films about marriage – Bitch Flicks

‘Concussion’: When Queer Marriage in the Suburbs Isn’t Enough

The queer women we see in sexual situations in ‘Concussion’ are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in ‘Blue’: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

This repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

How many distinctive, acclaimed films about queer women can be released in American theaters at the same time? If we extrapolate from the actions of film distributors in 2013, the answer is apparently: only one. Concussion was named one of the top 20 films of that year by Slate’s Dana Stevens and was also named one of the top films of 2013 in Salon. Shortly after its premiere, at Sundance, The Weinstein Company acquired it for distribution. For most films that acquisition (and the later support from reviews in traditional media) would mean a national release, but the film had a very limited run in theaters that fall and never played a theater in my art-house-friendly city. The film was on Video On Demand, iTunes, and Google Play, but deserves much more attention than most films that never have a national theatrical run.

This film about a queer woman is, unlike the same year’s Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who was nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards and directed an episode of this past season of Transparent) and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed Blue as a product of the male gaze. Instead of a teenage protagonist, the main character in Concussion, Abby (played by Robin Weigert: Andrew O’Hehir in Salon summed up her performance as “OMFG”), is a 40-something, stay-at-home Mom, married to another woman and living in the suburbs.

When her son accidentally hits her in the face with a baseball, we see the confusion and blood in the family car ride to the hospital, as she moans to no one in particular, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.”

In the ER Abby says she is going back to work in the city (and that she really means it this time). Abby doesn’t need to work for money: her spouse, Kate, is a divorce attorney, kept busy by the dissatisfied wives in their social circle. We see the wives’ well-maintained bodies in slow motion, at the beginning of the film, in spin and yoga classes as David Bowie sings on the soundtrack, “Oh you pretty things…”

Passon knows this world well She lives in the town (Montclair) Abby does. She is married to a woman and has children, one of whom accidentally hit her in the face with a baseball. The parallels between her life and Abby’s may be why the character and setting seem so fully realized.

Abby for the most part blends in with her straight women friends but we see she’s different from them–and not just in her orientation. She reads books while she vacuums. When a friend is circulating a “new motherhood” survey for an article in a parenting magazine, Abby writes of dreams in which she sticks her then newborn son in the microwave–and other dreams in which she and her son are married. She writes, “My poor baby, I didn’t know whether to kill him, fuck him, or eat him.”

At times Abby’s queerness does separate her from the other women. When Abby mentions to her friend that one of the group of women they work out with is “cute,” the friend (played by Janel Maloney) reproaches Abby, “She’s not a lesbian!”

Abby starts work with a contractor to refurbish a city loft. As they transform the apartment, she transforms too, first hiring women to have sex with her and then working out of the loft as a high-priced escort, “Eleanor,” whose clients are all women.

A woman character turning to sex work for reasons other than money is usually a male artist’s conceit, as in Luis Buñuel’s great Belle de Jour, which features stunning, beautifully dressed, doctor’s wife, Catherine Deneuve, working in a brothel while her handsome, attentive (but clueless) husband sees his patients. In women’s memoirs of sex work (like Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl) the money is the point of the work (as it is with most work).

A sex worker character whose clients are all women (when the vast majority of sex work clients are men) is also usually the creation of a straight male artist–and is usually a male character so the work avoids any explicit same-sex scenes.

Perhaps because Concussion turns that last trope on its head (or perhaps because New York is a big city that can cater to many kinds of tastes) we accept the conceit of a woman over 40 seeing women clients (for $800 a session) every day. The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

Robin Weigert doesn’t have a Barbie Doll face or a porn model’s body, but does have a passing resemblance to the young Ellen Barkin. Weigert exudes the same confidence and sexiness–reminding us those two qualities are often one and the same.

Concussion has a scene similar to one in Blue in which a straight man interrogates a queer woman about her sexuality. But because Abby is in her 40s, the mocking tone she takes with him is completely different from what we hear from the 20-something main character in Blue, Adele.

