1991: Judy Davis in "Barton Fink" and "Naked Lunch"
Thursday, July 16, 2020 at 2:28PM
Before each Smackdown, Nick Taylor looks at possibilities for an alternate ballot...
Barton Fink and Naked Lunch are two 1991 films with more in common than you'd expect. Both follow writers - one a lifelong devotee of the trade, one quite new to it - who are suddenly plucked from their old lives and dropped into entirely alien worlds, with few reliable sources to guide them. Both tackle the incredibly mundane ache of loneliness and toil of their work, albeit against obstacles like axe murderers and global drug conspiracies. Both are directed by major auteurs and styled to the fucking nines, making their settings as accessible as they need to be while fulfilling some impenetrably strange narrative conceits. And both serve as vivid showcases for the talents of Judy Davis, 1991’s NYFCC winner for Best Supporting Actress, who unfussily acquits herself to two very different, aesthetically demanding milieus. Her brainy, abrasive persona and preternatural expressiveness are cannily utilized in both films, and Davis emerges as an essential element of their respective successes despite her minimal screen time...
Barton Fink
Set in 1941, Barton Fink stars John Turturro in the titular role of an anxious young Broadway writer whisked off to Hollywood almost immediately after his newest play debuts to revelatory reviews. Fink isn’t particularly excited to write for the pictures, having already set his sights on reinventing the grammar of theatre itself in order to create the next great American Epic about the common man, for the common man, despite being chronically incapable of interacting with said common man. At the very least, he’ll receive a steady, handsome income and a chance to further hone his craft. Granted, a Wallace Beery wrestling B-movie may not be the best venue for exposing the soul of blue-collar America, but Fink’s inability to start writing the script is a much bigger problem than the cliched material he’s been given. Even worse is the litany of studio bigwigs and fellow writers who should ostensibly be able to give him some kind of help but only leave him even more baffled about how to do his job.
Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis) is something of an exception to most of the folks running around Barton Fink, not just sympathetic to Fink’s plight but arguably the only character in the film the Coens’ seem interested in getting the audience to like. Sporting a Southern drawl and a Scarlet O’Hara wig, Davis spends her first scene standing in the doorway of her nice apartment, apologizing to Fink on behalf of her boss/lover W.B. Mayhew (John Mahoney) and informing him he isn’t sober enough to keep up their lunch date but should be able to meet with him in the next few days. Taylor is candid about Mayhew’s vices, regarding it as a typical part of his behavior while downplaying its extremity even as he sounds like he’s destroying their house. Davis plays Taylor with the self-awareness of a woman too smart not to see the damage Mayhew's alcoholism is wreaking on the both of them but still obedient to whatever ideals of Southern obligation and romantic yearning have kept her by his side for all these years. I can’t imagine Davis being anyone’s first choice for a meek Southerner, yet she’s magnetic to watch as she explains the troubling dynamics between her and Mayhew to an increasingly shattered Fink.
Her third scene culminates with a pretty major revelation about her work for Mayhew and a tender step forward in her relationship with Fink, making it an even bigger shame she’s axed from the film almost immediately afterwards. Even for a film about stifled potential and sudden disappointments, her removal from Barton Fink feels more like a missed opportunity to explore the character further. Her particular form of suffering is singular even among the Coens’ pantheon of losers, and I wish they’d given her a real arc to play out instead of cutting it short at her biggest secret.
Naked Lunch
For all Fink’s surrealist flourishes and everyday manias, it’s amazing how Naked Lunch is, by several degrees, the weirder movie of the two. Loosely based on the novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs and the events in his life that inspired its creation, the film takes place in a version of 1950's New York very removed from our known reality. Our hero is William Lee (Peter Weller, whose elastic deadpan is an effective foil for Cronenberg’s oddities), an exterminator who finds himself suddenly swept up in a major global conspiracy. Lee is quick to frame this development as a hallucinogenic side effect of his newfound addiction to the bug powder he uses to kill cockroaches, having recently picked up the habit from his wife Joan (Judy Davis). but if you were summoned to a police station by a talking, anatomically unique, pug-sized beetle, you might be eager to explain that shit away too. The beetle tells him his handlers have decided to bring him into the war against Interzone Inc., a shady outpost in North Africa, and that his first assignment is to kill his double-agent wife in as tasty a manner as possible.
Davis follows in the lineage of Cronenberg women such as Debbie Harry in Videodrome and Genevieve Bujold in Dead Ringers, addicts whose perversions and fetishes are all the more vivid for how casually their actors inhabit them and the agency they display behind every questionable choice they make. One wonders if she turned to drugs out of sheer boredom, or perhaps as a mordant form of mental stimulation, though Davis, Weller, and Cronenberg largely refuse to indicate what (if anything) has changed in the Lee household now that they’re consistently high as kites.
