James Wolcott

“After worrying herself to a limp frazzle Country, Jessica Lange wings around in Sweet Dreams, the Patsy Cline story, and gives a joyous, cut-loose performance. Dressed in cowgirl fringe, she's the queen of the rodeo. Patsy Cline was a country singer famous for her yips and growls, who, as she became comfortable in the recording studio, smoothed her tone until it was as pure and fleecy as a trail of vapor in a clear blue sky, yet her voice was never merely a brush of angel feathers. There was too much hard-knocking life in Patsy Cline for her to sound dainty and chaste. Firmly grounded, she knew how to attract lightning. . . . [The] biographical stuff Sweet Dreams handles dutifully, tearing off the months on the calendar with a dull, even rip. The excitement comes from Jessica Lange--it's her show. To the legend of Patsy Cline she restores the thrilling hellcat growl. 

“When Natalia Makarova won a Tony award for her performance in On Your Toes, she thanked her husband at the rostrum, adding with dipsy charm, 'He didn't actually help, but he didn't get in the way either.' That's how I feel about Karel Reisz's direction in Sweet Dreams: he has the good sense to stay out of the way. With actors this 'on' and dialogue this salty, he doesn't need to do elegant loops of calligraphy with the camera to sustain our interest. Just nail down the roof and clear a path for the whirlwind. Lange's Patsy Cline is a dynamo of female gumption, her will forged not by doctrine but by her own gutsy temperament. She's completely without armor or guile. When she's happy she hugs the clouds; when she's riled she throws herself such a pity party that her mother (played with tendercrust charm by Ann Wedgeworth) drawls, 'Well, you can scream and claw your face, if you think that'll help.' And when she tastes success she races ahead to the cry of 'Let's go spend some money!' Everyone in Sweet Dreams is a big spender; it's a movie about people recklessly generous with their emotions and how one woman cleanses those emotions into song. 

“The extraordinary thing about Lange's performance is that she is on her high horse nearly every moment of the film, yet nothing she does seems actressy or excessive or thought-through. When she lip-synchs Patsy Cline's songs she throws in a lot of body English without looking as if she's trying to upstage the numbers. It's Patsy Cline's blood she keeps circulating. Lange's mature build also helps. Sissy Spacek tended to get lost in Loretta Lynn's wigs in the grown-up sections of Coal Miner's Daughter. Lange breezes across the screen in Cline's long, sleeveless coats as if she's caught the wind in her sail….”  

 -- James Wolcott, Texas Monthly, December 1985 

 

[note: see alsp Wolcott: ". . . Annette O'Toole's superb Tammy Wynette in Stand By Your Man"]

(originally published this blog 2005 or 2006?)