R.I.P. Maggie Smith

I’m sometimes inconsistent in my tributes here but it doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts about those I didn’t write about! James Earl Jones died on September 9 and I didn’t write anything here because I was in Scotland and not there for pleasure, although it was all very fun, of course. But I had just an afternoon of free time (where I went to Elvis Shakespeare. Not the castle. Not a museum. lol). James Earl Jones was a massive figure in American theatre and film and I feel so damn lucky that I actually saw him on Broadway, in Fences no less. He was a giant. And now, another giant has left us. Dame Maggie Smith.

Whatever I say here cannot compete with my friend Dan Callahan’s superb tribute over on Ebert. I so needed to read that today as I scrolled through social media, reading all the tributes. He knows her and her way of working and her response to life (a NEGATIVE response) better than anyone. He devoted a chapter to Smith in his amazing book The Art of American Screen Acting (I interviewed him about it here). Please read Dan’s tribute. He gets it on a deep ACTOR level.

I wrote this a while back but I will share it today. Maggie Smith’s performance of Alan Bennett’s 49-minute monologue called Bed Among the Lentils is one of the best performances I have ever seen. Period.

It is done direct to camera and is an astonishing piece of work. As I watched, time stood still. I feel like I didn’t even blink. I couldn’t breathe. The character’s misery and bitterness was stultifying. Crucially, and this is a very Maggie Smith “fingerprint” (if such a dazzlingly versatile actress can have a fingerprint), there is a total lack of catharsis. Maggie Smith was TOUGH. There is no leakage for her own/the audience’s comfort. Near the very end, there’s a tiny glimmer of her sense of loss. It’s just a glimpse, though. The character wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of seeing more than that.

Smith, with her impeccable technique, gives you just a tiny glimpse of the character’s interior world, and you, the audience member, are wrecked. She shows a little bit of what’s there, and you feel ALL of it. This is what total control looks like. Amateurs are not capable of what Smith does here, with text, subtext, gesture (the moment above with the water glass), backstory (even if not expressed), vocal technique – everything. And yet you don’t feel the control. Her control/technique is invisible. You don’t “see the work”. Smith is like De Niro in that way. Pacino in The Godfather. The character isn’t expressive. Therefore the actor isn’t either. The work has been done so you can feel all this STUFF going on inside, but none of it actually comes out. If Smith had lost control of her technique and broken down into stormy sobs during the monologue, allowing herself to express the underlying emotion, it would be a very different experience. Strangely, catharses sometimes alienate audiences. The actor feels so much there’s little room left for the audience to feel.

Civilians (and this includes many critics) are too impressed by the presence of tears, mistaking visible tears for excellent acting. This reminds me of a story my friend Shelagh told me years ago. Shelagh was in an acting class and a girl was up there doing a monologue, and my GOD she was feeling things. You could see her emotions from the space station. Credulous critics are bowled over by tears because it seems like a magical ability to produce actual tears in a make-believe situation. But it’s not magic. The sobbing student finished the scene and after a long pause the teacher said, “You were feeling everything and I am …. curiously unmoved.”

In Bed Among the Lentils, the character is a very unreliable narrator. The only emotion visible to the naked eye is a coiled contempt swimming in a sea of existential boredom. This toxic brew is the only thing she allows others to see … but then … over the course of the monologue, her rigid facade starts to (very subtly) disintegrate. Only once does she let you see what her public persona is hiding. We may have perceived it all along, misery emanates off her in waves, but the character will be damned if she lets you see any of it.

When the feeling rises in her like a volcano, surprising her as well as us, it’s shattering.

The acting here is literally world-class. It’s never been done better.