BEFORE: Sticking with the biographical documentaries about actors, though I think tomorrow there could be a little break. (I discovered I could flip the next two films, watch them in either order, so we'll have to see how I feel tomorrow...it's kind of weird for me to have any choice at all...) I think tonight there will probably be some Vietnam stuff, so I'm back on Nixon and all that, this might be the antithetical film to "The Fog of War", if my suspicions are correct.
Thank God for talk show hosts - without them, this week's linking just wouldn't be possible. David Letterman carries over again from "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind", and so do two other talk-show hosts, one news anchor and two actors. That's right, SIX people in total carry over from yesterday's film - and I thought linking my documentaries together might be hard, it's very easy once I know the entire cast lists!
THE PLOT: A look at the life, work, activism and controversies of actress and fitness tycoon Jane Fonda.
AFTER: I'm a little late in getting to this one, because I snuck out to see "Spider-Man: Far From Home" on Monday night - then appeared on a podcast about it right after, to capture the impressions of the film right away. I'll be posting my review here in just about under two weeks, I've got to finish the documentary chain first, and re-connect to the fiction chain via a Jake Gyllenhaal film - all part of the plan...
This documentary on Jane Fonda follows sort of the same path as the last two on Robin Williams and Roger Ebert, there's a bit about what the subject was like as a child, some cursory information about going to school and such, and then they all sort of divide their careers into sections. This one's a bit more defined than the others, with 5 chapter headings: Henry, Roger, Tom, Ted and Jane. It's maybe a bit too neat to separate out Jane's life in terms of her relationships with her father (Henry Fonda), her three husbands (Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden, Ted Turner) and finally herself as an individual. She even makes reference to it being a problem for her throughout her life - a feminist woman allowing herself to be defined by the men in her life. So - just putting this out there - if that was such a problem, why make the problem worse by maintaining that in this documentary? Aren't we STILL defining her through these men if we carve up her life in this fashion? That seems a bit of a shame.
Also, this suggests that the documentary is going to work chronologically, more or less, and that's not what ends up happening. Her whole relationship with her mother, who died when Jane was 12, doesn't really get explored until the second section ("Roger"), because that's when Jane had her first child, and supposedly that's when all the memories of her mother came back, and she really started thinking about what her mother was like, and saw things in a whole new light. That's all well and good, but chronologically it seems weird to jump back to explore these childhood events after Jane's an adult with a child of her own. Why couldn't this information have been presented in the first section? Her mother was Henry's wife, after all, so information about her mother's time in an asylum and how she died now seems out of place. Why create an overarching structure for the film and then not stick to it?
There's still plenty of fascinating information, if you can overlook the awkward time-jumping, I suppose. The "Henry" section ends with her father re-marrying and Jane and her brother Peter being shipped off to boarding school, so they'd be out of the way and her father wouldn't have to deal with them in his new life. Ouch. Later she dropped out of Vassar, studied art in Paris for six months, and then came back to the U.S. and fell into acting almost by default, because Lee Strasberg had a beach house not far from her father's. Well, great, we wouldn't want for someone to walk a LONG distance to find an acting teacher, after all. God forbid someone should have to WORK a bit to figure out what they want to do with their life...this doesn't really help to dispel the "poor little rich girl" stereotype, that's all I'm saying.
But this does lead to her acting career taking off in the 1960's, with "Tall Story", "Period of Adjustment" and "Walk on the Wild Side" (all of which I haven't seen) and then "Cat Ballou", "The Chase" and "Barefoot in the Park" (all of which I have seen). Returning to France to make some films there put her in the orbit of Roger Vadim, so that's Act 2 of this doc, where she starred in "Barbarella", married Roger Vadim, and won an Oscar for "Klute". (This is where the doc takes that big leap backwards to really get into her non-relationship with her mother, though...)
