In anticipation of the upcoming 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the next few weeks of the Almost There series will be dedicated to performances that won big at the Croisette and went on to some Oscar buzz. That being said, the first entry in this quasi-miniseries didn't convert Cannes plaudits into industry awards attention. The opposite happened. After opening commercially in the USA at the end of 1972, Paul Newman's third directorial effort, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, got slotted into the main competition of the following year's Cannes Film Festival. By the time Joanne Woodward won the festivities' Best Actress prize, her new Oscar dreams were already busted…
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Paul Zindel, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds tells the story of a dysfunctional household in 1970s America. Beatrice Hunsdorfer is a middle-aged widow struggling to raise her adolescent daughters while indulging in fruitless dreams of one day owning a fancy tea room where she might sell cheesecake. But, as the hilarious tag line of the movie indicates, life's been a real bitch to Beatrice and vice-versa. Her belligerent and curiously needy personality makes her into something of an overbearing presence in her daughter's complicated lives. The oldest, hormonal Ruth, seems destined to grow up into another version of Beatrice, but introverted Matilda is something else entirely.
Focused on her pets and school projects, the Hunsdorfer's youngest girl floats through life in a cloud of youthful melancholia. While they don't fight like many an antagonistic mother-daughter pair in film history, the relationship between Beatrice and Matilda proves to be the film's most complicated dynamic, the aching heart at the center of a messed-up organism. It was Woodward's own daughter with Paul Newman, Nell Potts, who took on the role of Matilda, playing the girl as a resilient flower suffering and mutating through the radioactivity of her family environment. It's incredible how Potts' fragile downplayed characterization can coexist with Woodward's harridan explosiveness. Their characters' conflict is thus woven into the very fabric of the picture's cinematic reality, in their essentially complementing acting incompatibility.
The way Beatrice lends her belligerent support to Ruth on the occasion of the girl's nightmares and epileptic fits is strangely heartbreaking compared to how she handles Matilda. There's nothing outwardly wrong with her behavior in these scenes, but one senses a patina of nastiness about them, like grease and tobacco smoke over the celluloid. The mother can recognize herself in one daughter, forging shaky complicity while rejecting the other she cannot understand. Something as innocuous as a bad joke can reverberate through the household in fractious ways. When her awful homophobic humor doesn't get a laugh from the youngest daughter, Woodward plays notes of scary irritation in the matriarch's petulant reaction.
She's constantly defensive, walking into every conversation as if expecting it to break out into a fight, even when the person she's talking to is her little girl. One often feels that Beatrice would be more comfortable accepting our disgust than our pity, and Woodward plays to the audience accordingly. Her every gesture soaked in defiance. Other filmmakers might have downplayed the venom of Beatrice or refused to find humor in her eccentricity – painting her as a unidimensional funny weirdo/pathetic monster. However, Newman and Woodward chose the tricky approach of presenting Beatrice as both extremes, daring the audience to look away, to reduce this chaotic personality to any simple thing. It makes for a challenging viewing experience, though not an unrewarding one.
Take, for instance, the scenes in the aftermath of Ruth's public parody of her mother. Beatrice is such a living caricature that it doesn't take much exaggeration for the kid to come up with an uproarious impersonation. Regardless, the mother's reaction couldn't be more heartbreaking. There's genuine hurt in Woodward's questioning of her daughter after the disrespectful lark. One would expect shouty aggression at this point, but there's something more potent in the cocktail of cold fury and choleric sorrow Woodward comes up with. Later, as she shares high school memories and middle-aged remorse with a former schoolmate, we again see Beatrice subsumed by disappointment at herself and her bad luck. Expressive body language further betrays a searing need for comfort, for someone's reassurance, maybe a simple hug.
Like in the scene with Beatrice's eldest child, the actress surprises by choosing a path of introspection and demonstrative brokenness, contradicting what the viewer has grown accustomed to with the character. The entire performance lives in these rug-pulls and brilliantly mercurial inconsistencies. They make the anti-heroine more human and more emotionally dangerous from her vulnerable daughters' point of view. Joanne Woodward's acting in this role can be very broad, but such precise aspects of tonal variation keep the thunderous work from becoming too one-note. That's never more apparent than in the build-up to the ending and its bruising climax. The matriarch's insecurities spill forth when she discovers she'll need to be on stage during Matilda's science fair presentation.
The fear she'll be laughed at, humiliated, is so tangible it's like Woodward has summoned heretofore hidden demons of her character's past, materializing them before us with a terrifying visceral quality. Something cracks inside her, and it's only a matter of time before Beatrice completely shatters. When she does so, it's an ugly spectacle, far greater than any casual indignity Beatrice might have anticipated. Boozed-up and festering inside a pool of fermented self-hatred, her only consolation is the pride for Matilda's success. Bellowing an obsessively rehearsed line with manic zeal, Woodward's Beatrice appears in the picture's climactic moments as someone imploding into themselves. She repeats her words, maybe trying to impress her maternal warmth unto others, perchance trying to convince her daughters or herself that there's tender love within in this mother's broken heart.
As previously stated, Joanne Woodward won the Cannes prize after the 1972/3 American movie awards season had drawn to a close. Even without the festival's honors to recommend her for, this erstwhile Oscar-winner did get a fair bit of attention for her abrasive performance. Critics lauded her, and the HFPA nominated her for the Golden Globe. Additionally, she also got a Golden Moon Award from the Faro Island Film Festival and the Best Actress trophy from the Kansas City Film Critics Circle. AMPAS, however, looked elsewhere for their Oscar lineup. The nominated actresses were Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, Maggie Smith in Travels with My Aunt, Cicely Tyson in Sounder, and Liv Ullmann in The Emigrants.
Even without Woodward's vinegary tour-de-force, that's one hell of a magnificent lineup. Minnelli won the Oscar, and it's pretty difficult to ascertain who was the weakest link in the quintet, voting-wise. Usually, I'd say Ullmann's non-English-speaking performance would be the most vulnerable. Still, The Emigrants was a smash-hit with Academy voters, nabbing four additional nods, including Best Picture. At the end of the day, I guess Maggie Smith was the fifth-placer on nomination morning, taking the spot Woodward might have hoped to get. Still, while The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds did not win its leading lady an Oscar nomination, it indeed established that she was on the hunt for awards gold. The following season Woodward got her third Best Actress nomination for Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.
The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds is difficult to find, but there is currently an upload of the entire flick on Youtube. In addition, Twilight Time has also put out a Blu-Ray of the film.