Off the Beaten Path: Ghostlight and A Farewell to Shelley Duvall

Keith Kupferer and Dolly De Leon in Ghostlight.

For the first half hour Ghostlight made me restless. Everything about it felt awkward: the actors seemed to be working too hard for obvious effects and I couldn’t find the performing rhythms. But then Dan (Keith Kupferer), a small-town road worker, is persuaded to join a community theatre production of Romeo and Juliet, and, almost magically, the movie, written by Kelly O’Sullivan and directed by O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, settles down and turns into something quite unusual. Though it takes a while for O’Sullivan to fill in all the requisite information, we learn by bits and pieces that Dan and his wife Sharon (Tara Mallon), a teacher, have lost their teenage son Brian to suicide and are suing the parents of his girlfriend Christine (Lia Cubilete), who was intended to die with him but survived, for wrongful death because the kids got access to her folks’ pharmaceuticals. But though he and Sharon are going after them, Dan’s response to the loss of his son is mostly denial. He refuses to talk about Brian, which makes his daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallon Kupferer), who was very close to her brother, crazy. Always, we assume, a handful, Daisy can’t control her temper and keeps getting in trouble at school.

Though he refuses to acknowledge the cause of his own behavior, Dan has been swinging close to the edge himself, and one day, when he goes after a careless driver, his co-worker (Matthew C. Yee) has to pull him away; afterwards he can barely remember what happened. Rita (Dolly De Leon), who is taking a smoke break from the first readthrough, observes the meltdown, brings him gently into the rehearsal and gets him to join. The process calms him down, and though he has no intention of coming back, after a domestic tiff he finds himself joining up with the ragtaggle, mismatched troupe, where Rita, who’s about fifty, is playing Juliet opposite a young man half her age. (He’s not terribly good but he prides himself on being the pro in the group; he boasts that he has an agent.) When her Romeo makes a crack about her age, she slugs him and he walks out. And Dan winds up playing his role. He’s too embarrassed to tell his family, who have begun to suspect that his evening absences hint at his having an affair. Daisy follows him into the theatre one evening and learns the truth, and Rita presses her into service. She doesn’t take much persuading; Daisy has been performing in high school musicals for several years. The director, Lanora (Hana Dworkin), casts her as Mercutio.

You’ve no doubt figured out by now that the point of Ghostlight is that Shakespeare’s tragedy parallels Brian’s tragedy and that getting in touch with the emotions of the despairing young lovers allows Dan (and, finally, Sharon) to work through the grief. But not precisely in the way one might have anticipated. When Dan plays Romeo’s suicide, he is able to imagine what his son must have felt that threw him out of hope and out of life. The closer the film comes to the opening of this small-time R&J, the more surprising it becomes.

The other theme of the movie is something about the essential nature of theatre – about the element that telescopes the distance between different levels of performance. Obviously we all know that what Ian McKellen achieved on stage as Falstaff this summer in Robert Icke’s Player Kings and what Rachel McAdams came up with for the title role of Mary Jane on Broadway are beyond the capabilities of community theatre actors. But there’s a way in which good acting in one setting is more like than unalike good acting in another setting. Anyone who has worked with student actors, even high school actors, knows this. And Lanora is a very fine director: she draws on smart exercises, and she has great radar for authenticity. As the movie proceeds the film actors who play the community theatre actors figure out what they’re doing, or – more likely – they show us how their characters figure it out. The three leads in the film are a real-life family that has worked together in Chicago’s Rivendell Theatre Ensemble. Keith Kupferer is especially fine – he has a proletarian delicacy. And Dolly De Leon’s sensitivity to Shakespeare’s language makes the point about the virtues of unconventional casting (in this case, casting against age conventions) that all the virtue signaling in the professional theatre these days merely obscures. Ghostlight is a very small picture, and you can see clearly all the ways in which it doesn’t quite work. But the ways in which it does are far more important.

Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall in Thieves Like Us (1974).

