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The Actor’s Vision: Three Performances by Jessica ChastainSteven RybenIn E.L. Doctorow’s short story, “Jolene: A Life,” there is the following passage: Cindy had an eye for Jolene right from the beginning. She gave her cigarettes to smoke outside behind the garbage bins, and she knew hair and makeup. She said, Red—Jolene had what they call strawberry hair, so that, of course, was her nickname—Red, you don’t want to cover up those freckles. They are charming in a girl like you, they give your face a sunlight. And see, if you keep pulling back your hair into ponytails your hairline will recede, so we’ll cut it just a bit shorter, so that it curls up as it wants to, and we let it frame your sweet face and, lo and behold, you are as pretty as a picture. Jessica Chastain starts here. Of course, years of training and acting work in theatre, in dance, and on television precede her performance as Jolene (Dan Ireland, 2007), the film adaptation of Doctorow’s story. The small roles on television, especially, already indicate her striking presence and intense emotional shorthand. But these parts are reactive, not active. On a 2004 episode of E.R., she plays the delusional, abused daughter of a stroke victim, stilled into shock as the controlled chaos of a trauma center orbits around her; in a 2005 installment of Veronica Mars, playing a runaway living in fear of a violent boyfriend, she disappears after the first five minutes. As Jolene, though, she is in all but one scene. Did this mean that Chastain’s character had achieved narrative agency? Not quite. In the Doctorow story, Jolene—a fifteen-year old foster child when we meet her, in her twenties at the end—is abused by her stepfather, and subsequently moved from one foster home to another. She is looking for love, but is repeatedly subject to the victimization of men (and one woman) who take her as their prize. Cindy, in the passage above, is only one of several characters in the story who tries to possess Jolene, to frame her like a picture, rather than let Jolene frame herself. However, throughout the short story and its film adaptation, Jolene will develop an interest in art. In the film, her paintings and drawings suggest her gradual discovery of the means by which to articulate her vision of the world, rather than subjecting herself to the vision of others: Whether or not Jolene finally achieves an independent vision is uncertain in the Doctorow tale, for the author suggests that his character is about to make the same mistake again. Rather than having Jolene remain settled in her new career as an artist of graphic novels that tell her story, Doctorow ends the narrative with Jolene’s dreams of becoming a Hollywood movie star:Friends tell Jolene she could act in movies, because she may be twenty-five but she looks a lot younger … I mean, why not? Jolene says to herself. She has this daydream. Her son sees her up on the screen one day. And when takes herself back to Tulsa in her Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud he answers the door and rushes into the arms of his movie-star mother.A trip to Hollywood would mean peril for Jolene, one more adventure in objectification. However, the film’s version of this scene cannot help but function as a prescient allegory for the career of its lead actress. As Chastain voices Jolene’s words (lifted, more or less verbatim, from Doctorow’s story), she walks away from the camera, and along the Hollywood walk of fame, in control of her future: One can be forgiven for forgetting about Jolene at this moment, and for instead imagining Chastain walking, some decades hence, on her own star. This desire for agency, of a victory over the male gaze and a film industry dominated by men, is often found in writing on actresses, including autobiographies by actresses themselves. As it turns out, in the final frame of this film, Chastain herself is walking towards better movies than Jolene—films that enable her to articulate a vision of her own rather than subjecting her to one. But how can someone as new to cinema as Jessica Chastain already be said to possess a “vision”? For most cinephiles she is best known for her role as Mrs. O’Brien in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011); this celebrated appearance in the work of a director known to engage with large philosophical issues would be reason enough to take her seriously. Yet her career already includes more than Malick. Her other memorable appearances in 2011 included Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols), The Debt (John Madden), Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes), The Help (Tate Taylor), Texas Killing Fields (Ami Canaan Mann), and, more recently, Lawless (John Hillcoat, 2012), Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012), and Mamá (Andres Muschietti, 2013). Indeed, a recurring critical trope in journalistic pieces on Chastain in 2011 was the seemingly sudden appearance of a fully-formed body of work. A distinctive screen presence and also something of a chameleon, Chastain creates vivid depictions of singular characters with rich inner lives. Consider the variety of problems, actions, and situations her characters grapple with: motherhood and marriage (The Tree of Life, Take Shelter, Coriolanus); retribution and national politics (The Debt; Zero Dark Thirty); relationships between men and women (all the films, but felt especially in The Tree of Life, Take Shelter, The Debt, and Texas Killing Fields); racism (The Help); the environment (Take Shelter); mental illness (Take Shelter); and, in the case of Malick’s film, the very meaning of life itself. Chastain, then, has quickly become something more than Hollywood’s latest starlet. The seriousness of the subject matter tackled by these films is one reason. Her background is another: trained at Juilliard, with the benefit of a scholarship provided by Robin