Alfre Woodard in Cross Creek (1983) - Supporting Actress Sundays

"Actressing at the edges" emerged almost inadvertently as my descriptive catchphrase for what I'm most fascinated by in the Supporting Actress category. It evokes what I love most about watching certain performers on screen -- their ability to make the most of whatever they're given to do onscreen in ways that suit the character, the situation and the film. I love scenestealers, to be sure, but great actressing at the edges isn't really about yanking focus -- it's about transforming the limits of a role (nominal screentime, scripted cliches, banal stereotypes, etc) into unanticipated possibilities. And I can think of few better examples of someone turning such scripted limits into unforeseen performance possibility than...

...Alfre Woodard in Cross Creek (1983)
approximately 17 minutes and 48 seconds
20 scenes
roughly 15% of film's total running time

Alfre Woodard plays Geechee, housemaid to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Mary Steenburgen -- at her Steenburgen-iest), a newly divorced woman determined to make a new life -- and new career -- for herself in a rural community in Northern Florida called Cross Creek.
Marjorie's arrival -- as an apparently wealthy and well-mannered single woman -- to the (literally) backwater community causes a flutter of interest, most notably that of Woodard's Geechee who arrives inquiring about job. Woodard's Geechee wheedles her way into a position as Rawlings's maid, mostly by pretending not to understand Marjorie's painfully polite demurrals as she gregariously chatters on and on. The combination easily erodes down Marjorie's feints at resistance and also lays the foundation for what becomes a foundational relationship for Marjorie's life in Cross Creek.
Among the handful of Cross Creek denizens that the film depicts as shaping the writer's vision of her world -- the poor white family who are in so many ways up the creek; the proud hired man and his pregnant wife; the moonshiner; the child whose choice to make a pet of an orphaned fawn became the inspiration for Rawlings's Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Yearling; the hotelier Norton Baskin who would become her husband -- Geechee emerges as perhaps Rawlings's most intimate friend. As I understand it, the figure of Geechee in the cinematic treatment of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's story is a composite based upon lives of several maids who worked for the writer throughout her time on Cross Creek. I don't know enough about the Rawlings story to know which elements came from what, but this little bit of trivia amplifies what I admire most about Woodard's work in the role of Geechee.
The role of Geechee is laden with racial cliche. She's poor, unsophisticated, deferential, devoted to her white employer and provides some of the film's few flashes of comic relief. To her credit, and to the credit of the filmmakers, however, Woodard utilizes such cartoonish character traits as the broad outlines for what is a boldly independent characterization.
Woodard's characterization establishes Geechee as utterly distinctive person.
Her work in the role -- the flashes of contradictory emotion that complicate the meaning of her words and actions -- seems to actively resist the cinematic idealization of black servitude. Woodard's Geechee may be this white lady's maid but Woodard's performance reminds us at nearly every turn that Geechee is also a complex individual making complicated choices as a poor, single black woman making a living in the rural south.
Woodard's biggest scene elaborates Geechee's dilemma. Marjorie has fired Geechee's layabout ex-con boyfriend, and presumes that Geechee will be leaving with him. Woodard's Geechee confronts Marjorie on this choice, on whether Marjorie wants Geechee to leave and why Marjorie's not speaking up when she sees Geechee making a bad decision. Woodard handles this scene with acute insight. Geechee's challenge to Marjorie works largely because Woodard has already shown Geechee to be independent, strong-willed and fairly bold.
Woodard textures this scene with complex, idiosyncratic emotions that amplify Geechee's clarity as a character, transformed -- not defined -- by her professional relationship with Marjorie. Indeed, Woodard's presence in the film is one of Cross Creek's most clarifying threads. The film is one of those writerly pictures where people amble about making pronouncements about the way things are. And, with the exception of her two or three big head-butting scenes with Steenburgen's Marjorie, Woodard's Geechee is largely an ambient presence in the film -- part of the landscape of the film's tribute to Rawlings appreciation of this particular landscape and its denizens.
That said, Woodard's work in the role of Geejee is a near perfect example of what I mean when I say "actressing at the edges." There is no reason she needs to be this good in this role. The film certainly doesn't need Geechee to be as human, as complicated, as strange as Woodard makes her here. Plenty of the other supporting players do just fine in Cross Creek, floating on the buoys of familiar stock characters and delivering pleasant, effective but unremarkable performances. Yet, in nearly every scene, Woodard gives Geechee far more than the role requires while maintaining the necessary level of plausibility and the balance of the scene.
Woodard invests nuance, texture and humanity in what was scripted to be a one-note role. Yet through the combined force of her charisma, empathy and intelligence, Woodard's performance permits us to hear and feel that one-note with uncommon depth and resonance. And that's what actressing at the edges is all about...

Juanita Moore in The Imitation of Life (1959) - Supporting Actress Sunday

Few things make my actressexual heart sing more than an actress taking the thinnest, most cliché-ridden kind of role and investing it with a charismatic, transcendent humanity. And this week offers one of the best examples of such actressing alchemy. Of course, I'm talking about the at once subtle and spectacular actressing performed by...