In Concussion are we seeing the female gaze? Well, we’re definitely seeing one woman’s gaze, that of Passon. The sex scenes in Concussion, unlike Blue, don’t seem like outtakes from an amateur porn video, but flow from the other nonsexual encounters in the film. (Concussion’s expert cinematographer is David Kruta.) We also don’t see full frontal nudity from any of the actresses, and although we see the bare breasts of some of Eleanor’s clients, we never see hers. Eleanor/ Abby is both a psychological and corporeal enigma to us.

Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.

In the city we see Abby in punk rock t-shirts (vintage Blondie and the now-defunct C.B.G.B) and boyshort underwear and in the suburbs we see her fitting in with her friends in yoga pants and an expensive down-filled jacket. At a suburban dinner party the guests talk about their days hanging out in pre-gentrified downtown New York clubs, Squeezebox and The Limelight, and we realize yes, many of the club kids of the ’90s have become comfortable, suburban Moms and Dads.

The loft is decorated with posters for Louise Bourgeois and The Guerrilla Girls and has Diet For a New America on the bookshelf, distinct touches some of us in the audience recognize from our own living spaces. In the dialogue we hear echoes of conversations we too have had (or overheard) at parties: “I finally took the Myers-Briggs.” Writers of satire often seem to want their audience to hate the people, especially the women, they create (the Annette Bening character in American Beauty is just one example). Passon’s satire is much trickier–and kinder. She wants us to recognize these people. She wants us to recognize ourselves in them.

The film Passon says inspired Concussion is from the 1970s: Jeanne Dielman.., (and was also written and directed by a queer woman, the late Chantal Akerman). In Concussion, as in Dielman, we see the first signs of the housewife/sex-worker protagonist starting to unravel when she fails to stick to her usual daily routine: Abby misses picking up the kids after school for the first time in six years. Unlike Dielman, Passon’s film captures the monotony of domestic tasks, but doesn’t ask the audience to endure that boredom themselves.

Although Concussion was made before queer marriage became legal in New Jersey, the film brings up some interesting questions about the queer community’s quest for “equality.” What if we become just as disenchanted with being soccer Moms as straight women sometimes do? What then? At the end Abby throws herself into a home renovation project, the way so many of our married friends, straight and queer do, and we marvel at the mystery of other people’s marriages, not just in the film, but all around us.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Wg–Mh8YY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

’45 Years’: A Lifetime of Honing Talent

When we first meet her, Kate seems, like a lot of older women, serene in the unspoken knowledge that she’s at least a little too good for her unshaven, bumbling husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) who may or may not have the early symptoms of dementia.

The end of the year, just in time to qualify for the Oscars, is when we usually get at least a few films that feature actors we first saw when they were young and beautiful (or in the case of a performer like Bill Murray, not so beautiful) who, now that they’re around retirement age, are playing either irascible old coots (and their gender-switched twins: old ladies who swear a lot) or characters who show that life invariably becomes pathetic and tragic for those who age, as the leads in Michael Haneke’s Amour did a few years back. You’d never know from these films that some of the most powerful men in the mainstream movie industry are approaching or are over 70 (women in the business apparently are not allowed to be that age and keep their jobs)–and they aren’t shitting their pants nor have their personalities magically changed into the curmudgeonly but loveable stereotypes their own films are littered with.

Out writer-director Andrew Haigh best known for the film Weekend and as the co-creator of the now-cancelled HBO series Looking has decades before he turns 70, but in his new film 45 Years (opening Dec. 23) which he adapted from a short story by David Constantine, he treats the older, straight, married couple who are the film’s focus with the complexity that other filmmakers reserve for characters under 50. Charlotte Rampling plays Kate, a retired schoolteacher living in a home in rural England with her husband. Confident and warm but with razor sharp cheekbones, she wears boots and jeans for her daily morning’s walk with the dog as if she just stepped out of a Land’s End catalog, senior division.

