Pauline Kael

“In Sweet Dreams, Jessica Lange plays the pop-and-country singer Patsy Cline with a raw physicality that's challenging and heroic. 'Patsy didn't hold anything back,' Lange has been quoted as saying. "Patsy had a way of hitting life head-on." That's exactly how Lange plays her. It took courage for Lange to abandon her blond silkiness and appear as a raw, small-town Southern girl with bushy dark hair who dresses in outfits her mother makes for her. (Patsy's mother seems to have cornered the market in shrill-blue fabrics). And it took intelligence not to tone up the story with genteel movie-star conceits. Lange's interpretation of Patsy Cline's character is based on the best possible source--her singing--and she creates a hot, woman-of-the-people heroine with a great melodic gift. Almost insistently clumsy and completely unpretentious, her Patsy is like an American backcountry version of the young Anna Magnani. The singing voice that comes out of her is from the vocal tracks of recordings that Patsy Cline made between 1960 and 1963. (In come cases, new instrumental tracks with new background singers have been laid on.) It takes a few songs before you get used to Lange's body with patsy Cline's voice, but as Lange's Patsy rises to stardom, bouncing and dancing as she sings, you feel the unity: Patsy's voice is generating Lange's performance. 

“Patsy Cline was one of the rare full-throated belters with the ability and stamina to belt musically, exultantly, and Jessica Lange's body lives up to the sound. So does her speaking voice, which she modulates so that it's in the same range as Patsy's singing. Growing as confident as the singing voice coming out of her, Lange even puts a raucous growl on a line of dialogue to match Patsy's growl. Lange and Patsy Cline's voice energize the picture, give it a vigor that women have rarely had a chance to show in starring roles. Sweet Dreams . . . is a woman's picture of a new kind--a feminist picture not because of any political attitudes but because its strong-willed heroine is a husky, physically happy woman who wants pleasure out of life. Lange's Patsy cline doens't have to talk about her art: we can see that she's happiest and rowdiest and most fully alive when she sings, and when she's rolling in the hay. What the movie makes you feel is her lust for living. And what makes the movie different from the women's pictures of the past is that there's no call for the heroine to be punished, and no suggestion that she shouldn't want more. Sweet Dreams doesn't step back from her; she's taken on her own terms. 

“The big weakness in this kind of bio-pic is that once is it's on the rails… you can see where it's heading…. 

“…. Reisz… does beautiful work with Ann Wedgeworth and with Ed Harris. He doesn't interrupt Patsy Cline's songs, and he stays out of Jessica Lange's way. She doesn't have the opportunities for brilliant nuances that she had in the dud movie Frances, and her performance may not have the suggestion of worldly ripeness or the affecting qualities that Beverly D'Angelo brought to her few scenes as Patsy Cline in Coal Miner's Daughter, but when Lange's Patsy slings her strong young body around she gives off a charge. Lange has real authority here, and the performance holds you emotionally. This is one of the few times I've seen people cry at a movie that wasn't sentimental--it's an honest tearjerker. People can cry without feeling they've been had.” 

 Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, October 21, 1985; Hooked, pp 48-51

(originally published on this blog 2005?)