watchability that have made McDormand such an enduring industry figure, even though she so seldom steps outside its sidelines. It’s sad but not even remotely surprising that after nabbing a Best Actress Oscar for one of the most iconic lead performances in film history, McDormand went directly back to playing supporting characters. After the most ascendant moment in any actor’s career, there were no star vehicles specially designed for her, no savory lead roles to sink her teeth into. In the years directly following Fargo, McDormand continued to play second, third, and even fourth fiddle in so many of her movies, with a few alluring deviations from game and often female indie collaborators.
Through her continued work with Joel and Ethan Coen, McDormand has unquestionably earned herself a place in the film studies textbooks, even though this unending partnership tends to expose some of her shakier instincts. Marge Gunderson is one of American cinema’s most treasured oddities and for good reason, but there’s something increasingly distancing about these other auteurist collaborations. McDormand’s personal biases are on full display in Burn After Reading, in which the actress contributes one of her coldest characterizations as a blonde, surgery-obsessed trainer, mercilessly exaggerating every aspect of her performance until all that is left is the punchline. Even in comparably minor parts in Raising Arizona and Hail, Caesar!, McDormand seems to stand outside her characters, not entirely holding them in disdain but concealing the animated eloquence of Fargo’s Marge, whose peculiarities never come at the cost of her inherent dignity.
Maybe it makes sense, then, that one of my favorite McDormand roles is one of her most uncommonly muted. The first time audiences ever saw McDormand on screen, in the Coens’s electrifying Blood Simple, she was little more than a silhouette, riding through the rain in a passenger seat, the night cloaking all but her hair. You can barely see her, but even in the dark, there is such evident composure to her physicality and a calmness to her light drawl that never betray the nerves of an actress just barely out of the Yale School of Drama, but evoke the relaxed and confident aura of a seasoned performer who appears to have been doing this for years.
The further one travels through McDormand’s filmography, the more anomalous Blood Simple looks in comparison. McDormand plays Abby Marty, a Texan trophy wife who leaves her brutish bar-owner husband (Dan Hedaya) for one of his bartenders (John Getz), setting into motion a deadly spiral of schemes and suspicions. Too unassuming to be a femme fatale, Abby is more like a final girl who doesn’t fully comprehend the horror film she’s in. Like Streep’s Linda in The Deer Hunter, it’s a role that McDormand would scarcely play again: the near-silent ingenue amid a group of hulking men who make the movie’s most decisive actions and come to define almost every quality of their most visible female bystander.
Streep was famously wary of the wispy but heartbreaking Linda, a role she only took to be with dying boyfriend John Cazale. While not necessarily displeased with Abby or Blood Simple, McDormand at least sounds relatively dismissive of the performance that launched her career. In a 1995 interview with Willem Dafoe in BOMB Magazine, McDormand had this to say about her contribution to the film:
In Blood Simple, the only choice I made was not to be theatrical. I never moved my face and my mouth’s always open like I’m terrified—I was a lot of the time. I just did whatever they told me to do, which was perfect for the character, but it’s not like I made that decision as a character choice. It was from not knowing what to do.”
It’s true that, on paper and even occasionally on screen, Abby comes across as a bit of a drab creation, staring with her mouth agape and awaking in cold-sweated terror at the peril encircling her. The Coens ultimately reveal her to be Blood Simple’s most resourceful figure during the film’s unsparing final showdown, which places Abby at its center, but even at this point our knowledge of the character is almost the same as when the movie started. McDormand’s task, then, is to not only suggest a more complex woman beyond the tight frame of the story but inspire an audience to actually care about this woman’s well-being without an entire life’s history to rely on.
What emerges is McDormand’s most emotionally pristine performance, an achievement of digging just deep enough into a blurry character’s concealed interior and retrieving coherent character details from what could have been an incomprehensible persona. As she herself suggests, McDormand is an apt and inspired supplier of abject terror, but she finds more interesting notes to play as well. She evokes carnal ease, a side we wouldn’t see again until Laurel Canyon nearly twenty years later, but also gentle concern for the new man in her life, dispirited mystification when he mysteriously retreats, and growing frustration for being so carelessly kept in the dark. She doesn’t slather on these affects as a first-time performer fighting to make an impression might be liable to do, but glides into them, playing a normal woman trapped within a tangled and trying web of deceit, as opposed to an idea of one. Abby is the face of survivalism by Blood Simple’s end, but it’s through McDormand’s efforts that we feel the bitter, human cost of such survival.
It’s an absorbing piece of acting and a corker of a debut that would have certainly been an enlivening addition to AMPAS’s especially sleepy roster of supporting actresses that year. McDormand would quickly go on to play weirder, louder characters over the course of her career, but I can’t help returning to Abby, whose stark power is as much an attribute of the character as it is of her portrayer.