When we first meet her, Kate seems, like a lot of older women, serene in the knowledge that she’s at least a little too good for her unshaven, bumbling husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) who may or may not have the early symptoms of dementia. She’s the one who knows where to find the German dictionary in their house when he needs one and corrects him when he gets the facts of an old news item wrong. But she doesn’t seem to resent her role as the competent, dependable spouse and brings a lot of tenderness to her interactions with Geoff, holding his hand or bringing him tea when he’s upset and preparing every meal and cleaning up afterward without complaint. I always notice, in films as in life, when women are the ones doing all the cooking and dish washing and 45 Years is one of the few films–and one of the only ones directed by a man–which seemed to notice along with me.

Kate is also the one who plans their social calendar, including the big party in a rented hall for their 45th wedding anniversary, delayed from the one they planned for their 40th when Geoff had open heart surgery. She’s even sure of the songs that should be played, politely insisting, “No Elton John”

The use of music in this film is some of the best I’ve ever heard–without any of the selections being obscure or surprising. These songs are precisely the ones that would play on an older person’s car radio and for their anniversary party and we’ve heard them many times before, but in this film, especially in the song that plays over the closing credits, we hear them in a new way, just as Kate comes to see her marriage with a new perspective. The other touches in the film are equally expert, from the cinematography of Lol Crawley to a supporting performance by Geraldine James as the couple’s (especially Kate’s) longtime friend.

So many other films (like the the execrable Youth) can’t show older characters without making cheap jokes about their bodies and diminished capacities. Even when we see this couple getting ready for bed and sex the two are never held up for ridicule, though Geoff , slowly pounding around the scar on his bare chest, like a superannuated Tarzan, seems to be making fun of himself. The film is about Rampling’s Kate but it wouldn’t work if Geoff were not equally well-written and Courtenay weren’t such a good foil. His Geoff is not above flattering Kate or playing the fool to appease her suspicions. In an early scene he defuses what in a shorter marriage might have turned into an argument with a wide-eyed admission, “I don’t remember.”

Seeing an older woman in crisis in a film without also seeing her humiliated (or looking very disheveled) is unusual. And we’re affected more by the increasing uncertainty Kate feels because of the calm we’ve seen her radiate in the early scenes. Haigh never robs Kate of her dignity, even during her dinner table confrontation with Geoff, “I’d like to be able to tell you everything I’m thinking,” she says, “but I can’t.”

Haigh does what more filmmakers should do with older performers: incorporate our own memories of them as younger actors into their characters, the way we see in older relatives and friends the traces of their younger selves. Sarah Polley proved she understood this desire when at the beginning of Away From Her (the first film she directed) she showed the woman who will be played by Julie Christie when she was in her twenties–and the young actress had a ’60s hairstyle Julie Christie might have worn and had the young Christie’s energetic and playful presence. Haigh pointedly avoids showing us what Rampling and Courtenay’s characters looked like when they were younger because we (at least those of us who watch British movies) already know–from the films the actors made in the era their characters discuss. The early ’60s which Geoff relives when he gets a reminder of a tragedy that happened then, is also when Courtenay starred in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The mid-sixties, when Geoff and Kate first met at a dance, was when Rampling made her film debut in Georgy Girl opposite the equally young Alan Bates and Lynn Redgrave.

Many films have characters who are a little (or a lot!) slow on the uptake, so that the audience can congratulate themselves on how much smarter they are than the people onscreen. Several times during 45 Years we assume Rampling’s Kate is overreacting, but as the movie continues, we understand that a woman married to a man for 45 years knows him better than we do. She questions him and knows what to ask when she feels like he could be hiding something from her. Sometimes Kate second-guesses Geoff so accurately that her intuition seems supernatural, until we realize we are just seeing the result of a very long relationship. And unlike the dreary, hackneyed revelations of By the Sea, what Kate finds out shocks us as much as it does her: it isn’t something Geoff could have “forgotten” to tell her.

