The Great Acting Blog: “Remarkable, Wonderful, Complex – Geraldine Chaplin In Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name”
Geraldine Chaplin plays Emily, who is released from prison after 12 years, and starts a new life working the check-out at a supermarket. Soon however, she begins to stalk a construction worker (Anthony Perkins), and we gradually learn that she was married to him before she was put away. Chaplin’s performance in this film is one of the finest, most compelling portraits of lonliness and isolation I think I’ve ever seen by an actor. By all accounts, it really shouldn’t have affected me in the way that it has – Chaplin offers a quirkiness which I usually find annoying because quirkiness is usually employed as a dishonest distraction, as a means of obscuring the truth. With Chaplin however, we sense that the quirkiness exists in order to masque a true, inner pain. Chaplin is an outsider in this film, an outsider at work, an outsider in love. There is a particularly painful moment when she enters a bar, and tries to engage a man, but he gruffly shakes her off, grunting without even looking at her – Chaplin remains stoical, but we sense the sting of rejection even though we don’t see it on Chaplin’s face. There is another truly astonishing moment, when Chaplin sneaks into Perkins’ house [see clip above], and confronts his new wife in the kitchen. The wife, in turn, holds up a kitchen knife as protection, and after a few moments of chat, Chaplin reveals that she too has a knife, but she does so with a shocking burst of energy – what makes this moment special though, is that it’s not a truly aggressive threat, it’s an expression of her inner suffering.
Most actors would have played this scene in such a way as to make the character seem like a serial killer, controlled and dark, but Chaplin offers a playfulness, her longing is present, her bitterness, her sense of loss. Miraculously we see that Chaplin is simultaneously victim and aggressor: she is aggressor in terms of confronting Perkins’ wife, but the victim because the wife is bascially living the life Chaplin would have had if she he hadn’t gone to prison all those years ago. Chaplin enters the house not to harm, but to gaze at this possible alternative life.
Chaplin achieves this remarkable performance by her total commitment to the truth, and so what we see is her pain, her longing, her playfulness, and not some facsimile of it. And the fictional, given circumstances of the script, help to shape and give meaning to her expressions.
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