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.

Viola Davis in Doubt (2008) - Supporting Actress Sundays

Between this week's and last week's nominated performance, I find that I'm torn. Not necessarily between who I want to win (though that too) but over whether I feel last's week's performance was the "perfect scale" (in terms of screentime/percentage) for a Best Supporting Actress, or whether this week's is. Indeed, this week's profiled performance has been widely considered "too small" or having "negligible screentime" to be a real contender for this year's trophy. And, to put it simplest terms, I couldn't disagree more. The more I do this "Supporting Actress" project, the more I find myself enamored of performances in the 10-15 minute zone, wherein the performer is able to knock my socks off with presence and precision even as they craft a vivid, emotionally potent characterization within a concentrated span of scenes. Indeed, I'm increasingly convinced that such performances display the artistry of supporting actressness at its most sublime height. And, of course, I could likely find no more perfect an example of this premise than this week's nominated performance...

...Viola Davis in Doubt (2008)
approximately 10 minutes and 41 seconds
3 scenes
roughly 10% of film's total running time

Viola Davis plays Mrs. Miller, the intensely devoted mother to a not-quite-teenaged son who has unwittingly become caught in the crossfire of a very adult battle of wills. In the film, Meryl Streep's Sister Aloysius and Philip Seymour Hoffman's Father Flynn are steeped in a fearsome contest -- a dogfight in clerical garb, really -- between certitude and doubt, between viciousness and veracity. Writer/director John Patrick Shanley amplifies the dramatic intensity of his elegantly algebraic "he-said-she-said" conceit by factoring in an unknowable variable; we are never told what "really" happened and, as such, must contend with the unverifiability of our own beliefs about the events unfolding within this play and (by extension, one presumes) the world at large. By the time Davis's Mrs. Miller appears, however, the film's narrative action has been framed as a classic, zero-sum game pitching protagonist against antagonist. (Who the hero or villain might be -- Aloysius or Flynn -- is cannily left to the audience to decide.) And, at first, Mrs. Miller's arrival promises to tip the battle in favor of one contender.
Streep's Sister Aloysius uses her status as principal of the school where Mrs. Miller's son is the first and as yet only black student as pretext to have a one-on-one conversation with the boy's mother about the possibly "inappropriate" relationship the boy has developed with Hoffman's Father Flynn.
As Davis's scene with Streep begins, Mrs. Miller knows none of the priest-nun politics that have compelled her visit to the principal's office. And as the conversation between the two women begins, Davis allows haunting uncertainties and anxieties to flit across Mrs. Miller's face as the character struggles to find her footing in this unexpectedly forthright encounter with Aloysius, a white woman with a title, a habit and a measure of power.
At first, Davis's Mrs. Miller appears single-mindedly concerned with whether or not her son Donald has done anything to trouble his continued enrollment at Sister Aloysius's school.
The role of Mrs. Miller is a device, certainly. She's introduced in a fashion not unlike that befitting a surprise 3rd-act witness, the one with damning testimony sure to seal the trial's outcome. Yet what Mrs. Miller actually delivers is an even greater surprise, one that threatens to shock Sister Aloysius's foundations more than anything else.
In an illuminating rendering of Shanley's script, Viola Davis crafts Mrs. Miller as a woman for whom at least two things are true.
First, Davis conveys that Mrs. Miller loves her son with a fierce passion and that she has pinned her hopes for her son's future happiness upon his being successful in the best school possible.
Second, Davis communicates -- with a surprising clarity, given the oblique way her character expresses herself -- that Mrs. Miller understands that her son's path toward happiness and success will oblige some, possibly heartbreaking, degree of compromise.
Manuevering these two truths, Davis palpably conveys both the terrifying sense of risk felt by any mother of a black child approaching adulthood in the United States (especially in the early 1960s) and also the incredible specificity of this mother's particular challenge in loving this particular son.
Shanley's dialogue scripts an awesome, distilled volley of emotion and information between Mrs. Miller and Sister Aloysius, each woman obliged by social convention to a certain degree of deference even as both are fueled by defiant passion. And it's undeniably thrilling to watch Streep and Davis perform the acting equivalent of an arm-wrestling match, and to see Davis's Mrs. Miller -- slowly, steadfastly -- force Streep's Sister Aloysius to admit defeat. (As you certainly know, lovely reader, watching female actors do their thing is my favorite spectator sport and this scene is like sitting courtside for a late round at an all-star tournament.)
But what I think I so admire about Viola Davis is that she accomplishes something else besides (a) showing Mrs. Miller's ability to defend her child in whatever way she deems fit and (b) demonstrating the actress's capacity to hold her own against the gale force of Meryl Streep in the role of Sister Aloysius.
Davis anchors all the actorly pyrotechnics in a precise character study of this moment as a life-changer for Mrs. Miller. Like the best one-scene or two-scene wonders, Davis amplifies her comparatively small amount of screen time into a precise character study of a watershed moment in Mrs. Miller's life. By the end of her encounter with Sister Aloysius, Davis's Mrs. Miller has discovered the principle that will guide her as she continues to parent her son: she will stand with those who stand with her son. Mrs. Miller probably knew some version of this truth before this moment but Davis, by doing what great actors so astutely do, charts Mrs. Miller's epiphanic realization with emotional clarity and precision, so that we might share in its discovery.
Viola Davis's work in the role of Mrs. Miller is indelible and elevating, a breakthrough performance for a clearly formidable acting talent. Now let's hope -- against hope -- that Hollywood proves as willing as LaStreep to parry with the remarkable Viola Davis.