Performance Review: Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Braodway (1994)

Back tracking a bit again -- the surprise of the lack of enthusiasm for 1995's winner is understandable yet rather sad. When the quality of the film she's in might just be at root of one's beef with a winning performance. But then there can be times when many people as a collective group (ie. the whole film community) find it in their best interest to rally around any said performance that might just become too overpraised (ie. overrated) after a certain point and carry on so for years. Though this case is nowhere near as drastic as others, this sentiment holds slightly true for the highly acclaimed 1994 winning work of...

...Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

Dianne Wiest plays Helen Sinclair, the once luminous, now aging Broadway diva whose looking for a comeback and finds one when caught in the awe-struck gaze of playwright David Shayne.

Helen, from the start, is a creation spun from the spirit of Norma Desmond herself -- a high-strung, buzzing, highly theatrical, quick-witted, floozy, but captivating presence. Wiest's Helen is a woman/actress who treats the world around her as a giant stage, upon which she is always giving some kind of a larger-than-life "performance" as herself.

Wiest's Helen is first reluctant to be part of such an unglamourous role and production by an untested director, but with a few accommodations, Helen agrees to take the seemingly drab lead role of Sylvia Posten, and make it something of her own.

As she reads more into the character at rehearsal, Helen begins to see "it" in David's work; a subtle, yet powerful kind of genius that stems from the under appreciated mind of this down-on-his-luck fella. In David, Helen sees someone who shares an identical artistic passion for crafting life from mere words on a page, and being able to share it with an audience.

In Helen, David finds sees a richly cultivated and charismatic woman, one who is not only able to understand, but to feel what he feels and appreciate it in a way many others have yet too.

In turn, David begins to fall into a kind of love with Helen, a love she's not sure she can be apart of. The role (like almost all Woody Allen roles) is written in broad, theatrical strokes; requiring an actress to be able to stir a strange mix of energy, neurosis, and laughs -- and on these accounts, Wiest hits a home run. She can land a line and time it with precise accuracy and stops short of tipping over the edge. I love how ably Wiest can tune/alternate her vocality and energy to one moment -- running around and braying -- to another -- sitting on a park bench speaking in a refined, subtle tone.



The actress shows Helen's utter lack of apology from anything, even when she slips into a quiet mode, and it makes Helen fun to watch. In her famous one-liner, she tells Cusack's David, "DON'T SPEAK!", yet the chattering Helen is able to do anything but that herself.

And while Dianne Wiest is very vivid, alive, and enjoyable in the role, she is much less vivid in the words more basic sense of being emotionally lively. Maybe it's the role, but Wiest's performance -- for all its strengths -- skips over past any emotional texture to be found in Helen Sinclair. Granted, almost every scene she's in has the character on a repetitive loop and doesn't give Helen any real emotional reality. Intellectual reality? Yes. But not any real emotional foundation.

Yet, I still hold Wiest partially responsible for this, as she doesn't seem to read past the script's limits and unearth something deeper within a character that has some real potential to go off of. In turn, Helen becomes closer to caricature than character as the film continues when it should be the other way around. Where's Helen interior life? Her soul? It's all covered with a glamorous gloss.

With a different hold on the character, this really might have been the Best Supporting Actress of 1994 -- with a less technical characterization approach and more nuance. Still, Wiest is very consistently funny and finds her nuances there, but it's still hard see past those few surface notes...