Tuesday, April 12, 2005

David Edelstein

“Diane Keaton isn't the easiest actress to cast. She's deceptively accomplished, but she comes to a role with her mannerisms in tow; like a bashful duchess with ladies-in-waiting, she nervously invokes them when she's feeling exposed. She exhales 'yeahs' and 'hmmmms' when she hasn't got anything else to say, which might lead you to think that she isn't in control. Except the tics don't derail the character, the way they do with someone like Goldie Hawn--they're just little notes she throws in to keep her place in the score. Mannered or not, she has the greatest gift a performer can have. For every important moment, every emotional beat, every climax, she's totally there: she's authentic in all the ways that count. Watching Keaton act is like being in a fast car on a winding mountain road; she might be all over the road, but she doesn't leave it, and when she roars into that parking space you're winded, laughing, exhilarated. 

Baby Boom is formula swill, a sitcom tailored to yuppie fantasies of escape, but Keaton makes an event of it: her spectacular return to high comedy. After dutifully doing her serious actress thing (and giving sensational performances in Shoot the Moon, The Little Drummer Girl, and Mrs. Soffel), she comes back to farce with a new virtuosity and confidence--not to mention glamour. As J.C. Wiatt, a high-flying management-consultant executive who get saddled with a distant (dead) relative's baby, Keaton is hilariously miscast. She isn't particularly convincing as a steely executive (she's too dizzy) or even a devoted mother (she's too dizzy). But she's marvelous conveying the anger and subtle panic she feels in the face of her gradual loss of power, the frustration at watching control of her life slip away, and the pain of trying to reconcile two legitimate impulses in a culture inhospitable to female ambition. 

“… [F]or all their inanity, Shyer and Meyers let Keaton cut loose in high style. She wears sleek, striped business suits, and, in one scene, a supple black number with a high collar and wide brown belt. The famous clotheshorse at last has occasion to prance. But clothes don't make the actress. Keaton can throw a sputtering breakdown on screen--in which she rants, reels, sobs, and passes out--and have you laughing and crying at once; her comic timing is inspired, but it's the pain and fury behind the tirade that makes the scene such a knockout. She's a great comedienne and a great actress. Liv Ullmann, eat your heart out. [To be fair, it had been ten years since Ullmann had been a critic's darling, although Stanley Kauffmann, often so hard on Keaton, kept the faith and had raved about Ullmann as recently as 1981 (in Richard's Things). Is Edelstein jibing Kauffmann? In any event, Edelstein's description of Keaton's performance is, as so often, virtuosic.] 

David Edelstein, Village Voice, October 13, 1987

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