It has been exceedingly fun to watch McDormand eclipse Tommy Lee Jones for the best grumpy, GIF-ready reaction shots at award shows, even as I continually wish that this level of interest could be applied to her actual acting efforts, which are still too few and far between. I wish she were a more obvious contender for the sort of stage-to-screen roles like Sister Aloysius and Violet Weston that Streep has a neverending monopoly on. If Hollywood remotely cared about working-class Boston women when they aren’t the mothers of famous boxers or abducted children, a screen reprisal of McDormand’s Tony-winning performance in David Lindsay-Abaire’s phenomenal and timely Good People would be a no-brainer. McDormand’s tenacious shepherding of Olive Kitteridge remains an invigorating instance of an actress grabbing her own opportunity, but surely there are other filmmakers who are eager to build projects around McDormand’s gutsy and specific gifts.
Even if she appeared with the frequency of a Daniel Day-Lewis, she would always belong to an eminent breed of hard-working, no-nonsense actresses whose tremendous talents were instantly evident from their very first frame. She continues to be a mainstay in an industry that never fully knew how to spotlight her and has driven so many of the women she came up with into early obscurity. But not her. Even when the odds are discouraging, Frances McDormand has a triumphant way of evading defeat, not unlike the very first character she gave cinematic life to and many of the singular creations that have followed thereafter. Like Abby, like Marge, and like Olive, Frances McDormand endures.
Reader Comments (24)
Going for Meryl's head... such a bad trend. *sigh*
Anyway love love l o o o v e Frances, industry sucks.
after nabbing a Best Actress Oscar for one of the most iconic lead performances in film history Lies.
McDormand's role should not count as a leading one. She has thirty minutes of screen time in a ninety minute movie. And the general populace does not care about Fargo only film geeks. Her Oscar win should seem shocking based on her competition. Although Keaton and Thomas were never threats to actually win. My pick is Blethyn. And once more members saw Secrets and Lies after the fact she and her other defeated rival nominee Watson were nominated again in '98 as makeups for their shameful loss to a Hollywood insider. Fargo wasn't going to win Director nor Picture. Best Actress is the highest honor it could get. Ironically enough McDormand was the last character actress to win Best Actress. I suppose this will change once Viola Davis does it for Fences.
McDormand was offered Doubt she turned it down. Also, she benefits from being married to a powerful man who can just cast her in anything. Unnecessary for her to fight for shit when her husband and brother-in-law are considered the shit. She's also a bit of an asshole. There's a You Tube interview with her where she shits on female directors and actors who refuse to do Michael Bay movies. Bitch.
Also her lack of vanity can't be a virtue since she's not pretty. Not cute. Not beautiful. She's very man-ish which should be encouraging to trans women who are criticized for their bodies not being feminine enough.
nice work Matthew -- I like that you can see Frances' missteps (increased cartoonishness) within your praise.
she really is a singular actor. And very few actors ever do anything as good as her work in Fargo so there's that.
I saw Blood Simple only once and it felt like such an exercize, like a filmmaking thesis. But it was a first film. The Coen Bros got so good so quickly
Great post! We're so lucky to have Frances McDormand. Her performance in Fargo is my favorite Best Actress-winning performance of the past 30 years.
I, too, have only seen Blood Simple once, even though the Coens are among my favorite filmmakers. I should probably rewatch it.
What? Did she turned down Doubt?
I'd pay millions to see that performance.
Strangely, she never gets the praise she deserves for her spectacular performance in The Man Who Wasn't There
I don't know if I've ever been more excited about a film that I am about Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Is it impossible to praise one actress without having to trash talk another? Sigh..
My mouth is still opened in wonderment at one of the responses to this blog.....
I love Frances! Her Oscar win is one of the happiest moments of my entire Oscar experience.
What the hell happened with the movie adaptation of Good People? That's such a great role.
LOVE Frances McDormand greatly. It's crazy how she turns from an unlikely sex symbol to a bonafide character actress.
Olive Kitteridge would not have worked if it's on big screen cause it would not have the necessary time for us to know Olive wholly.
But can you praise her without the conparison to other actresses, Meryl Streep of all people? Not classy and actressexual like.
This is an excellent appraisal and I think the comparison to Streep makes perfect contextual sense. Definitely don't see any trashing here, especially since there is as much critique of McDormand's work as there is of Streep's. Also worth noting, by the way, is the difference in trajectory of their stage careers over the past 30+ years.
Why do we feel the need to pit two actresses against one another talking about their weaknesses and strengths? A bad trend.... And we never do this with male actors? Do we ever compare Tommy Lee Jones with Robert Redford?
*than
And I really don't think this was meant as a trashing of Streep so much as a critique of predictable casting.
Also, @jamie - Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Redford? That'd be so much fun! We could talk about their better performances and their weaker performances, see how they measure up, and then move on to their directorial efforts!
Devin- sounds only fair!
No doubt McDormand is a good actress, but her win for Fargo puzzles me too, surely Blethye shld win for her heartrendering turns, if not her, then surely its shld be Watson, who delivers a knock-out debut that breaks yo heart. The only reason I can come up w is that both Blethye and Watson are British which worked agst them....
I thot McDormand shld be nom for best supp in Fargo, judging the length of her screen-time which is similar or even shorter than Binouche who won for The English Patient.
