By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
December 03, 1993
In "A Dangerous Woman," you know Debra Winger is a bomb about to go off. The title -- not to put too fine a point on it -- is a dead giveaway. And when Winger almost clubs a woman to death in the opening scene, you know bizarre things are in store. As Martha, Winger is a "childlike spirit captured in the body of an awkward woman" -- as Gramercy Pictures' press notes puts it. Whether that means mentally impaired or not is unclear. But she's called a "screwball" behind her back. Timid and thickly bespectacled, she lives a sheltered existence in a guest house next to her aunt (Barbara Hershey), on whom she depends for emotional security. That near-clubbing comes when bitter wife Laurie Metcalf intentionally plows her car into Hershey's front porch. Climbing out of the battered automobile, gun in hand, Metcalf accuses Hershey of having an affair with her politician-husband John Terry -- who happens to be there. Winger, who's been watching the altercation in horror, retreats to her house and comes back with the hammer. Before she brings the thing down on Metcalf's head, however, she is stopped. So is Metcalf. The incident is forgotten. But we know something's ticking away. In producer/writer Naomi Foner's increasingly laughable scenario, Winger undergoes a systematic shafting from everyone around her, including Hershey, who treats her like an unwanted child, and Winger's fellow employees at the dry cleaners where she works. When Winger meets drunken Irish handyman Gabriel Byrne, who gets a job fixing that front porch, it's love at first nearsight. They're birds of a feather. He sees how mistreated she is. She sees his heart of gold under all that boozy breath. In one private encounter, the besotted Irishman bursts into tears, buries his head in her lap and begs for absolution. "Oh, Martha," he whimpers. "You're like a primitive thing that's never been spoiled." Their tentative affair and various other episodes continue with slow, arbitrary and unintentionally amusing abandon. The most significant development is a growing tension between Winger and sleazeball David Strathairn, boyfriend of one of her co-workers. Like most movie naifs, Winger speaks the truth no one else is capable of, and naturally no one believes the addled Cassandra. She also sees -- with contrived regularity -- society's deceptions. After the gun-and-hammer scene, for instance, Winger peers through a window to see Hershey making illicit love with Metcalf's husband. So they were having an affair! Winger happens to look up as Strathairn slips money from the dry cleaners' till into his underwear. But Strathairn successfully accuses her of pilfering. What's a harassed "screwball" to do? Winger, who looks like one of Gilda Radner's "Saturday Night Live" caricatures, throws herself into the acting task. But her talents and enthusiasm are counterproductive here. Her eye contact veers away from people, "Rainman" style. She squints so theatrically behind those glasses, you want to knock them off. Her ungainly waddle is meant to be poignant, but it just looks like she's imitating TV's Urkel. If mistakes are things to recover and learn from, "A Dangerous Woman" is the lesson of her career.
By Roger Ebert
Observe the way Debra Winger plays her character in "A Dangerous
Woman," and you will learn something about the alchemy of acting. She
doesn't look particularly different in this film - aside, of course,
from the details of makeup or hair style that help women express
their beauty. You can always see that it's Debra Winger. But she
projects such a different essence in the film, so profoundly
different, that you wonder how she's doing it.
She plays a woman named Martha, who is slow, or somewhat
retarded, or whatever word you want to use. She can function in the
world, and even hold a job at the dry cleaners, but she is odd in her
behavior, and children in the street feel safe to follow and mock
her. Her home is the guest cottage next to the big house occupied by
a close relative, Frances (Barbara Hershey), who has sort of
inherited Martha as a responsibility.
Winger must have studied women like Martha in preparing for
her performance. She must have lived beside them, observing a hundred
different details. She puts them all together into a portrayal that
never seems made up of those details, however; everything is of a
piece, and after a time we are simply watching Martha, identifying
with her. Look at the way Martha studies the movements in the faces
of people she's talking to. She all but peers at them, looking for
clues, trying to read emotions and meanings. Look at the way she
walks, filled with purpose, concerned with getting from here to there
without false effort. Look at the way she stiffens when she is
treated unfairly. Look at how proudly she insists that she always
tells the truth.
The women live in a small town where everybody knows each
other, more or less. Frances is a bit player in local politics, and
it gradually becomes clear that she's the victim of a series of
affairs, that she tries to find herself through the assistance of
men, and usually fails. As for Martha, she hardly seems aware there
is such a thing as a sex life. Then one day an alcoholic handyman
named Mackey (Gabriel Byrne) comes drifting into their lives, looking
for work. It so happens that Frances' frame porch has
been caved in by an automobile driven by a jealous wife who thought,
correctly, that her husband was inside the house. Frances sends the
handyman away, but Mackey comes back anyway, and starts the job; he
needs the work so badly he has no choice.
Eventually Mackey will become involved with both women. But
it is not as simple as it might sound,
because he isn't bad - none of these people are bad - and in the
loneliness and desperation of these lives many things can happen. His
moral carelessness is fueled by alcoholism, which he acknowledges,
although the movie in general doesn't take it very seriously.