It’s always hard to say goodbye to actors we’ve been watching with pleasure over the course of decades, and over the past few years more and more of the ones I loved as a young man have disappeared. Each time I feel as if some part of my youth has faded away, though they’re still up there in front of my eyes when I stream a favorite old performance. It seems especially cruel to lose Shelley Duvall so close to Donald Sutherland, since it was the great director Robert Altman who first brought both of them into our orbit. Duvall was sui generis. Altman loved to tell the story about meeting her at a party in the days when she was just trying to help her boyfriend sell his paintings, and he assumed that her goofy, outsize Texas looks and moony-eyed presence were part of an act she was putting on to impress him; he was knocked out when he found out that she wasn’t an actress at all, and that everything about her was completely real. And he turned her into an actress – or rather, he located the natural actress in her. First he cast her as a tour guide at the Astrodome in his 1970 Brewster McCloud – his follow-up to M*A*S*H, which had starred Sutherland – opposite Bud Cort (from M*A*S*H). The movie was screwball piffle, but in Duvall’s scenes, as the girl who takes Brewster’s virginity, you couldn’t take your eyes off her. Then he gave her the small role of Ida in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the mail-order bride in a Pacific Northwest mining settlement on its way to civilization who goes to work for the local madam (Julie Christie) when her new husband is killed in a brawl. Duvall is so big-eyed that you fear she might burst like a balloon, but her Ida gets to enjoy life at Mrs. Miller’s whorehouse. Altman put her and Keith Carradine, another one of his discoveries, together on screen – he’s a horny cowboy passing through whose stupid, pointless demise gets under our skin – and they look like they belong together. Three years later, Altman followed through by casting them as gawky outlaw lovers in Thieves Like Us.

Duvall is fantastic as Keechie in Thieves Like Us, a girl from the Depression-era South who falls for a sweet kid who breaks out of prison with two buddies so he doesn’t have to spend the rest of his life behind bars and, unpredictably, becomes a famous bank robber. Carradine's Bowie never loses his sweetness but he does grow up, while Keechie doesn’t. She makes up a life for herself, and at the end, when she survives his violent end (just by chance), she’s still living a fantasy. Though neither the movie nor Duvall’s performance has ever received the acclaim both deserve, they are among the high points of the great American Renaissance period.

Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall in Popeye (1980).

Duvall could be terrific when she acted for other directors. She strolls through Roxanne, Steve Martin’s irresistible update of Cyrano de Bergerac (directed by Fred Schepisi), as his best pal; she doesn’t seem to be acting at all but she doesn’t take a false step. She grounds Stanley Kubrick’s overwrought, imcomprehensible hothouse horror picture The Shining: Nicholson’s psycho-Loony Tunes performance takes up most of the air but Duvall is the movie’s actual touch with emotional reality. She’s effortlessly charming in Joan Micklin Silver’s TV adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” which misses the Fitzgerald melancholy but, between Duvall and Veronica Cartwright and a surprisingly on-point Bud Cort, it’s quite lovely. But Duvall was always at her best when she worked with Altman – as the compulsive beanpole starfucker in Nashville who keeps changing her clothes and her wigs and showing up on one dude’s arm after another with a Cheshire Cat grin on her face; or in 3 Women, where she plays Millie Lammoreaux, who’s so disconnected from the people she chatters on to that she practically seems to have fallen off another planet. (She talks to anyone who happens to be sitting or walking next to her, and when her partner peels off she just keeps going.)

And as great as she is in Thieves Like Us, what she does as Olive Oyl in Popeye is a singular accomplishment. Altman wanted to make a live-action cartoon musical, and it doesn’t look like it ever could have worked, but everything Duvall does is a triumph. Her hair is twisted back into a braid that sticks out of the back of her head like an outsize bug and yet it emphasizes her swan’s neck; her face has never looked so much like a Modigliani portrait. Her high, light Texas-infused voice has an unexpected softness that slips in between moments of fussiness and snobbishness; her gestures, like the way she waves her arms at the dinner table at her parents’ boardinghouse or points her napkin at Robin Williams’s Popeye, look genuinely cartoonish – she seems to be the one person in the cast who gets instinctively what the director is going for. And it comes from somewhere; this is one of those roles that underscores Duvall’s trademark quality of anxiety provoked by disorder, which she took in different directions in Thieves Like Us and 3 Women. She doesn’t push for a moment; she simply embodies the role, though God knows how she does it. She’s inspired.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.