Stanley Kauffmann

“Something over 16 years ago (TNR, November 24, 1962) I wrote a review of three films in which a relative newcomer named Jane Fonda appeared. I deplored the fact that her extraordinary talent was not being adequately celebrated, and I dared to think that she might grow into a first-rate artist…. Hoots abounded. Fonda proceeded.

“During the intervening years …. much of her acting was, by the standards that her possibilities impose, minimally good….

“Lately, however, Fonda has been deepening and freshening again. It would be fanciful to connect this with her lessening radical activism. (Her political and social concerns, I emphasize, seem undiminished.) I simply note the seeming coincidence. Admittedly, her work in Julia and Coming Home seemed crimped by the writing of the roles…, but in three very different pictures in the last two years, her roles were well-enough written and she showed us superior acting. In the pastry puff Fun With Dick and Jane, she bubbled. If there's such a thing as a non-dance performance that dances off the ground with sheer spirit--and there is--she did it here. In two current films she gives performances excellent in themselves and all the more impressive because they can be seen in tandem. Their differences make each one seem stronger.

“Both, unfortunately, are in questionable pictures, but if you're interested in acting, they are very much worth seeing for Fonda. In Comes a Horseman….

“And Fonda is in California Suite…. The moment she appears, her physical silhouette--I don't mean her dress, of course--is so different from Comes a Horseman that there's a small shock of fright, as if the transformation by art had something supernatural about it. Her pattern of movement, her vocal attack, her timing are so integral to what she is doing that before she was on the screen 30 seconds, all I was conscious of was knots--knots in this woman's psyche, emotional responses, ability to respond openly to an open approach--and her regret about this that she could never voice. Again what we are given is simply the current phenomenological evidence of a woman who existed before the film and will continue after it.

“I haven't seen such an accidental juxtaposition of two differentiated fine performances by an American film actor since 1972, in Paul Newman's films Sometimes a Great Notion and Pocket Money. As with Newman, in Fonda's two roles there are no limps, no wigs, no broad accents, no stock-company trickery. Just (just!) creative imagination and the talent to embody it. For a number of years in the 1960s, I conducted a series about film on the PBS station in New York, and sometimes I would do a program on acting, with clips from two or three performances by the same actor. I don't often miss doing that program nowadays, but I wish I could do one with these Fonda films. Besides the pleasure it would give, it might possibly also do a little--o wan hope--to offset the rubbish that gets published about film acting, about these two performances especially.

“I can't quite contend that Fonda has become the first-rate artist I thought and still think is in her. For one point, she has been lax in her choice of scripts. For another, she has missed playing some of the great roles that only the theater could give her…. [S]he ought to let one medium feed the other in her work. Still she is the preeminent actress on the American screen. We have other good ones--for examples, Ellen Burstyn and the lately arrived Meryl Streep. Fonda, further on (she has already finished two more films), could move still further, could surprise us unsurprisingly. That is, she could move to unforeseen new strengths that nevertheless grow out of what we know about her.

“Futile Question No. ????. With actresses like these on hand, how can Diane Keaton still be taken seriously? How can her parlor-act broken-arc comedy and facile hysterics not be perceived for what they are?”

Stanley Kauffmann
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