JOAN ALLEN SAYS YES TO RHYMES AND REASON
By Matt Wolf
New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
March 9 2006
In Hollywood, where beauty is skin deep, Joan Allen possesses the
kind of natural radiance you can’t buy off the shelf.
Sure, Allen doesn’t make the covers of Heat and People – few performers
the wrong side of 40 do (the actress will turn 49 this month).
But in an environment that is harsher than ever to women of a certain
age, Allen is working almost constantly – five films in the past
two years – and with unwavering integrity and adventurousness, too:
not every actress would say yes to a film like Yes.
“I just feel very fortunate that I’ve got to do interesting things
with talented people,” she says during a stopover in London, a city
she has come to know pretty well in recent years.
For the Mike Binder film The Upside of Anger, co-starring Kevin
Costner, for which she has won rave reviews across the Atlantic,
Allen lived in Notting Hill and was driven every day to Hampstead,
which was substituting on screen for, of all places, suburban Detroit.
Sally Potter’s film Yes found the actress taking up residence in the
East End. And yet, she laughs, “I still can’t get my bearings here.”
The more immediate question is whether filmgoers will find their
bearings as regards Yes, a movie told not just in verse but in rhymed
iambic pentameter.
As one might expect from the director of Orlando and The Man Who
Cried, Potter’s movie is a love story but of a particularly rarefied,
high-flown kind, and it also registers as a none-too-veiled political
commentary.
Whatever one’s reaction, it’s hard not to respond to the burnished
intensity of Armenian-Lebanese actor Simon Abkarian (who was cast
in The Man Who Cried but cut from the finished feature) and to the
unforced luminosity of Allen, playing an American scientist based in
London who finds refuge from a chilly marriage to an English diplomat
(Sam Neill at his most severe) in an affair with Abkarian’s Lebanese
refugee.
The two principals go only by the names She and He. It can’t be easy
acting archetypes – characters who, Allen acknowledges, “represent,
I suppose, the Eastern and Western worlds, though I don’t want to
sound pretentious or anything”.
What’s important, she says, is Potter’s interest in bridging different
cultures and merging the political and the personal at a time when
too few movies choose that route.
“I was really drawn to Sally’s material because of that question of
how we really talk to each other; how do we try to understand.”
Potter began writing Yes on September 12, 2001, a date that resonates
throughout the film.
Says Allen: “Somebody said to Sally that it was the first therapeutic
response to 9/11 because we are all sharing a dialogue. It’s not just
one person talking while the other listens.”
Allen’s capacity for listening – for a restraint that tends to gather
force throughout a film – can often make her the quiet centre of a
noisy movie.
She got the first of her three Oscar nominations a decade ago for
playing Pat Nixon, wife of the disgraced American president, in the
Oliver Stone biopic Nixon, and was nominated again the following year
for her role in Nicholas Hytner’s film version of The Crucible.
“On film, I like work that is more introverted,” she tells me, citing
Robert Duvall’s low-key contribution to The Godfather as the sort of
acting she admires.
Her contribution to Yes is as remarkable for what goes unspoken as
for the language that Allen gets to speak, not least a scene in which
colour visibly drains from her face.
Nixon wasn’t Allen’s first big-screen splash. In 1986 she played Brian
Cox’s blind victim in Manhunter, the first Hannibal Lecter movie,
and was Jeff Bridges’ wife in Francis Ford Coppola’s little-seen but
much-admired Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988).
A later biopic, When the Sky Falls (2000), cast Allen as a
semi-fictionalised version of the murdered Irish journalist Veronica
Guerin.
“It was very hard to understand her character,” says Allen, reflecting
on a film about a crusading woman and mother who dared to invade the
Irish underworld. “People would go, ‘Why did she do this?’, and I was
like, ‘Because she did’. You wouldn’t be asking that if she had been
a man.”
Still, her range of acting opportunities over the years seems even
now to come as something of a surprise to Allen, who says she grew up
“a gal from a little-horse Illinois town surrounded by cornfields”.
The youngest of four children, Allen had never before been to New
York when she first worked at the Lincoln Center for the Performing
Arts in the early 1980s in C.P. Taylor’s play And A Nightingale Sang.
That production was part of the widening reach of the Steppenwolf
Theatre Company of Chicago, where Allen acted with then-unknowns John
Malkovich and Gary Sinise while working as a secretary to pay the rent.
Allen soon began appearing on Broadway, winning a 1988 Tony Award
for her role in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, and a nomination the next
year for Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles.
But she hasn’t done a Broadway play since 1989, the dual result of
raising a daughter, Sadie, who is now 11, and her shifting attitude
to theatre.
“I’m just not as interested in doing the same thing every night,”
she says. “I used to love it, but it just doesn’t interest me the
way it used to.”
Besides, it’s not as if Allen has much time to miss the theatre,
as she ricochets between high-profile films such as Face/Off and The
Contender (which brought her a third Oscar nod, her first for Best
Actress) and art-house fare like Yes.
Still to come is Pushers Needed, written and directed by Irish actor
Jimmy Smallhorne, about four working-class Dublin women who visit
Lourdes.
“It’s called Pushers Needed because we push the wheelchairs of the
crippled,” says Allen, laughing at the misconception that the film
might have anything to do with drugs.
Another adventure for an actress who by now is used to them? Allen
smiles and nods.
“I haven’t done much world travelling, I have to say, but I have been
to Lourdes.”
Filmgoers keeping a keen eye on this fine actress will give thanks
for that.
* Yes is screening at Rialto cinemas now