Davis's turn-on-a-dime vacillations between bored disregard, latent carnality, and occasional fondness for her husband - in communication with his less expressive but equally readable reactions to her demands - paints a fascinating portrait of a marriage seemingly defined by sad surprises and pitiful acceptances. Even when she’s at home without Bill, breathing on cockroaches to watch them choke on her powder-infected breath or sleeping with his Beatnik friends just to do something, Joan doesn’t display much forethought beyond whatever’s energizing her in the moment yet seems hyper-aware of her actions and the people around her. Joan’s intelligence and listless self-amusement are palpable even through the heavy fog of bug powder flowing through her veins.
So, does this sound like a secret agent to you? Or perhaps the deep cover identity of a highly trained centipede operative waiting to strike? Bill remains conflicted about this question, even after he accidentally completes his mission during a botched William Tell routine. He flees to Interzone, spending his time with a great number of literary contemporaries, underworld dealers, and their twinks. Most notable among these figures are debauched writers Tom (Ian Holm) and Joan Frost (Judy Davis!), the latter a doppelgänger of his dead wife. Here, Davis also intersects with the lineage of Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers and Miranda Richardson in Spider, whose thematically heavy dual-casting benefits from the unsettling overlaps in personality and affectation between their two roles. Joan Frost is every bit as erudite as Joan Lee, though this Joan is clear-eyed and lively, connecting fully to the world around her. She has unhealthy appetites of her own, arguably more overwhelming ones, though Davis - in team with her ace makeup and costume designers -ensures at all times that Joan Frost is a distinct character in her own right. Admittedly, Davis isn’t as central in these passages as she was, though her commitment to the material remains just as inspired. Compare her playing of Joan’s seduction by Bill or her near-inexplicable romantic subjugation to a mysterious woman against the impact made by Naked Lunch’s other supporting players, and witness how fully she’s invested herself in Cronenberg’s concepts while interacting spontaneously with her costars. In Naked Lunch and in Barton Fink, Davis manages to turn her crucial but peripheral roles into showcases for her idiosyncratic talents without once showing off. She's able to synchronize with the very peculiar, very recognizable styles of her directors, carving out her own indelible impression in both their canons.
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• Vote on the upcoming Smackdown
Reader Comments (26)
Nice appreciation. I love her in pretty much everything, including in both of these. And given that this was the same year as her lead turn in the delightful Impromptu - range!
I'm so glad you wrote about Davis' amazing '91 performances. She's my personal choice for Best Supporting Actress of the year for her turn in NAKED LUNCH. Thanks, as ever, for the great writing.
Judy Davis is such a brilliant, but underappreciated actress.
Her real crowning achievement was Husbands & Wives.
Barton Fink is a classic. The Naked Lunch I’ve never seen
I simply adore Judy Davis in The Naked Lunch. I watched in 1992 and that was pivotal to cement my conviction she was going to get the Oscar for her acclaimed perf in Woody Allen’s Husband and Wives. As everybody knows, I was wrong
@ScottC - I still need to see that! Will hopefully watch it soon. Heard good things about her and Emma Thompson.
@Cláudio - Thank you! Coming from you that means a hell of a lot! I think my Supporting Actress winner this year is Juliette Lewis but Davis is a close runner-up.
@Dl - She really fuckin is.
@/3rtful - Agreed, though I still have to see a few of her other classics. My Brilliant Career is top of my list for her.
@Joe - Check out Naked Lunch if you get the chance! Lots of crazy experiments going on there, not all of which work 100% but their combined effect is pretty dazzling.
@Mirko - RIP. I wonder how much better her chances would’ve been if the movie didn’t get released while his marriage was falling apart. Still, at least she got nominated! Can’t say that about Carol Spier or Denise Cronenberg :(
Oh, she fucking killed it in both of those films. How she got overlooked is beyond me.
Vote splitting maybe.
Cronenberg writes such challenging roles for women.
The "lineage of Cronenberg women", as you put it, is just astounding.
Debbie Harry in Videodrome
Geena Davis in The Fly
Genevieve Bujold in Dead Ringers
Judy Davis in Naked Lunch
Holly Hunter, Rosanna Arquette and Deborah Kara Unger in Crash
Jennifer Jason Leigh in Existenz
Miranda Richardson in Spider
Maria Bello in A History of Violence
Keira Knightley in A Dangerous Method
Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars
Oh so this momentum is why she came so close for Husbands And Wives. Tomei was leagues ahead of her (Redgrave was second best) so it always confused me the whole DaVIS waS RObBeD film critics/pundits of today narrative.
@Nick - Thanks for the tribute to one of cinema's very best. Judy Davis always radiates a luminosity I don't often find in actresses I admire. In every film Davis happens to be in she can flick that switch and she's lit and for me it is impossible to keep my eyes off her (e.g. Where Angels Fear to Tread, Blood and Wine and Winter of Our Dreams to name a few).
