We'll be celebrating each of the upcoming Honorary Oscar winners with a few pieces on their career. First up is Danny Glover who turns 75 today. Happy Birthday to a fine American actor!
by Eric Blume
Danny Glover shows up about fifteen minutes into director Robert Benton’s 1984 Oscar winner Places in the Heart, looking dapper and handsome in his worn suit, with an effortless charm that belies his character’s backstory. He insinuates his way into the life of widowed Edna Spalding (that year’s Best Actress winner, Sally Field) and into the film’s narrative. Sadly he always stays on the sidelines but Glover provides a radiance and a verve that display his burgeoning talent and resourcefulness.
Places in the Heart marked Glover’s first large-scale film role, and he seizes the role of drifter Moses and does everything he can with it...
He has a truly dumb section to execute when he’s talking to himself while hanging up a horseshoe on his front door. He has the good grace to lean into it comically and make it a bit. He doesn’t overdo the brave protector qualities and has a flash during a monologue where he lets you know where Moses might have been and what he might have gone through before the events we're seeing.
Benton’s film hasn’t, as you might have imagined, aged particularly well. Even at the time, its “sumthin’s-happened-to-yer-Pa” ethos was an eye-roller; it's a good thing that they don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Field’s second Oscar win has been widely criticized (and sometimes reviled), and her work here is far from her subtle, first Oscar triumph in Norma Rae. But Field finds pockets of smart ways to undercut her character’s earnestness: when she “saves” Moses and lies about something he’s stolen from her, she lets you see that Edna is doing it more for herself and due to needing someone to plant cotton for her, rather than to shove her wonderfulness down your throat (Benton does that enough for us). And Field finds a good rhythm with Glover: they’re both extraordinarily direct actors, and while they’re not able to bring much complexity to what’s on the page, they keep things simple and straightforward, and their individual warm screen presences align sweetly. (They would later be romantically paired in the second season of the drama series Brothers & Sisters).
We never learn a lot about Moses, and you keep wanting his character to figure in in a bigger way, like for he and Edna to start fucking or something. But he remains in noble cliché territory within the picture’s narrow confines, The film is more interested in an hour-one tornado sequence and climaxes with an actual cotton-pickin’ contest (no, I am not making this up). And I won’t even begin to tackle this movie’s politics: they’re a bit of nightmare, so let’s just say that for a movie about cotton, it’s actually pure corn.
Still, within the limitations, Glover delivers a star-making performance, the kind of thing that made the industry and audience stand up and say, “who is THAT actor?”. Glover has a camera face that’s beautiful and soulful, and an intuitiveness for each scene that keeps things fresh. He was on his way to bigger and better things...