By Dan Callahan
“I might get killed but I wouldn’t die. I’d be born again as another me—or a lampshade, but I’ll be on earth. Always.” (Shelley Duvall to Patricia Bosworth, 1972)
Famously discovered by Robert Altman while working behind a cosmetics counter in Houston, Texas, Shelley Duvall is one of the weirdest and most beguiling performers to ever find regular work in movies. Duvall epitomizes a certain kind of huge-eyed, skinny Texas girl: diffident, flirty, innocent, addled by marijuana (Duvall has said that she used to smoke up all day and all night long), and generally unnerving. Very much a creature of the seventies, she featured mainly in Altman films, often in small roles, like her fresh-faced prostitute in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and her scene-stealing Mrs. Grover Cleveland in Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976). Aside from her three Altman leads and her besieged Wendy in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Duvall has been restricted to one scene bits and supporting parts, probably because she’s seen as too idiosyncratic and troubling to take center stage for long. In the eighties, she made her own opportunities by producing the innovative Fairie Tale Theatre cable series. Most kids of my generation will know Duvall mainly through her inimitably out-of-it introductions to each segment: her enormous brown eyes would shift around ever so slightly when she talked about “tonight’s tale,” trying to paste what she thought of as “normal” reactions on top of her obvious eccentricity. There wasn’t much work after that, and she has made no films since 2002. But her major appearances, listed below, are still as fresh and complex as ever.
1. Thieves Like Us (1974): Bathed in pearly primary colors, awash in Coca-Cola and old radio programs, this Altman movie serves as his tribute to the ambiance of the thirties, and as his least abashed love letter to Shelley Duvall. Her Keechie is introduced obliquely, gradually; Keith Carradine’s Bowie sees her several times entering and leaving a room. When we first see her up close, Altman stays on Duvall with laser-like focus, scrutinizing her narrow, flat face, with its drawn-on eyebrows, her over-sized teeth, her shiny skin, and the way her big ears stick out of her greasy, lank black hair. In conventional movie terms, Duvall’s Keechie couldn’t be less alluring, but under Altman’s gaze, we see Keechie’s (and Duvall’s) hints of worldliness and her motherly feelings for Carradine, which gives her an off-kilter kind of sexiness. Emerging from a bathtub, Duvall makes a beautifully elongated, painterly nude, but this “ideal girlfriend” figure can also be loopy in a menacing way, and petulant. Altman’s doubts creep in when he frames Duvall’s face in a warped mirror so that it swells up on one side, revealing a funhouse freak beneath the lovely woman we’ve learned to see. Her penultimate scene pushes her to hysteria, which Duvall takes to like she takes to every emotion: with complete, unstudied naturalness. And in Keechie’s very ambiguous last scene, Altman shrinks back from Duvall, as if he’s wondering if her strangeness might not be some sort of spiritual, or at least moral, void.
2. 3 Women (1977): This is Duvall’s magnum opus, her tour-de-force for Altman. She wrote some of her own role, the unforgettable Millie Lammoreaux, a Texan Alice Adams/Stella Dallas, and Duvall plays this isolated, deluded creature with such risky comic and tragic precision that it belies (or maybe confirms?) her seeming lack of technique. Millie’s eyes are blank, and she moves stiffly beneath her yellow sun dresses (the hem of her skirt always gets caught in her car door, marking her as one of life’s big losers). You could call what Duvall is doing here minimalist, but that implies a choice of some kind, and I think that she’s really just working within the set confines of her own droll personal style, as a person, as an artist, but not really as an actress, per se. Millie talks and talks to the air in her light, fey voice, like a Beckett heroine, and her inane babble reveals what artist Jack Smith once termed the “uninterrupted commercial intrusions into our daily lives.” Desperate for attention, specifically male, Millie chats up some hospital interns with the priceless come-on line, “Would you check my glands for me?” Everything she says is absurd, but even if we laugh, we aren’t really laughing at her. The sad truth of her empty life is too apparent for that release, so that every laugh she gets holds the audience in a vice of sympathy and horror. Millie is a chattering black hole, a zombie doing an infomercial for various recipes and magazines, and, underneath, she’s a real, hurt, limited girl. We find out where she came from: “My mother was sick. Couldn’t keep me,” she says, briskly, to her deranged admirer at work, Pinky (Sissy Spacek), as if she can’t linger over this loss. When Millie is made to finally feel her own loneliness and lashes out at Pinky, Duvall’s big eyes water with suppressed anger and her girlish voice seizes up as she shouts, which feels shocking. She later redeems herself by taking care of Pinky after a suicide attempt, realizing, on a pre-conscious level, that Pinky is the only person who has ever loved her. 3 Women casts an unbroken spell until the last act, when identities morph in a clumsy way. Though the ending doesn’t do justice to Duvall’s conception, Millie Lammoreaux stands as one of the most believable, detailed portraits of an outcast in all of cinema and literature.
