Jodie Foster Is The Best Actor Ever

In a 2021 interview with The New York Times, Jodie Foster, one of our most guarded movie stars, confessed, "I am a solitary, internal person in an extroverted, external job. I don't think I will ever not feel lonely. It's a theme in my life. It's not such a bad thing. I don't need to be known by everyone."

Movie stardom can be a curse in this regard. Each performance, splashed across a big screen and examined time and again in the home-viewing format of your choosing, draws us near to them. We want to know them, befriend them, tear up the town with them... we want them. And since we are typically not an empathetic species (particularly in the United States), too many of us do not understand why these seemingly blessed individuals recoil from the public eye or feel ambivalent about their success.

This tension has been the central theme of Foster's career, and, evidently, her personal life. Starting with her watershed 1976, when she co-starred in six films ranging from Martin Scorsese's caustic character study "Taxi Driver" to Disney's hit body-swap comedy "Freaky Friday," Foster has appealed to moviegoers of all bents. There was a preternatural depth to all of her early portrayals; an intuitiveness that put her method collaborators (most of whom were men) to shame. She wasn't your typically precocious child star, but she could serve that function if need be. Foster was an accessible virtuoso, a kid who appeared to treat acting as the great big game of pretend that it is.

Foster never lost that childhood sense of play, though her approach to character sharpened over time. She understood being different, being isolated, and being someone else in the public eye because she could not outwardly be herself.

The Breakout

Jodie Foster popped in Jerrold Freedman's Raquel Welch roller-derby vehicle "Kansas City Bomber" and Don Taylor's musical adaptation of "Tom Sawyer," but it took her portrayal of the ripple-swilling Doris (she prefers Audrey) in Martin Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" to separate her from the child-actor pack. She was 11 when she shot the film, but projects the unaffected world-weariness of a kid trapped in Tucson, "the weird capital of the world."

She brought the same authenticity to Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," where she was asked to play the impossible part of Iris, a 12-year-old prostitute who's sworn allegiance to her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel) because he treats her well. In other words, she's not looking to be rescued by anyone, let alone a "square" cabbie like Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro).

Iris is too young to know what she wants from life, but, for reasons Paul Schrader's script never examines, tough and savvy enough to survive on the mean 1970s streets of Manhattan. Sport is both Iris' employer and protector, and she thinks they're simpatico because they're both Libras. Travis, however, believes Sport is a killer, and tries to persuade Iris to return home, where she can date boys her own age and blossom into a regular young woman (too late for that).

While Iris ridicules Travis' old-fashioned notions ("Haven't you ever heard of women's lib?"), she does so while topping her jam and toast with an added layer of sugar like an unsupervised 12-year-old would do. Scorsese and Foster don't make a big deal out of it, but this bit of business is as inventive and revealing as Marlon Brando slipping on Eva Marie Saint's glove in "On the Waterfront." Iris may seem wise beyond her years, but she is still, clearly and tragically, a child.

The Career

"Taxi Driver" earned Jodie Foster her first Academy Award nomination, but she struggled to build off the buzz of her watershed 1976 because there aren't a lot of Irises out there for a performer entering their teen years. In 1977, she appeared in the French film "Moi, Fleur Bleue" and the Italian comedy "Casotto," both of which capitalized on Foster's preternaturally mature presence. She also returned to Disney for the agreeable heist flick "Candleshoe."

Though Foster is superb in "Carny" and especially Adrian Lyne's "Foxes," she'd worked just about every variation on the too-much-too-soon teen imaginable. She took college seriously, only working over summer vacation -- and aside from Tony Richardson's scattershot "The Hotel New Hampshire" -- in films of little distinction. Post-graduation, she made a tentative comeback via Mary Lambert's fascinating misfire "Siesta," Tony Bill's wonderfully quirky "Five Corners" (from a script by John Patrick Shanley), and the shockingly awful coming-of-age romance "Stealing Home."

The adult Foster finally emerged in 1988 with her scalding portrayal of a rape victim in Jonathan Kaplan's "The Accused." Three years later, her performance as FBI trainee Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme's "The Silence of the Lambs" secured her place in the pantheon. She could've retired right then and there, and been immortal.