When (not if) Rampling is nominated for awards for playing Kate, she’ll be called a “sentimental favorite” but her performance, like the relationship at the film’s center is a culmination of experience. Rampling was a fixture of “swinging ’60s” London who hung out with The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Over the course of her long career, she’s worked with an astonishing list of talents: Visconti and Ozon were her directors and she was the leading lady opposite both Paul Newman and Robert Mitchum. The last look and gesture she leaves us with in 45 Years is the unmistakable answer to a question we’ve been asking ourselves throughout the last scenes of the film. If she wins awards for this role, it will be because she’s earned them, not because she’s outlasted her peers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXAnjA9tAnQ” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘The Theory of Everything’: A “Great Man” From The First Wife’s Point of View

Do great women exist? The film industry still hasn’t decided. We had ‘Frida’ a dozen years ago and that bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher (like ‘Frida,’ directed by a woman) from a few years back–which won Meryl Streep an Oscar, but tepid reviews along with a completely irredeemable main character kept me from seeing it. Usually the women in the “great man” films are great only by osmosis, because they married or otherwise provide emotional–and other–support to great men. The actresses who play these roles win Oscars too: they make the “supporting” category a literal one. ‘The Theory of Everything,’ the new bio-pic about astrophysicist (and best-selling author) Stephen Hawking seemed like it might be different since it’s based on the book written by the great man’s first wife, Jane.

Like a lot of women, I’m impatient with the “great man” films that invade theaters every year just in time for Oscar consideration. The main character is always a man whose name we all know, played by an actor who really wants an Academy Award. We see his earliest struggles then later, his triumphs. The addition of some failures never succeeds in making the film more interesting, just longer.

Do great women exist? The film industry still hasn’t decided. We had Frida a dozen years ago and that bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher (like Frida, directed by a woman) from a few years back–which won Meryl Streep an Oscar, but tepid reviews along with a completely irredeemable main character kept me from seeing it. Usually the women in the “great man” films are great only by osmosis, because they married or otherwise provide emotional–and other–support to great men. The actresses who play these roles win Oscars too; they make the “supporting” category a literal one. The Theory of Everything, the new bio-pic about astrophysicist (and best-selling author) Stephen Hawking, seemed like it might be different since it’s based on the book written by the great man’s first wife, Jane.

But the movie begins by focusing on him (Eddie Redmayne) not her, as he rides a bike, attends classes as a Ph.D. student in the early 1960s at Cambridge and acts as a coxswain (complete with megaphone) for the crew rowing on the river. Hawking meets Jane (Felicity Jones) at a student mixer and they become a couple. Hawking’s physical awkwardness could pass for that of any geeky man who considers his body merely a container for his brain, but we know what’s coming before the characters do when we see scenes in which Hawking trips and falls in a train station or his hand folds in on itself as he writes equations on a blackboard. When he has a fall in the yard he receives his diagnosis, ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease), along with the news “Life expectancy is two years.”

At first he avoids Jane and holes up in his room, but after she finds out from his friends about his illness, in a scene we’ve all watched in countless other films, she marches into his room and declares, “I want us to be together for as long as we’ve got.” Stephen resumes his studies and for his thesis topic chooses “time.” He and Jane get married and start to have children soon after.

What follows is a portrait of a marriage that combines all the elements of pre-second-wave feminism at once: Jane has to set aside her studies not just to care for her very young children, to make all the meals and clean the house, but also to care for her husband, whose mobility is rapidly deteriorating, even though he’s still a relatively young adult. At the point where he can walk only with the assistance of two canes and can maneuver the stairs in his house only by lying flat on his back and grasping with his few remaining functional fingers the railing to pull himself up or down, we see Stephen hand in a typed dissertation with a barely legible shaky signature; I couldn’t help wondering if the person who typed it was Jane, since he seems unlikely to have been able to do so himself–and so many wives in that era were also their husbands’ de facto secretaries. We’re also seeing an era in which care for disabled family members was often left to a wife or mother (as opposed to paid staff, unless the family was very wealthy), and no one, not Hawking’s family nor Jane’s, ever thinks of taking over his care for even a few hours at a time to give Jane some respite. On the drive back from a dinner at his family’s hillside cottage in the country, a teary Jane tells Hawking she needs help, but he cuts off any further discussion.