Mackey's involvement sets a plot into motion, a plot that
eventually involves another local man,
Getso (David Strathairn) a worthless petty thief at the dry
cleaners. Things happen. The movie is not really about the things
that happen - it's about the two women - but it's as if the
screenplay gets seized by a desire to tell the superficial story, and
forgets to tell the real one. There is a pregnancy and a killing and
a secret that cannot be shared, and it's all really just melodrama.
I guess human stories have to be linked up to the mechanics
of a plot in order to get financed, or to find an audience. No one
would have wanted to see a movie that simply watched and listened
with sympathy to the events in the daily life of a moderately
retarded woman. But why is it that violence has to be involved? Why
do so many plots depend on violence as the shortcut for creating
dramatic tension. What do Martha and her job and her simple hopes
have to do with all these distraught scenes in the police station,
and all that blood? Look at another current movie, "Ruby in
Paradise," which by setting itself free from the contrivances of
sensational plotting allows itself to be deep and true.
"A Dangerous Woman" raises more questions than it answers.
The handyman character is well-played by Byrne, and surprisingly
sympathetic, considering he sometimes behaves in an unprincipled way.
But he functions too much as an invention of the plot, dropped into
the story to busily make speeches and love. He doesn't have much to
do with the real lives of the two women. Then there is another
character handled carelessly: the wife of Frances' politician lover,
who drove her car into the porch. This woman reappears in the movie
at an important juncture and takes her husband back, and it's all
handled in long shots, without explanation, so that we can see she's
just a convenience for the screenwriter.
The movies are so seldom perfect that it's enough to find
something perfect in them. What's nearly perfect in "A Dangerous
Woman" is the Debra Winger performance. Her Martha seems to float
above the inventions of the plot, in a world of her own. She may not
know everything, but she knows what she knows, and acts on it to the
best of her ability. She does not lie. She will not hurt another. She
deserves her chance at happiness, and she knows it. It's quite a
performance.
IN 'A DANGEROUS WOMAN,' HONESTY IS THE WORST POLICY
Review by Ty Burr
In director Stephen Gyllenhaal's movies, small-town tragedy builds by accretion. His Paris Trout adapts Pete Dexter's novel about a southern crank (Dennis Hopper) whose racism erupts with hideous consequences. Waterland is a melancholy stunner in which schoolteacher Jeremy Irons can't break free of boyhood ghosts. Killing in a Small Town follows a Texas mom (Barbara Hershey) who one day just picks up an ax. His latest film, A Dangerous Woman (R), stays the course. Like the others, it's based on a well-regarded book (by Mary McGarry Morris); like them, the story hinges on a loner who's one step out of synch and whose actions are fueled by the petty torments of others. This time, though, Gyllenhaal's gift for making the mundane mythic fails him. Debra Winger plays Martha Horgan, a graceless near-simpleton for whom a supermarket clerk's asking "Paper or plastic?" represents existential dilemma. Martha lives with her youngish aunt Frances (Hershey), a widow stuck in an affair with a married local politician. The arrival of a strapping itinerant handyman named Mackey (Gabriel Byrne) sets up a classic fox-in-the-henhouse triangle. Meanwhile, Martha's friendship with a coworker (Chloe Webb) is shattered by the woman's duplicitous boyfriend (David Strathairn, in a rare sleazeball role), who has a knack for pushing Martha into messy, defensive flusters. As usual, Winger's good enough to hoist her role above the expected ugly- duckling Oscar bid. You understand why Martha makes people nervous, and why they make her nervous; you see her self-consciousness gain an edge of hostility as the movie progresses. Yet there's a precious vagueness in the script by Naomi Foner (Running on Empty) that keeps the characters at arm's length. In Morris' novel, Martha's oddness is partially explained by a traumatic gang rape in her past; here, she's untethered by previous events. Hershey, too, is stuck in a part that's annoyingly undefined. Even though we learn concrete facts about Frances, we rarely get a sense of who she is. When the actress' talent surfaces in a raw late-night drunk scene, the specificity of character comes as a shock. (Part of the problem may be that Frances narrates the movie, and narrators tend to be unexamined stand-ins for authors themselves.) By contrast, Byrne brings his meaty Black Irish authority to the role of Mackey, a screwup who's no better off for knowing he's a screwup. Mackey's sensitive, he's smart, he drinks too much-in other words, he's a walking cliche -but Byrne finds the man's heart. And Gyllenhaal finds surprising eroticism in Mackey's seduction of Martha, a queasily touching scene in which explicitness for once feels earned. Their relationship is so intriguing that it's a letdown when the movie turns first melodramatic, then preposterously upbeat in the homestretch. It's one thing to imagine Martha capable of murder, and even of the saintly serenity with which she faces justice: If Gyllenhaal and Foner want to paint her as a backwoods Prince Myshkin, Winger has the stuff to pull it off. But Dangerous Woman's final scene ignores the real bitterness that has led up to it. Much is made of Martha's naive inability to tell anything but the truth (thus, the title). In a sense, though, she doesn't have to lie. The movie ends up doing it for her. -Ty Burr