But Foster had filmmaking ambitions of her own, which is perhaps why she began to play the movie star game more willingly than she had before. She is terrific opposite Richard Gere in "Sommersby" and banters easily with Mel Gibson in the jokey Western "Maverick." There's way more meat on the bone in "Nell," "Contact" (easily her best post-Starling role), "Panic Room" and "Inside Man," but it feels like her creative energies have been getting poured into directing.

This is why the fourth season of "True Detective" can't arrive soon enough. The trailer teases a Foster we haven't seen on screen yet. As an investigator isolated in a frigid expanse of Alaska, this could be the beginning of a brilliant and surprising third act from an acutely resourceful actor. Foster's future is unwritten. But while we're waiting, let's revel in the glory of her twin, late-twenties triumphs.

The Defining Role

Sarah Tobias is a victim. This is hideously apparent before an emergency room doctor begins examining her injuries in "The Accused." And once we view the scrapes, scratches, and abrasions battered into her thighs and backside and places we needn't see to understand the savagery of her assault, our conscience demands swift and decisive justice.

But this isn't the way the system works -- now and certainly not in 1988. Because Sarah is, in the eyes of the judicial system, a problematic victim. When she entered The Mill, a dive bar somewhere in Washington state, she was looking to get a little drunk, a little high, and, possibly, a little revenge on her scumbag boyfriend. She's dressed provocatively and flirts with the male patrons. So when one of them throws her onto a pinball machine and rapes her, our boorishly patriarchal culture will hold that she was asking for it.

The legal conflict at the heart of Jonathan Kaplan's "The Accused" centers on the third-party incitement of gang rape. This makes for searing drama in its own right, but it's Foster's live-wire portrayal of Sarah that taps our fury. Kelly McGillis' DA is right: she isn't an ideal defendant. But her shortcomings, particularly her less-than-straightforward nature, exist because she knows she'll be punished for acknowledging her peccadillos.

Thirty-five years ago, "The Accused" provoked actual debate over Sarah's flirtatious behavior, and this ludicrous notion fuels Foster's multifaceted performance. Her Sarah is a battler, but when the people charged with defending her see her as complicit because she is an openly sexual being, the fight begins to fade. She's worse than powerless. She is as guilty as the men who raped her. Foster owns every inch of "The Accused," and wholly earned her first Oscar for Best Actress. And she wasn't done rattling the patriarchy, not by a damn sight.

The Other Defining Performance

Clarice Starling is a victim. Oh sure, she's been afforded a fine education and accepted into the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, but she is a victim of diminished expectations. She's a hard charger on the obstacle course, and shows tremendous promise as a potential member of the Bureau's Behavioral Science Unit, but, as Demme makes painfully plain in the early going of "Silence of the Lambs," this is a male-dominated field and Starling is viewed as more of a curiosity than a colleague.

When Agent Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) selects Starling to interview the brilliantly brutal serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) as a means of gleaning insight into a series of murders by the active Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), it's not entirely an act of faith in her abilities. Crawford hopes sending a young woman will shake out a little more candor than usual from the killer psychiatrist. Lecter sniffs this out immediately, and this is where one of cinema's most electric thespian pas de deux begins.

Jodie Foster's Starling is confident and plenty capable, but she's masking the pain and shame of her poor rural upbringing. Hopkins has the upper hand at every moment because Lecter knows the FBI will never let him out of a cage, so Foster imbues Starling with an affected naïveté. She comes on as the eager pupil eager to learn from Hopkins' evil genius, which draws out a genuine warmth that might've been tough to fake with a more guarded scene partner.

Lecter emotionally wounds Starling once, but once she recovers, she's no longer afraid of him. Their back-and-forth plays as a romance even though neither party expresses any interest in consummating it. Starling's equally disinterested in Crawford, which is a choice. Foster could've struck a warmer dynamic with Glenn, but she interprets Starling as a fundamentally lonely person.

This might be the closest she's come to playing herself, but the mystery of Foster remains intact. We know that she is queer, we know that she is married, and we know that she has two children. Yes, we watched her grow up in movies, but she has seen to it that we know only so much. All we deserve is Jodie Foster the actor, and I'm not sure we even deserve that.

Read this next: The 14 Best Film Acting Debuts Of All Time

The post Jodie Foster Is the Best Actor Ever appeared first on /Film.

from /Film https://ift.tt/5bU3GpN