Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Stephen Schiff

“Fortunately, Jill Clayburgh can take care of herself. In It's My Turn, she has developed a new kind of movie character: the female abesent-minded professor. Clayburgh possesses wonderful comic equipment--a nasal, drifting voice; the sort of nose that the British refer to as a "great honker"; sleepy-looking eyes that are always glazing and wandering, that sometimes even look as though they were about to roll off to the sides of her face. And yet, because she keeps her vulnerability right on the surface, she always appears on the verge of surrender (To what? To anything), and so she never loses her sensuality. In It's My Turn, she stretches the tension between silliness and sexiness to its limits: like any good absent-minded professor, she's always dropping things or tripping, or accidentally wrapping herself in errant swatches of clothing. Her gestures are too big and clumsy and when she eats, she hunches over her plate as if she were trying to keep her hollandaise warm; in tense or even seductive moments, she's likely to pop her eyes, make inadvertent clicking noises with her mouth, and break into a goofy grin. And yet she glows. In their way, all her nutty little tics and quirks turn her into the very incarnation of liberation. For here is a woman who needn't be statuesque, elegant, pretty, or even well-mannered to be attractive; she needn't be an ideal. In It's My Turn, Jill Clayburgh seems to have left the pedastal for good.”

Stephen Schiff
Boston Phoenix, October 28, 1990
[left out some on Grod/Clay chemistry]

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