Williams, she is also the veteran of recent theatrical productions co-starring Al Pacino, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and John Ortiz. And the impressive range of directors she has already worked with—from established filmmakers such as Malick, Hillcoat, and Bigelow, to relatively more mainstream Hollywood craftsmen like Madden and Taylor, to emerging independent directors such as Nichols and Mann—offers a varied set of contexts for her performances. What I am claiming for Chastain, then, is the ability, as an actor, to enact a vision of the world. This is a large claim for a young actor, particularly one who works in an industry that values persona over performance and commodity stardom over acting ability. In her star study of Nicole Kidman, for example, Pam Cook shows that Kidman struggled for respectability early in her career, finding widespread mainstream recognition as an accomplished actress only with the receipt of an Oscar in 2002, for The Hours. Crucially, as Cook points out, Kidman’s desire to be recognized as a serious actress was not first articulated through her films, but in an appearance in a Vogue photoshoot in 1994, in which she assumed the look of various classical Hollywood stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Lana Turner. Of course, Chastain’s career has not lacked for publicity appearances, and in photoshoots she has evoked the guises of actresses such as Tilda Swinton and Lucille Ball. However, Chastain’s public persona has also emphasized her education and training, as well as her desire to place herself in a lineage of actors not only in terms of physical appearance, but also in terms of ability and skill. For example, she has mentioned her admiration for other performers past and present, such as Greer Garson and Isabelle Huppert, in various interviews. Certain biographical details, repeated in various interviews, also amplify her attitude toward acting as a profession and a craft. These include her anecdote of her experience watching a theatrical production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat as a child and subsequently discovering that acting was a profession that she might one day attempt. Another motif of Chastain’s various interviews is her tendency to frame her experiences working with seasoned actors (such as Al Pacino in Wilde Salome, Helen Mirren in The Debt and Vanessa Redgrave in Coriolanus) as “master classes,” pedagogical experiences that do not simply satisfy a will to become a star but rather teach her about technique and improve her ability as an expressive artist. Her definition of the actress as a life-long student of the profession was made explicit in a September 2012 New York Times interview in which she claims to study the work of other actors who have tackled similar roles in the past as a method to improve her own work. In the same interview, she also describes the value of watching her own dailies during film productions. Chastain’s discursive framing of acting as an ongoing pedagogical experience provides a frame for understanding the various guises the actress assumes on screen and in various public appearances. This persona deemphasizes the persona itself in favor of the profession. That an actor should want to be known as a serious artist first and a star second is, of course, not unfamiliar. One is reminded of Lauren Bacall’s autobiography, By Myself (1978), in which she claims personal agency over the narrative of her career by spending as much time describing her later experiences on Broadway as she does reflecting upon her iconic pairing with husband Humphrey Bogart. Bacall’s book is typical of autobiographies by actresses in its writerly claim of agency over a career often subject to (male) forces beyond her control. But regardless of the suspicions of claims to an “authentic self” often voiced in scholarly work on stardom and performance, there is enough evidence to take Chastain seriously when she claims an interest in acting over stardom. For example, in early 2012 she turned down a presumably lucrative opportunity to appear in Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013) in order to make a pair of low-budget independent films and to rehearse, over the summer of 2012, for her Broadway debut in The Heiress later that year. Of course, the circulation of Chastain’s public persona, constructed out of various interviews, red carpet appearances, and photoshoots, does not give us access to the “authentic” person any more than Nicole Kidman’s persona does. But it does establish her serious regard for the craft and artistry of acting not as something achieved later in a career after stardom has been attained but as an authentic point of departure for understanding the career to come. Chastain, in other words, does not need to wait to write her autobiography to claim agency over her life story; she has, at a very early moment in her career, claimed agency as an actress by discursively placing herself as an artist whose learning process continues even after her stardom has been attained. So Chastain wants to learn. But what does she teach us as cinephiles? In the balance of this essay I want to show, through close analysis of three performances, that what Chastain is beginning to create, at a very early moment in her career, is nothing less than an oeuvre, a vision—the same kind of vision Jolene might like to attain through the making of art, but which Chastain is in a better position to accomplish because of the skill and complexity of her first performances. Discussions of “visions” in film studies are usually limited to film directors, but what would it mean to credit an actor with a vision? The actor’s vision might be understood as a process of thought, emotion, and action that unfolds gradually on film: not a way of being looked at, but a way of looking, glancing, and ................
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