3. Popeye (1980): In Altman’s intriguingly awkward and sometimes downright ugly comic book movie, Duvall gets to do the part she was “born to play,” Olive Oyl. She changes her physicality, moving like a hyped-up chicken, and plays a cartoon variation on her dominant mood, a kind of persnickety, blithe materialism. The role enhances Duvall’s poignant two-dimensionality, making her into a female Pinocchio longing to be a real girl. Altman dresses her in red to set off her pale white skin and ink black hair, and he makes a perverse movie, thumbing his nose at the producers (which included Disney and Robert Evans) while paying final tribute to his Texas rose. The sweet, plangent way Duvall chirps the song “He Needs Me” was tenderly appropriated by Paul Thomas Anderson for Punch-Drunk Love (2002), but Altman subverts Olive’s epiphany by cutting to windows shutting around her as she sings. This is one more point in the film where Altman emphasizes the meanness of Sweet Haven, the seaside setting of Popeye, but it might also be a signal of his disenchantment with Duvall. After steady collaboration in the seventies, Altman and Duvall never worked together again after Popeye. Did they have some kind of falling out? It’s a shame that she didn’t get to turn up in Short Cuts (1992), or Kansas City (1994), or any of Altman’s later films. Duvall always brought the prickly director as close to warmth and wonder as he would ever get.
4. The Shining (1980): As Wendy Torrance, a wrung-out dishrag of a woman who has to find reserves of strength to protect herself and her son from an increasingly psychotic husband (Jack Nicholson), Duvall is much like Lillian Gish in a sadomasochistic D.W. Griffith movie, bringing her purity and humanity to a role that could have been laughably overwrought. She has to spend the second half of this distended movie in a state of constant hysteria, and the trouble she had with Kubrick’s many-take methods over the year it took to shoot the picture is documented in a short documentary on the making of The Shining, directed by Kubrick’s daughter Vivian. In some ways, this brief on-set doc is more interesting than the film itself: we see what look like panic attacks for Duvall, and we see Kubrick’s impatience with her child-like, attention-seeking behavior. After the film is finished, Duvall tells the younger Kubrick that making the movie was finally a positive experience, in her real, almost alto, steady speaking voice. Watching her in the film, though, remains an uncomfortable experience; however effective Duvall is in The Shining, the experience of being (not acting) hysterical under Kubrick for such a long period may have soured her burgeoning creativity.
5. The Portrait of a Lady (1996): Towards the middle of Jane Campion’s well meaning but mostly unfortunate adaptation of the Henry James novel, up pops Duvall as the sprightly Countess Gemini (the operative word here is pop). She puts together a detailed, merry bit of character work in just a few scenes, then disappears, leaving us wanting more. The next year, Duvall had a lead in Guy Maddin’s typically marginal Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), in which she seemed a bit unhappy, and there’s been nothing substantial now for a while. Some rather dark rumors on her IMDb page count as the only information I’ve been able to find about what’s happened to Duvall. According to some of these posts, she has retreated back to Texas and lives in a small town. Two eyewitness accounts state that Duvall might be suffering from health problems. I can only hope these stories are false, but if they have a basis in truth, let me drop my writerly stance completely and simply say, we love you Shelley! Get better soon. David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Paul Thomas Anderson and others would benefit from your uncanny presence on screen._________________________________________________
House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.
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13 comments:
Nice post. My pick for essential Shelley Duvall viewing, however, ıs Faerie Tale Theatre. It used to run on Sunday mornings at nine o'clock when I was growing up in Ankara, and I remember the show's being tremendously entertaining. And somewhat scary, as all fairy tales should be. I ran into a couple of episodes a few years ago, and was glad to discover that my appreciation wasn't based on hindsight, or queasy nostalgia.
The relative dearth of lead roles for Duvall makes it hard to offer an alternative list -- you hit most of the high points, Dan. I completely agree that Duvall's specialness (weirdness?) was difficult for Hollywood to process; an industry whose first concern is always "likability" (often a synonym for blandness) is terrified by anyone who doesn't fit any predetermined mold.
Her performances in "Popeye" and "The Shining" were the peaks for her, I think. That they came out during the same calendar year is rather astonishing.
