Sadie, an emotional basket case, is all raw need and flaming exhibitionism – an aspiring rock singer whose lack of talent doesn’t stop her from spilling her soul on-stage, and whose reckless intake of booze and heroin keeps her bouncing from band to band and man to man. Georgia’s life is as orderly as Sadie’s is chaotic. A successful folk-rock singer with a voice like honey, she’s constructed a life-caring husband (Ted Levine), loving children, the same placid country home she grew up in – designed to protect her deep need for repose and anonymity. So when the torn and frayed Sadie lands on her doorstep in need of shelter – not, you can be sure, for the first time – Georgia welcomes her with profound ambivalence. “She swallows people up,” Georgia complains to her husband. Sadie is no less divided, revering her sister even as she drowns in her shadow.
Georgia has all the power, but is she really the stronger one? Is Sadie a self-indulgent monster or a brave, risk-taking soul? Which is the true artist, the gut raver or the seamless technician? Audiences take sides about the sisters; the movie doesn’t. No easy judgments here, just raw psychological reportage. It’s Grosbard’s best movie since “Straight Time,” and though its dogged realism denies it much cinematic rhythm it has a discomforting power.
And magnificent acting. Winningham has the subtler role, but she shades it with brilliant flickers of passive aggression. John C. Reilly, as a junkie drummer, Max Perlich as a gawky delivery boy Sadie impulsively marries, Jason Carter as Sadie’s useless Brit “manager” are all pitch per-feet. But it’s Leigh’s show, and she sets off a harrowing display of emotional fireworks. In the movie’s key scene, she takes the stage for eight and a half magnificently appalling minutes and rips through a desperately heartfelt cover of Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back.” It’s a mind-bending marvel: a great performance of a bad performance that’s so great you have to wonder if it really is bad, or if some new category has to be applied.
It’s invariably a shock to meet the shy, tiny, soft-spoken Jennifer Jason Leigh. In vain you look for signs of those raging, self-destructive heroines she seems compelled to portray. The psycho roommate in “Single White Female.” The boozily brilliant Dorothy Parker. The tortured junkie in “Rush.” The ravaged hooker in “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” The housewife in “Short Cuts” who coos phone sex while diapering her baby. The sweetly vapid call girl in “Miami Blues.”
None of these is remotely like Leigh. Indeed, if the actress resembles anyone in “Georgia,” it’s not the wild sister. “I’m much more like Georgia,” she says, “in terms of needing quiet and treasuring my privacy.” It happens that Leigh has a sister who is more like Sadie – Carrie, who “ran away from home and joined the carnival when she was 16,” and for years, before she cleaned up, lived a life of heroin-laced abandon. “A lot of Sadie was inspired by Carrie. Cartie sometimes seared me and I was also awed. She would rage and was very gut, so I went into my head and became very cerebral.
“But in acting, that’s where I could get my connection to that part of myself that I needed so desperately, what Carrie lived out and I didn’t.” Leigh does all her acting out in front of a camera – passionately. A fanatical researcher, she immerses herself in a role completely – even keeping a notebook in the voice of the character – until the metamorphosis is complete. But the method can take its toll. “I love that Sadie burns so intensely, but it’s not my nature. After the movie was over I was 89 pounds, I was very sick, and just physically and emotionally exhausted. I really needed to come back to myself; I don’t think I’ve ever felt that lost.”
Now she’s gearing up for another grueling role, a white-trash girl abused by her stepfather in Dorothy Allison’s “Bastard Out of Carolina,” which Anjelica Huston is directing. “I do roles because there’s something in the character I haven’t done before that I want to understand.” It’s character, not stardom, that drives her. “Those movie-star roles are deadening. There’s just nothing human to connect to.” But it’s not only darkness that draws her, she insists. “I want to do more comedies, too. You know, it’s nice to make audiences laugh.”