She's at her best in Barton Fink and especially Naked Lunch -- such brazen power she got there. Like her Joan character said: She's a literary high... a Kafka high. Much like her George Sands character in Impromptu. Peter Weller likened Judy Davis to a Ferrari: once she's cranked up to go, she will be the best you'll ever see.
Some of her earlier films stream occasionally. Of her early ones, I particularly like her in High Tide and Kangaroo.
In one interview (it's probably still on youtube), she said that when she watched her performance again in Husbands & Wives she thought she was over-acting the entire time and she wished someone told her to stop it. I thought Sally is peak Judy Davis: no showboating or grandstanding. Not over-acting at all.
I think her best performance was from A Passage to India, which she deservedly nominated and also should have won over Sally Field that year. She also was brilliantly over the top in Husband and Wives. Marisa Tomei should have won for In the Bedroom, not for My Cousin Vinny IMO.
Judy Davis isn't only an extraordinary actress, but one of the few people to have an accurate view on her Husbands And Wives performance She doesn't care for sycophantic overpraising. We have no choice but to stan!
Finally, someone who agrees with me about Judy Davis' performance in Husbands and Wives and it turns out to be ... Judy Davis herself. She's a great great actress and should have easily won an Oscar in 1984, but this is one of her least impressive performances.
I think her lack of a nomination in 1991 was the result of vote splitting. It's always dangerous to give two excellent performances in the same eligibility year (just ask Amy Adams, Ryan Gosling and Sidney Poitier), but when one doesn't clearly dominate the other, or happen to be in a film that's getting a major push, it can spell disaster. I'd've gone for the Naked Lunch performance myself.
Love Davis in both these projects and the already mentioned Impromptu. She also had a starring role in the underrated Where Angels Fear to Tread so really if 1991 was anyone's year it was hers. While I appreciate her oscar nominated turns it's those she was not nominated for that I love her most for. Her breakout in My Brilliant Career is one for the ages and should've garnered her an academy award nomination.
Other films of hers worth watching are The Ref, Children of the Revolution, Me and My Shadows (tv but still exceptional), The Dressmaker & Page Eight. With her next project Ratched already having filmed pre COVID I'm thankful we'll have something from her sooner rather than later.
To clarify, I don't want to take away from Field's deserving runner up performance. At least a great performance triumphed and if you want to choose from the three farm wives Field is the standout. Redgrave is a slightly snoozy also-ran from any perspective.
I love Tomei in My Cousin Vinny, but I love a good honey glazed ham and Miss Judy Davis can dip into that mode so deliciously.
Judy Davis, for finding the correct evaluation of your performance in Husbands and Wives, Condragulations you are the winner of these weeks challenge, but deservedly not that Oscar.
I found Judy's interview on youtube.
The whole interview is fascinating, but if you want to watch that part where she dismissed her performance as Sally in Husbands and Wives, go directly to 7:21. I love how she quietly rebukes the interviewer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e1-YUPcT-Y
Deconstructing Harry . Nothing more to say .
Clear minded Judy Davis fans that don't go blindly into stan territory (usually to shit on one of the greatest Oscar winning supporting performances ever?)? Legendary.
I'm a huge Tomeito (is that what we Tomei fans call ourselves? ha) and generally like her better than Davis - but I still can't get into her performance in My Cousin Vinny!! So forced, so 'acted', so full of empty gesturing. The way she smacks herself in the head during her 'deer' monologue' ("he SHOT cha!!!") made me cringe. And fans of it call Davis in Husbands and Wives over the top? She was much better later on in stuff like In The Bedroom.
These two (well, 3 considering her role in Naked Lunch) Judy Davis performances are extraordinary though. I remember the Coens told her to make Audrey's accent as "Southern as a barn yard door". The result is offbeat comic brilliance. She probably split votes that year, but both films were a little bit too 'weird' for the Academy back then. I'd hazard a guess she was closer for the more traditional 'Impromptu' than any of her supporting work.
In a field of acclaimed actresses (Plowright, Redgrave, Richardson) up for the 1992 supporting actress Oscar, Davis was considered the favourite for the win as she had received glowing reviews and won the lion's share of the critics' awards. Tomei's win was staggering and it seems as though it took years before many people had anything nice to say about it at all.
Nick T: When you say "released while his marriage was falling apart", do you mean Woody Allen? Because he was never married to Mia Farrow. But the scandal surrounding their break-up might have affected Davis's chances of winning for Husbands and Wives. Not that it affected Dianne Wiest and Mira Sorvino's chances two and three years later.
She is such a brilliantly unique actress!
Even in her ingenue years, she always looks a bit old but still sensual.
Still think she should have won for Husbands and Wives
I love TFE! Only here can the logical call of Tomei, or possibly a Redgrave, being the 92 supporting actress winner not be overrun by stans choosing an actress they like in a hammy and good performance and emotionally calling her the winner. You guys have taste out the wazoo!!