I like her best in Laurel Canyon!! its a pity she din get any recognition for tt small indie film
I will refrain from naming the devil but, gosh, if I ever wish that amorphous lizard would leave this blog forever and ever. Its responses are always so jarring and contradictory. Like, pretending to be a feminist while being completely mysoginistic throughout its commentary. And I'm not going to mention the other thing IT wrote that made me shake me head in utter disbelief.
Anyhow, viva McDormand and her nonconformist, non-nonsense attitude to her craft.
/3rtful, your general nastiness and unpleasantness is unique and most of your comments are not accurate at all.
LOVE Mcdormand and so glad she won the Oscar for her LEAD role (in an independent movie, so a Hollywood insider she most certainly is not) in a film that in a different time would most likely not have been on Oscars radar at all. My vote would probably have gone to Watson but I think Mcdormand is amazing in Fargo and without that Oscar she would most likely not have gone on to have had the career she's had. Her role in Blood Simply is my second favorite performance of hers, I think she's the one reason to watch Almost Famous (which I find to be exceptionally overrated), and I was blown away when I finally got around the watching Olive Kitteridge. Her lack of vanity has nothing to do with her lack on conventional Hollywood beauty and completely to do with making that character palatable without condescending to make her more likeable.
And Streep bashing, seriously? I don't see any of that in this write up at all, just an exceptionally well written and democratic take on the recent performances she's given. People need to lighten up a bit.
Also, I'm not exactly sure where the notion that Mcdormand is supporting in Fargo comes from. She might not be THE lead, but she is most certainly A lead. Once she arrives she's the focal point of the movie right up until the end and the movie totally shifts from being about Macy to being about her. The character is an odd one because in terms of an emotional arc there's very little, but plot wise the character is a lead IMO and Mcdormand brings so much to it, so many details and she never goes overboard.
Binoche is clearly supporting the other characters in the English Patient (Scott Thomas is in less of that movie and I don't hear any debates about her being considered a lead over Binoche) and the movie is twice as long as Fargo so everyone in the movie has more screentime than any of the characters in Fargo.
After a couple of brief scenes Blethyn doesn't show up in Secrets again until the movie is halfway over and even then she's still sharing center stage with literally everyone else in the movie and is rarely the one moveing the narrative forward. Sometimes it has little to do with screentime. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is IMO more of a lead than she is.
matthew, what a great article! beautifully written and insightful. mcdormand is a wonderful actress, and i couldn't agree more with your assessment of her weaknesses. i do wish she weren't such a sourpuss! the self-seriousness of her, tommy lee jones, viola davis, etc. is yawn-inducing (meryl's management of a media persona is another thing she does better than almost everyone else!).
side note: i'm always fascinated by the love for blethyn: to me, she was always ACTING in capital letters? i guess mcdormand in fargo (where she's peerless) is similar to anthony hopkins in LAMBS...not the typical screen time of a leading performance, but so indelibly performed that it's unforgettable and makes the entire film work.
thanks for a terrific piece!
she won the Oscar for her LEAD role (in an independent movie, so a Hollywood insider she most certainly is not)
Her husband and brother-in-law make the bulk of their movies through the studios. She's a previous Oscar nominee. She was in Primal Fear the same year. Don't pretend she's some marginal indie phenomenon. Everyone including her knew this was her best chance at ever winning Best Actress.
Matthew, thank you for this great essay. It provides so much insight into a fascinating artist. I have no idea what she was doing in Burn After Reading. Then again, the entire cast had no idea what they were doing--geesh, that script.
I do have to stand for Diane that year and say she should have won the Oscar for Marvin's Room, not a popular opinion here at TFE. What a great actressing year that was.
Matthew - great article! McDormand is...maybe my favorite actress ever? I haven't done the math on that, so don't hold me to it. :)
Also I think that she is absolutely a lead in Fargo. I would say there are three characters that could be classified as leads: McDormand, Macy, and possibly Buscemi. When I rewatched Fargo recently, I was struck by how McDormand's character's first appearance in the movie is the point at which the movie becomes more than a crime caper, but something more elusive - I guess I would describe it as a non-didactic but still powerful meditation on the nature of good and evil, with the three main characters representing good, good intentions but susceptible to bad actions, and bad, while still showing them as individuals with their own internal worlds without reducing them to types - and it is McDormand who is the film's moral center and almost an audience surrogate (without the annoying narration). Although she appears late in the film, she dominates it from the moment she appears.
As for whether she should have won the Oscar - I think she absolutely should have. Every moment, every look, every vocal inflection is so perfectly judged. I lived in Minnesota for a few years and her accent and demeanor ring absolutely true for me.
I also want to shout out the scene that stood out to me in 'Fargo' when I rewatched it recently - it's when Marge is having lunch with Mike Yanagita. He says he will just sit next to her, and she firmly but kindly says 'no you should sit over there' and repeats it again when he doesn't move right away. Something about her line delivery - the firmness and absolute nature of the boundary being enforced without being unkind - was just so perfect.
In summation, I heart McDormand and her greatest creation, Marge Gunderson.
McDormand plays an exceptional role in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day! If you haven't seen it, you are missing out on one of her most adorable characters, to me! A plus in this movie is Lee Pace! It is streaming on Netflix! 🌹❤️💯👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