Jennifer Jason Leigh here pulls off another of her 'impossible' performances. Is there any film actress as versatile as she is? Is there anything she can't do or any role she cannot play? When she acts, she throws herself into the role with the force of an express train. Here she transforms into a hopeless, cheery, ever-smiling flop of a girl, who has failed at everything but just goes on in good humour, taking it on the chin from Life time after time. Her pathetic, sprawling, inept character is endlessly endearing, like a delightful child, even though she drives everyone she knows crazy because she is so hopeless. She can't stay off the drugs, or the booze, or out of bed with anyone for a quickie. She doesn't know when to start, she doesn't know when to stop. She is behaviour-dyslexic. Her thoroughly controlled and successful older sister gets her revenge on little sister by extending icy and permanent tolerance, disguising condescension as devotion. The two sisters are both singers, and the older one, Georgia of the title (though the star is really Sadie, the Leigh character), is a magnificent folk singer with a marvellously controlled and captivating voice (must get Winningham's CDs!). She is played brilliantly by Mare Willingham, who was justly nominated for an Oscar for it. As for Leigh, she won best actress awards from the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (highly prestigious in the USA), and the Montreal Film Festival. Leigh can sing better than she does in the film because it is part of the role that she must not be very good. However, she throws herself totally into every song she sings, and unbearably heart-rending emotion is her specialty. What a contrast to the cold control shown by her sister, who stands erect and formal, while Leigh throws herself all over the stage and repeatedly swallows and vomits up the microphone, and everything hangs out like long johns on the washing line which the neighbours don't want to see. The film is incredibly sensitive and profound, a triumph by Ulu Grosbard, who made too few films in his career, and is now well into his 80s. This is REAL film-making, and one of the endless parade of spectacular achievements by the incomparably brilliant Jennifer Jason Leigh, and surely one of her best.
Review of Georgia