Part 3 of the doc concerns her marriage to Tom Hayden and her second career as an activist, and since this involved trying to prevent the war in Vietnam, some people still haven't forgiven her for her actions while visiting North Vietnam. Activist issues took up much of her time in the early 1970's, and it seems like Nixon and his hit squads were going out of their way to discredit her - but wasn't she RIGHT about Vietnam in the end, knowing what we know from watching "The Fog of War"? So many veterans ended up disillusioned about that war anyway, wasn't she just out ahead of the curve on that one? People just thought that since she was against the war, she was therefore anti-American - but later people in the 2000's figured out that you had to say that you support the troops, even if you don't support the war.
During Part 3, Fonda comes back to acting, but only on "issue-oriented" films, like "Coming Home" (ah, more Vietnam veteran stuff) and "The China Syndrome", which had the good fortune of opening 3 weeks before a REAL nuclear disaster, at Three Mile Island. You can't buy that kind of publicity, it seems - and then this was followed with "9 to 5", which was all about sexual harassment and unfair payment for women in the workplace. Again, she was way out ahead of everybody else, considering that these issues are still unresolved and are more important in society now than ever. But the relationship with fellow activist and eventual California Senator Tom Hayden seemed strained when her third career as a workout celebrity took off. Her videos sold even better than her movies, and her workout book (what's a workout book?) was a best-seller, while Hayden's political books were snore-fests, apparently.
The film seems to forget to mention that Fonda retired in 1991, from making films, at least. This is part of Act 4, which is sort of about her courtship and marriage to Ted Turner, who owns I think about half of Montana. I'd honestly love to hear more about why THAT marriage failed, but the documentary can't seem to find the time. Because we're on to Act 5, where Jane un-retires to make more movies like "Monster-in-Law", "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding", "The Butler" and "This Is Where I Leave You". Of course there's time to interview Lily Tomlin and promote the Netflix series they co-star in...
I don't know, it's all about choices with these documentaries, over what to leave in and what to leave out, because you just can't include everything that happened in an 8-decade life-span. I probably would have made some different choices and put things in a different order, but it's not my film, so it's not up to me. It was probably going to be an organizational nightmare no matter what, which is too bad. I've got a couple of newer films with her on my list now, one which I'll get to this year, and another which I'll have to save for next February.
Also starring Jane Fonda (last seen in "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding"), Troy Garity (last seen in "Gangster Squad"), Tom Hayden, Dick Cavett (also carrying over from "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Robert Redford (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Lily Tomlin (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Ted Turner, Sam Waterston (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Paula Weinstein, Mary Luana Williams, with archive footage of Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "The Age of Adeline"), Johnny Carson (also carrying over from "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), John Chancellor (ditto), Michael Douglas (ditto), Forest Whitaker (ditto), Bennett Cerf, Jill Clayburgh (last seen in "Starting Over"), Bruce Dern (last seen in "White Boy Rick"), Phil Donahue (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Richard Dreyfuss (last seen in "My Life in Ruins"), Henry Fonda (last seen in "Midway"), Peter Fonda (last seen in "Life Itself", Oprah Winfrey (ditto), Merv Griffin (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), David Hemmings (last seen in "Spy Game"), Katharine Hepburn (last seen in "Holiday"), Abbie Hoffman, Elia Kazan, Harvey Keitel (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Henry Kissinger (last seen in "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Ron Kovic, Jack Lemmon (last seen in "Grumpier Old Men"), Jennifer Lopez (last heard in "Ice Age: Collision Course"), Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Walter Matthau (last seen in "I.Q."), Country Joe McDonald (last seen in "Janis: Little Girl Blue"), Geraldine Page (last seen in "Interiors"), Alan J. Pakula, Dolly Parton (last seen in "Koch"), Sydney Pollack, Harry Reasoner (last seen in "The Fog of War"), Michael Sarrazin, Dinah Shore (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Simone Signoret, Lesley Stahl (last seen in "RBG"), Gloria Steinem (ditto), Lee Strasberg, Roger Vadim, Jon Voight (last seen in "Holes"), Debra Winger (last seen in "Shadowlands").
RATING: 5 out of 10 protest signs
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