Posted: 3/13/17 at 1:07am
[B]The New Yorker[/B]
[QUOTE]As Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, we get Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, casting that’s also sly meta-commentary. Two A-list movie stars, who were sex symbols in their youth, play two A-list movie stars, who were sex symbols in their youth, as they grasp for the kinds of roles—not dirty-talking grannies or fading beauties but star parts, with prize-winning potential—that Sarandon and Lange find in “Feud.” The price is that they must be willing to play their aging bodies for shock and for laughs, an act the world condescends to—at least, when women perform it—as “brave.”
Sarandon seems to get the sweeter deal here. Popping her huge eyes and chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, she plays two equally fun Bette Davises: the saucy, pants-clad actress, a radical clown who smears crazy makeup all over her face, then struts out with her arms in the air like an M.M.A. champion; and the legendary villainess Baby Jane, an old lady who is also a cruel, spoiled little girl. Sarandon’s apprehensive look, as Davis, when she watches the dailies of herself, as Baby Jane, is one of many mirror-within-mirrors moments. Davis knows that putting on gargoyle drag is an artist’s choice, but it’s a gamble, too. The joke might be on her.
For several years, on “American Horror Story,” Murphy has reimagined Jessica Lange’s doelike vulnerability as steely theatre. For the “Asylum” season, she wore a nun’s habit and carried a switch; on “Freak Show,” she sang “Life on Mars” as a Weimar German ringmaster/amputee, blue glitter smeared from her lashes to her brows. Joan Crawford is equally larger than life, but hers is a tougher role—she’s a big-shouldered beauty whose stiff intensity is hard to translate to a modern era. In “Feud,” Lange is forever rubbing lemons on her elbows or doing jittery calisthenics, haughty with overcompensation. It’s a performance that makes the viewer anxious, too, but that queasiness becomes its power. “Feud” is Crawford’s tragedy, and, by the final episodes, when she’s trashing her prospects in a mad quest to punish her co-star, Lange finds something wriggling and alive inside Crawford’s hunger to be seen, her lipsticked rictus as amused as it is seductive. Spraying herself silver before attending the Academy Awards, she’s a kamikaze of femininity, determined to look her absolute best even as she flies straight into the Hollywood sign.[/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/feud-a-bittersweet-beauty[/url]
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