Lee Grant in Voyage of the Damned (1976) - Supporting Actress Sundays

I'm reminded this week that there's a certain stripe of legendary midcentury American actors who, quite simply, leave me nonplussed. I find them electrifying, fascinating, and occasionally quite moving yet, at the same time, I find them utterly confounding. To put it simply, I can always remember their performance but I can never remember their character. They're the kind of actors, often steeped in some version of "The Method," who forego chameleonic transformation in favor of vivid behaviorism. You sorta always know it's them and, implicitly, that the character is sorta secondary to the work of being "real" and "in the moment." It's not a persona thing, per se. The spectacle is not the performer herself but "the work" she's doing. The role, the story, the filmmaking is secondary to "the work" of the acting. I'm not sure this makes any sense, but it's my way of searching for an explanation of why I find myself so perplexed by "the work" done by...

...Lee Grant in Voyage of the Damned (1976)
approximately 12 minutes and 1 second
18 scenes
roughly 8% of film's total running time

Lee Grant plays Lili Rosen, one of the 960 or so Jewish refugees who, in 1939, fled an increasingly hostile Germany and boarded the S.S. St. Louis, a luxury liner destined for Havana. (The story is a fictionalized account of the tragic historical journey of the St. Louis. Basically, the St. Louis's whole journey was part of a cynical Nazi propaganda effort. When the ship and its passengers were refused entry both by Cuba and the United States, the St. Louis was then forced to return to Hamburg, where the passengers faced a grimly uncertain fate. After a sustained campaign by an international coalition of human rights activists brought attention to the plight of those on the ship, several European nations offered refugee status to the passengers. However, in a cruel twist that the film addresses only by concluding footnote, most of the countries granting the St. Louis passengers refugee status were ultimately occupied by Nazi forces. As a result, at least two thirds of the St. Louis's passengers were deported to concentration camps, where at least one third died.)
Grant's Lili Rosen is a tightly wired woman, apparently accustomed to some degree of privilege, whose existence to no small degree is defined through her relationships with her very pretty daughter, Anna (Lynne Frederick, in an unfortunately bland performance)...
...as well as her relationship to her husband, Carl (Sam Wanamaker, in a curiously obtuse performance).
Lil's husband has apparently borne the ignominy of Nazi persecution with a brittle, stubborn forbearance that manifests in a barely contained rage, a fury that blasts forth with little warning and occasionally catches Grant's Lili in the cross-fire. Nonetheless, Grant's Lili suffers her husband's thoughtless brutalities with instinctive empathy and attentive concern.
As her husband begins what seems to be an inexorable decline into paranoid psychosis, Grant's Lili -- skittish, tense and afraid already -- watches with a private desperation. Yet, at the same time, ostensibly for the sake of her young adult daughter, Grant's Lili tries to affirm the hope in her family's journey to the new world. In spite of her ministrations, however, Carl continues to slowly succumb to the overwhelming fear created by the situation.
In an effort to protect her daughter from seeing what's becoming of her father, Grant's Lili makes what turns out to be a fateful move: she commands her daughter to go up to the deck and make friends with some young people (which Anna does, meeting a cute deckhand with whom she begins an ill-fated romance).
Though neither Grant nor the film really make a point of it, the tragedies that chart the rest of Lili Rosen's character arc -- and, notably, the plot itself -- are scored in this scene, where Lili desperately seeks to give her husband and her daughter the confidence, the hope, to survive the ordeal.
Lili's character arc also scores the film's own tragic turns. First, the character is at the center of the film's emotional storm when, having been refused entry to Havana, the ship starts pulling back to sea. The sound of the ship's horns causes Carl -- the husband of Grant's Lili -- to experience a psychotic episode where, with straight razor in hand, he flails across the upper deck, slicing his arms bloody until he dives off the ship's deck. Cuban authorities take Carl away -- Lili doesn't know whether to hospital or to his death -- and Grant's Lili is left unmoored by one of her key coordinates of existence. The film's next tragic shift happens when, having been refused entry to the U.S., the St. Louis charts its return course to Hamburg. The terror of a return to Germany inspires Anna and her sailor boyfriend to make a suicide pact and, with Anna's death, Grant's Lili loses her sole other purpose for living.
Grant's Lili reacts to the loss of Carl and the death of Anna with a primitive, traditional grief instinct and begins to cut her hair as a gesture of atonement for her failings in allowing her daughter to die. Her private ritual of self-scarification is interrupted by an elegant fellow passenger (Faye Dunaway in a simplistic but effective performance as a proud woman attempting to maintain her strength in the face of successive humiliations).
Grant's Lili asserts the righteousness of her devastating grief, fighting against any attempts to stop her with a feral desperation, until she is stopped by the news that her husband has indeed survived his injuries. In this moment, Grant's Lili discovers a faint, grim, weary willingness to live again and surrenders somewhat to the support being offered her by a fellow survivor.
Grant's performance in the role of Lili Rosen is vivid. In every moment, Grant's Lili is alive with electric emotion and a palpable psychology. You can see Lili's mind working in flashes across Grant's face. Yet, as powerfully as Grant tunes me into what the character's thinking and feeling, I remain uncertain about who Lili Rosen is. Grant is so "in the moment" that my connection to Lili Rosen's backstory is tenuous. For example, when Carl inadvertently backhands Lili, I don't know if Grant's complicated reaction of fear, sadness and embarassment is something Lili's long accustomed to doing (as a cover for her bullying, possibly abusive husband) or whether it's a spontaneous coping mechanism (as a suggestion that Lili's as surprised as her daughter by Carl's sudden transformation). Likewise, I wonder if Grant's assiduously regal bearing doesn't get in the way of conveying the full force of Lili's desperation. (Indeed, I wonder if Lili and Carl are supposed to be a little nouveau riche, but one generation removed from the shtetl, and if that's not supposed to be part of what amplifies their crisis in the collapse of the new social order, and possibly explains the vague disdain with which the professor and his wife regard them.) Moreover, I'm a total sucker for a hair-shearing scene but, here, I found the action "stunty." I had no idea, from Grant's performance in the role, as to whether such an elemental gesture was in or out of character for Lili Rosen. In short, Lee Grant provides a vivid portrait of what the character is thinking and feeling in each moment even as she delivers only the most rudimentary sketch of who the character is.
I admire this performance with the same ambivalence I discover in most Lee Grant performances from the 1970s. In the character of Lili Rosen, I find myself searching Lee Grant's performance for a clue to who Lili Rosen was before this crisis, a search that seems frustrated by Grant's performance itself. Indeed, I find that Lee Grant's work illuminates the character's psychology with an often electrifying vivacity. Yet at the same time, I often feel I'm watching the actress perform the emotion instead of the character. It's too bad, too, because the stuff Grant does do is great. I only wish she had got around to doing the rest...