TheoryBed — Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking

Later Jane’s mother can see how stressed she is and (instead of offering to help) suggests she join a church choir (Jane is a regular churchgoer, a contrast to her outspoken, atheist husband). She then meets the handsome choirmaster, Jonathan (Charlie Cox) who becomes a family friend and also helps with Stephen’s care. Stephen seems to see the spark between his wife and Jonathan from the beginning and lets her know in an indirect way that she is free to pursue the relationship. Here the film is at its most interesting: too many “great man” films seem to sum up the wife or girlfriend character struggle of living with the great man as “she was a saint” without considering that she might have needs of her own. Jane’s situation also parallels many others of the 50s and 60s when women got married in their early 20s and found in their 30s and 40s their marriages did not fulfill their own expectations and ambitions. Jane remains devoted to Stephen but is at her happiest when she spends time with Jonathan. The closeness of their relationship invites the scrutiny of others at the christening of her third child, when her mother-in-law follows her into the kitchen and declares the family has a “right to know” whether the child is Jonathan’s. Jane replies that the child’s father could not be anyone but Stephen.

When Stephen has the health crisis that robs him of the ability to talk without assistance, Jonathan steps back and nurses come into the home to help Stephen, along with a man who designs a device through which Stephen can talk again, by slowly “typing” (actually clicking a monitor to choose letters and phrases) and having an electronic voice read the words. Stephen becomes very close to one nurse in particular, Elaine (Maxine Peake), who even helps him to look through the copies of Penthouse that come to his office. He eventually leaves Jane for her. An end title tells us that Jane eventually got her Ph.D., married Jonathan, and that she and Stephen are still friends.

EverythingSpeaks — Jane watches Stephen “speak” through a device while the woman who will be his second wife looks on.

What the film leaves out are the most interesting parts of the story–not just Hawking’s scientific work (we get explanations that are so oversimplified they don’t make much sense), but also that the nurse Stephen lived with (and eventually married and divorced) was the wife of the man who created his speaking device–and that she was also investigated after other caregivers alleged she physically abused Stephen (during their relationship he had unexplained bruises, broken bones and burns). When Jane did publicity for a previous movie based on her and Stephen’s relationship, she said she couldn’t comment on Elaine (who was still married to Stephen then) for legal reasons. She did admit during interviews that she was friends with Stephen mainly for the sake of the children. And she and Stephen weren’t a couple when he was diagnosed, their romance blossomed afterward, which Jane described as being in keeping with the great optimism of the early 1960s that ran parallel with the belief that nuclear war between the super powers could, at any moment, wipe out the world.

Redmayne does a credible job as Hawking (whose character in the film is much more sympathetic than Jane and news sources have portrayed him; this Hawking never runs over anyone’s toes “accidentally” with his electric wheelchair), especially in the later scenes where we see a certain impishness in his face (very like the real-life Hawking’s), while most of his features remain immobile. Jones as Jane does a serviceable job too, but I wish she had been allowed to look and dress less like Jean Shrimpton (the British supermodel popular in the era when the film begins). At least Redmayne (who is also more conventionally pretty than the person he plays) gets to mess up his hair and wear unflattering glasses; Jones, for much of the film, until she starts wearing a crappy short wig and half-assed “aging” makeup, looks like she could have stepped out of a stodgy, British clothing catalogue, even when Jane has three kids and a disabled husband to take care of, and, as Jane points out in her book, and is briefly referenced in the film, very little money. The filmmakers (screenwriter Anthony McCarten and director James Marsh) didn’t seem to think any of these details were worth including. The Theory of Everything is a good, if very conventional, film, but the real story it’s based on could have been made into a great one.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8QYUgO-tZo”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