That is a nice list. I think I've mentioned before how Thieves Like Us completely flipped me on Duvall. I'd always seen her as gangly and awkward and fairly unattractive (see: everything else on your list), but Altman made me see her the way Bowie does, and now I see that beauty whenever I see her onscreen. That perspective made 3 Women a completely different viewing afterwards.
I wouldn't call it a major performance, but she had a nice rapport with Steve Martin in Roxanne.
I also like her peformance in Brewster McCloud - which I believe is her screen debut - as a flightly tour guide whose sexual wiles threaten to distract Brewster from his obsession - building a set of wings and taking flight in the Astrodome. (Although perhaps wiles is the wrong word - it implies more volition on the character's part than she seems capable of. Her seduction of Brewster scarcely seems that calculated.)
Another notable role for Duvall (and one I'm not particularly fond of) is in Annie Hall where she plays a spaced-out Rolling Stone reporter with whom Woody Allen goes on a disastrous date. Her role (a cameo really) is basically an unfunny parody of the '60s counterculture type and it's really rather offensive in its dismissive simplification.
Lovely! I have a buggy crush on Shelley. I shot her some love last week over at ReverseBlog. (http://blogs.indiewire.com/reverseshot/archives/016442.html)
Why is she on our brains lately?
I love her cameo in Annie Hall. It is a parody, but not of counter culture per se, but the petit bourgeois temper tantrums that plagued conformistas of the time, who were on the bandwagon just because it was fashionable.
Ali,
Maybe so, but what's always bothered me about the scene is the cultural snobbery that it asks us to identify with. Duvall's character expresses an enthusiasm (perhaps only born of her desire to conform) for much that is great about the era she's supposed to represent (in a vastly simplified conception) i.e., the music. Thus, we are forced to identify with Allen's dismissive quips which, while designed specifically to deflect Duvall's comments, dismiss by extension the possibility that the music of - i believe she mentions Dylan and the Stones - could be "trans-plendid". Duvall's so ridiculous that the thought of taking anything she says seriously is impossible. In the end, we're stuck with Woody's perspective, a perspective that forces us to dismiss the great rock and roll music of the era along with the excesses of some of its more fair-weather supporters.
I've always felt that her performance in THE SHINING was the one to watch; sure, Jack gets the big moments, but there's something about Duvall's nervous Wendy that lets you know early on what Kubrick considers to be the REAL horror lurking in THE SHINING, and it ain't necessarily the ghosts.
Andrew Schenker: "In the end, we're stuck with Woody's perspective, a perspective that forces us to dismiss the great rock and roll music of the era along with the excesses of some of its more fair-weather supporters."
Agreed. It also bugs me that in "Hannah and Her Sisters," the band that Dianne Wiest drags Woody Allen to see can only confirm his low opinion of pop/rock circa the '80s. Culturally he plays with a stacked deck; if Weist had taken him to see Bob Dylan, his hostile distress would have been more pathetic than comic.
But as usual, I digress.
Word on the ANNIE HALL hate... or at least the anti-rock attitude Woody displays in it. Remember the line where he contemptuously mentions that Shelley Duvall's character is writing "a think-piece about a rock star"... as if the idea of anybody expending serious thought on rock music is inherently ridiculous.
Anyway, great article, and a worthy tribute to a singular film presence. Come back, Shelley!
The food preparation sequence in 3 WOMEN, wherein Shelley shares her culinary secrets with Sissy Spacek, simply cannot be topped.
Although, I've also long been an admirer of Shelley's cigarette-smoking scene near the start of THE SHINING, when she's talking with Anne Jackson. The ash on Shelley's cigarette just builds and builds and builds...and I thought WHEN is she going to tap the ash in a tray. There's a cut to Jackson, then a cut back to Shelley, cigarette no longer defying gravity, the ash apparently having fallen away......
Nice observation on her last scene in "Theives Like Us," its a chilling and heartbreaking moment in a somewhat subdued movie. I'd also second the appreciation for her performance in "Brewster McCloud." She plays it so straight throughout, never really wavering in any direction or tipping her hand as far as the character's emotion and so her turns in the film are fascinating I think. That might be a bad example though because that whole fucking movie is that way.
I'd also include "Nashville" in that list. She has a very minor role but she has a sort of omniprescence throughout the movie, this stick figure of a woman gliding infront of the camera or lurking in the background. I think it'd be a disservice to her talent to say its just her natural odd energy in most of her characters. She's natural, but I think there's a lot of choices being made.
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