Jennifer Jason Leigh
"Last Exit to Brooklyn," "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle," "Single White Female," "The Hudsucker Proxy"
Like Al Pacino, Jennifer Jason Leigh is a switch-hitter who can work big or small and be equally compelling. Her breakthrough performance in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” was very naturalistic, and over the years she kept returning to that mode, most notably in “Rush,” “Dolores Claiborne,” “Washington Square” and “The Anniversary Party,” which she co-wrote and co-directed with Alan Cumming.
But when I think of Jennifer Jason Leigh, those aren’t the sorts of roles that spring immediately to mind. I picture her as the broken doll of “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” the freakishly overgrown little girl coveting her roommate’s life in “Single White Female,” the motormouthed, wiggly-walking, utterly bizarre Barbara Stanwyck/Rosalind Russell-style reporter in the Coen brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy” (“I’ll stake my Pulitzer on it!”) and her mesmerizing but deeply problematic Dorothy Parker in Alan Rudolph’s “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.” For that last role, she modeled her voice on recordings of Dorothy Parker. The problem with that approach was the recordings were made near the end of Parker’s life. But by imitating them flawlessly, Leigh put an old woman’s voice in the mouth of a character who was 30 or 40 in the film proper, which was just weird; when people described Parker as an old soul, I’m pretty sure that’s not what they meant.
Not that I’m complaining, exactly. Leigh’s slightly abstract take on some of her characters makes them pop in a way that a more earthbound strategy might not, and even when she’s wildly miscalculating, something authentically strange and vibrant usually comes through. She’s unnerving in the way that real-life eccentrics, neurotics and freaks tend to be. As for Leigh’s performance as Sadie, the sister of the title character in “Georgia,” I’ll let Sarah D. Bunting have the last word. “Leigh occupies Sadie completely — you can smell her, the sour fug of Marlboro Lights and dirty hair that must attend Sadie’s movements — but manages to let us see what Georgia sees, this off-putting and childish broken-down charmer that can’t be written off. It’s a brilliant job, but I would rather watch ‘Un chien andalou’ a hundred times in a row and then eat the razor they used than sit through it again.”
