Jean Smart, In Standout Role, Stuns Critics
By Steve Murray, Cox News Service "It's a good thing I'm married, or I couldn't get another date," Jean Smart says with a gravelly laugh. "Except maybe masochists." She's talking about her small but devastating role in the independent film Guinevere. She plays Deborah Sloane, wealthy San Francisco mother of 20-year-old Harper (Sarah Polley), a young woman who falls for the charms -- sexual, artistic and intellectual -- of a 50-something photographer named Connie (Stephen Rea). Toward the end of the movie, a hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Deborah turns up unexpectedly at Connie's loft and sizes up this Svengali figure with a mix of honesty and venom that stops the film cold. It's not Smart's only scene in the movie, but it's a triumph of intense acting. Atlanta Constitution movie critic Eleanor Ringel Gillespie and the New Yorker's David Denby have both singled out the scene as a stunner. "It actually went quite smoothly," she says about shooting the confrontation, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. "Stephen has this great sense of humor, and Sarah has so much going on inside, plus those big eyes of hers -- I felt awful every time I looked at her. It was like whipping a puppy." Summing up the character of Deborah, Smart, 40, adds, "She's a very smart lady, and she's very witty, but it's sad when you see that combined with anger and disappointment and rage. So much of it spills over onto her daughter. It's almost as if she's an alcoholic. It's satisfying to her, but she can't stop." One thing that attracted her to Guinevere was the movie The Truth About Cats & Dogs, starring Janeane Garofalo and Uma Thurman. It was written by Guinevere writer-director Audrey Wells. "That had always been one of my all-time favorite romantic comedies," Smart says. "It wasn't typical and it wasn't cliched. I loved the fact that for once, the leading lady (Garofalo) was the one who was shorter, darker, heavier, funnier and smarter, and the sidekick was the physically perfect one." In other words, a reversal of the usual Hollywood formula. It may seem surprising that Smart delivers the movie's key dramatic moments, since she's just as well-known for comedy, whether in The Brady Bunch Movie (as a dipsomaniacal neighbor) or playing Charlene Frazier Stillfield for five seasons of Designing Women, the sitcom set in Atlanta but filmed in Los Angeles. (Smart actually has been to Atlanta, performing in Christopher Durang's A History of the American Film at the Alliance Theatre in the early '90s.) Ask her which she prefers playing, comedy or drama, and it's a draw. "It's like asking what do you like best, chocolate or steak? Well, both. If I had to choose one to do exclusively, maybe I would choose drama, only because it might be good therapy -- you get all of that stuff out of your system." Nevertheless, her next two movies are comedies: In one, called Tiara Tango, she plays an ex-Texas beauty queen, with Robert Wagner as her "out-of-work, alcoholic, lounge-lizard singer boyfriend." Then there's the Chevy Chase movie Snow Day. She quips, "I get to be the good mommy in that one." (In real life, Smart is a mother herself, with a 9-year-old son.) She doesn't know what her next project is, but she hopes it's the next movie based on a Wells screenplay. "I'm praying to the gods and lighting candles for Audrey's next movie, which she really wants me to do," Smart says. "But she's not directing that one. So I'll just have to charm the socks off the director." Or, with a laser-sharp performance like the one she gives in Guinevere, scare their socks off. "Now I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, nobody's gonna want to work with me,"' she says with a laugh. "Her treatment of Mr. Rea in that scene is a little scary, and I hope people know I'm just acting." |