Controversial Film Critic Armond White Blasts Halle Berry He Says She’s Lost Her Focus With Frankie & Alice.
Tuesday, February 1,2011
Halle Goes Off the Deep End
Berry probably wanted some Oscar buzz, but won’t get it for Frankie and Alice
Directed by Geoffrey Sax
Runtime: 101 min.
Introduced as a black stripper, then a foul-mouthed slut, then a racist white society lady, then an underprivileged child, then a mental patient, then a nascent genius, an abused daughter and a dispossessed unwed mother, Halle Berry in Frankie and Alice hardly leaves out any female pathology. It’s the Iditarod of movie roles—a tour de force even Meryl Streep must envy—and Berry has to be heartsick that it didn’t get her the planned-for Oscar nomination. Frankie and Alice is the kind of grandstanding that exposes an actress’ pathetic dependence on approval by others.
Oddly, it’s not other black Americans Berry needs to verify this far-fetched, “based on actual events” tale of black mental illness. She’s after the same mainstream corroboration that greeted her nauseating self-abasement in Monster’s Ball (Berry’s 2002 Academy Award role). The release of Frankie and Alice, which Berry co-produced, was pushed back to now because it is especially clear during this greed farce called “award season” that filmmakers’ priorities go haywire. They no longer want their movies to be entertaining or reflect the real world—they simply want prizes.
Berry has worked herself into a trap where she thinks anguish and hysterics are the only measure of her acting talent; not the beauty-based elegance, skill and emotional nuance that once distinguished actresses from Lillian Gish to Margaret Sullavan and Celia Johnson to Audrey Hepburn, but the knock-down, drag-out excess of one-time starlets who are desperate-to-please, insecure and can’t believe their own luck.
This self-doubt should mesh with the story of Frankie, a young black woman raised in 1950s Georgia whose personal and social disappointments contributed to her psychological instability. The film dramatizes Frankie’s breakdown, where her various frustrations (and unmanageable alter egos) cause her to be arrested, then committed to a psychiatric institute. It’s in the loony bin that a kindly, jazz-loving white psychiatrist Dr. Oz (Stellan Skarsgrd) takes on Frankie’s case and investigates the history behind her crack-up. But what the film really needs is a dramaturge (the script is credited to eight authors, typical for schizo-competitive Hollywood) who might interrogate the reasons driving Berry to once again debase herself—as if another leap off the deep-end would finally make people take her seriously.
Problem is, Frankie and Alice isn’t the kind of movie that will likely cause black folks to embrace Berry with the kind of automatic identification made with such recognizable, truth-hitting and average-looking black actresses as Ethel Waters, Dorothy Dandridge, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands, Madge Sinclair and Alfre Woodard. Frankie’s schizophrenia is so excessively dramatized that it seems a put-on from the get-go. Berry’s tit-thrusting, hip-slinging, groin-grinding, hard-talking stripper comes across so hard and lewd she’s repellant. This radioactive babe tells nothing about how young women lose their bearings and resort to exploiting themselves, only how one desperate actress aims to impress.
From the start, Frankie misrepresents a wounded female ego. Berry slips instantly into fashionable pathology—the kind that worked Oscar wonders for Charlize Theron in Monster, Melissa Leo in Frozen River and Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone. In Hollywood today, female destitution has taken the place of self-actualization. When actresses portray society’s worst hard-luck cases, it’s a decline from the insights into feminine struggle and social oppression that playwrights from Ibsen to Williams once illustrated. This unrestrained “empathy” derives from a mixture of pity and politically correct condescension. That’s how black stripper Frankie becomes white debutante Alice; one is a hysterical projection of the other’s fear. But director Geoffrey Sax’s fussy flashback structure never depicts a society where black and white people size each other up (as Berry played with moving simplicity in Charles Burnett’s interracial TV movie The Wedding); there’s just superficial antagonism that Frankie doesn’t sensibly process. Some unexamined, misunderstood masochism leads her to step outside her own experience and mimic her oppressor in diction, movement and cosmetics. It’s real Looney Tunes when Frankie/Alice signs her own release, puts on a pink evening gown and struts out of the hospital. Fashion-plate Berry smiling on an award season red carpet wouldn’t be half as imperious.
That ludicrous scene recalls the moment in Precious where the obese ghetto girl posed for imagined paparazzi. It was an anomaly only our fame-obsessed and simultaneously elitist media culture could turn into a reality (as when Gabourey Sidibe was denied a place on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood newcomers cover and was then airbrushed onto an unflattering Marie Clare cover). Racism and feminism have lately played leapfrog with each other, in today’s media, making a dubious progress that Frankie and Alice’s exaggeration of psychological and social problems only makes further confusing. Frankie and Alice dramatizes a post-Precious craziness. It’s part of the same victimization mythology that Oprah Winfrey peddles and that Tyler Perry has embraced, forsaking his formerly authentic understanding of female emotions.
Strangely, Perry did not cast Halle Berry as one of his baker’s-dozen sadsacks in For Colored Girls, but Berry challenges them all as the schizophrenic heroine of Frankie and Alice. Too bad she’s not as good at it as Thandie Newton, who gave the only credible performance in For Colored Girls. In Frankie and Alice, Berry reverts to the pent-up mania and fevered anguish she already exercised in Catwoman, Losing Isaiah, Things We Lost in the Fire and Gothika. The latter was Berry’s Black Swan, but our still-unfair film culture that denies the complexity of African-American experience already overlooked the personal nature of that film’s psychiatric disorder. To break through to mainstream indifference, Berry limits herself to styles of schizophrenia that appeal to white condescension. The risible flamboyance of Frankie and Alice suits that modern brand of sickness.
Since winning the 2002 Academy Award for playing a poor black wretch in Monster’s Ball, Berry has foolishly bought in to the notion that her work can only be validated by the mainstream’s approval. It’s clear, from Frankie and Alice itself, that Berry doesn’t use personal observation, philosophy or eyewitness accounts to motivate her film performances; she works out of some vague dependence on the status quo, like a slave still looking for the master’s endorsement.
If this film’s release were better timed and better promoted, apologists would no doubt be bum-rushing the media with the same Precious claims that this lurid sensationalism was “bringing to light a real problem in our community.” Frankie and Alice only works if your community is Beverly Hills.
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