A Performance, and Film, for the Ages: Gena Rowlands and ‘A Woman Under the Influence’

It was announced earlier this week that the Los Angeles Film Critics Association is to honor Gena Rowlands with its 2014 Career Achievement Award. Long overdue, no doubt, but perhaps the well-deserved attention will encourage people to revisit her impressive work. Most associated with the films she did with her husband, the ground-breaking independent director, John Cassavetes, Rowlands is an exceptionally talented and courageous actor. I must admit that I did not fully appreciate her talent until I experienced her extraordinary turn in ‘A Woman Under The Influence.’

Written by Rachael Johnson.

John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk

Both written and directed by Cassavetes, A Woman Under The Influence deals with non-conformity, mental illness, and the family. It’s also a considerably sympathetic examination of the socio-cultural role of women. Rowlands plays Mabel Longhetti, a mother of three young children, and wife to construction worker, Nick (played by Peter Falk). Mabel is a lively, spontaneous, somewhat charismatic woman, but it is clear from the very start, that she is psychologically unstable. She is feverish performing the most ordinary of tasks, such as getting the kids ready to visit their grandmother, or preparing pasta for her husband’s co-workers. Cassavetes seems to indicate that Mabel’s mental illness is an extreme form of non-conformity; her unrestrained behavior includes flirting with one of her husband’s co-workers directly in front of him. Although an uninhibited soul, Mabel is a deeply vulnerable woman who is consumed by her role as a wife, and mother. She wants to make everything right, but it is all too much. Perhaps she also feels that she has lost her very self. Her husband is characterized as a loving, traditionally masculine type who often responds to his wife’s extroverted ways, and unstable behaviour with frustration, and, sometimes, aggression. Mabel is, eventually, hospitalized for six months, and we see Nick struggle to perform his paternal role. In that it recognizes that that Mabel’s condition has both a psychological and social source, A Woman Under The Influence manifests a certain feminist awareness.

Rowland flawlessly channels Mabel’s open and exposed self, as well as her extraordinary intensity. She mines all aspects of her character, and deeply empathizes with her condition. Although she plays a woman whose condition issues from self-consciousness, specifically self-alienation, it is not a self-conscious performance. There are no gimmicks or false notes. Rowlands fully inhabits the role. She is, simply, Mabel, in all her complexity.

Unlike most American movies, A Woman Under The Influence does not romanticize non-conformity and mental illness. Cassavetes’s masterpiece is worlds apart from the likes of A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Frankly, it makes those films look totally fake. Unlike most Hollywood movies, it, equally, does not paint a sanitized portrait of the nuclear family. Cinematic depictions of struggling parents and young children are often unduly sentimental and exploitative but Cassavetes never falls into that trap. Although the family’s often heart-breaking story is sympathetically told, the director does not manipulate his viewers. Nor does he sugarcoat the bad stuff. He completely immerses us in the life of the family. We literally live with them. The nuclear family is vividly, and accurately, characterized as a psychic, and literal site of love, want, humor, hate, and sickness. Very few films about the domestic space have so effectively captured its unceasing tensions, and complexities. Note too that Cassavetes never judges his characters. He portrays their intimate, authentic selves. Contemporary audiences may also find the socio-cultural setting unusual too: A Woman Under The Influence is an American film about a working-class family.

A Woman Under The Influence is Cassavetes’s most powerful, and greatest film. Peter Falk’s naturalistic, and vivid portrayal of Nick should also be acknowledged but it is Gena Rowlands’s performance that stands out. It is up there with Brando in On The Waterfront, Streep in Sophie’s Choice, and de Niro in Raging Bull. In short, it is a performance for the ages.