...Juanita Moore in The Imitation of Life (1959)
approximately 47 minutes and 14 seconds
42 scenes
roughly 38% of film's total running time

Juanita Moore plays Annie Johnson, a hard-working and giant-hearted woman whose fierce devotion to her young daughter's happiness impels incredible self-sacrifice.
When we first meet her, Moore's Annie is spending the day at the beach with her daughter Sarah Jane. There, they meet Lora Meredith (Lana Turner in a fascinating, strange performance) and her daughter Susie. As the two single mothers chat, Annie offers to be Lora's live-in maid for free, a ridiculous proposal that accrues a poignant urgency when it becomes clear that Annie and Sarah Jane are, in effect, homeless. Moved by their plight, Turner's Lora -- in what will be become a life-transforming gesture -- invites Annie and Sarah Jane to stay with Lora and Susie in their coldwater Brooklyn flat.
Moore's Annie wastes little time making herself indispensable to Lora. She cooks, cleans, babysits, even fends of debt-collectors. Moore's Annie thus quickly establishes herself as a necessary presence in Lora's life at the precise moment when Lora's career (she's a model/actress) starts to take off.
Moore's Annie does all of this work, in exchange only for room and board, ostensibly to provide greater happiness and opportunity for her fair-skinned but dark-tempered daughter, Sarah Jane. Indeed, in many ways, the role asks that Annie be the embodiment of "mother love" and Moore's performance develops this affect in all kinds of ways. Even Annie's infectious buoyancy of personal spirit only deflates when she worries about Sarah Jane's troubles, especially her daughter's self-loathing of her (and her mother's) blackness. This is not to say that Moore's Annie is merely an idealized type, a perfectly selfless "Mammy" who's also an ideally sacrificing "Mother." Juanita Moore does develop Annie according to such ideals, as the script demands, but Moore (in clear collaboration with director Douglas Sirk) also layer such ideals with human complexity. A passionately Christian woman, Annie measures herself according to the impossibly high standards of such ideals and, in Moore's performance, we see the personal costs of such self-sacrifice.
(My favorite moment in Moore's performance comes after she and John Gavin's Steve have spent the evening together addressing envelopes. Turner's Lora arrives home and Gavin's Steve turns his attention wholly toward her. In a brief flash, clearly staged by Sirk, Moore registers Annie's sad resignation that the pleasure of Steve's attentive company is not hers to claim. It's a startling, vivid yet subtle glimpse into Annie's personhood -- one that is quietly echoed throughout Moore's characterization.)
But the thrust of Annie's arc comes from the challenges she faces with her daughter, Sarah Jane.
The driving narrative conceit of The Imitation of Life derives from the fact that Sarah Jane is light enough to "pass" for white. Moreover, Sarah Jane craves the privileges and opportunites that accrue to whiteness and, even as a child, bitterly resents being denied those privileges by her mother (who insists both that her daughter remain truthful about who she is and that there is pride in being black). Sarah Jane's troubles, then, impel the various narrative threads exploring (through the fraught lens of mother daughter relationships) how much one should live for oneself and how much one should live for one's mother/daughter.
Annie lives for Sarah Jane (and for Susie, for Lora, and for many others too) and it's her story of selfless sacrifice that anchors the film.
Moore's tasks in the film veer from exuberant support to silent suffering.
Juanita Moore scores the emotional steps between such polarities carefully, always demonstrating Annie's ability to be of service to pretty much everyone without ever obscuring her defining commitment to the one thing that truly matters: cultivating her daughter Sarah Jane's pride in who she is.
In the second half of the narrative -- when Lora's a successful actress, when Susie's a sweet but sad teenager, and when Sarah Jane's an incorrigibly rebellious bad seed -- Annie remains as Annie has always been...just more tired. (Of course, Annie's exhaustion becomes ominous code for "she's gonna die" which ends up amplifying the urgency of her subsequent scenes.)
When Annie discovers that Sarah Jane has been lying about her "late shift" at the library, she also learns that not only has Sarah Jane taken a trashy "showgirl" gig but she has "passed" as white to do so. In the scene that follows, Moore charts the range of emotions that define Annie's character arc, beginning with her maternal fury at her child's inappropriate behavior...
which shifts to a desperate concern that she might lose her daughter...
that culminates in the devastating pain of the seemingly irreconcilable -- or incurable -- differences that separate them.
A less emotionally decadent director might have left it at with the daughter leaving as the ill mother collapses on the street. But Sirk takes things one additional level and, in so doing, collaborates with Juanita Moore to configure one more heart-stomping confrontation between Annie and Sarah Jane.
Having pursued Sarah Jane across the country to Los Angeles, Moore's Annie is nonetheless mortified to see her daughter again passing for white and dancing in a nightclub.
She follows Sarah Jane to her rented room and insists that they speak.
In this scene, Moore's Annie expresses her love for her daughter while affirming that she will do nothing to interfere with Sarah Jane's happiness, even going so far as to deny that she's Sarah Jane's mother. It's a brilliantly executed, emotionally shocking sequence -- anchored by the potent synergy between director and performer.
Then Moore's Annie goes home to die (but not before helping to rescue the mother-daughter connection between Lora and Susie and delivering an extended deathbed scene that would be hilarious if it weren't so so tenderly sad).
Moore inhabits this most familiar stock character -- the perfect "mammy" who's also the idealized "mommy" -- with an elevating, precise humanity. Throughout this remarkable film, Juanita Moore deftly adds resonant character details (that look at Steve, the blazingly ironic line "You never asked") to deliver a lucid, thoughtful and emotionally pungent performance. A radiantly humanizing characterization of a potentially negligible role.