Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982, Robert Altman) (Patreon)

58/100

Spoilers ahoy.

Spent roughly the first half-hour convinced that Altman was elevating a mediocre play via expert staging and some nifty two-way-mirror effects, and that's more or less where I ultimately landed, for reasons I'll get to momentarily. But Karen Black's belated arrival piqued my interest, even though I was completely unaware of her character's nature/identity. Well before the big revelation (which completely blindsided me), Joanne's knowing mien—at once affectionate and vaguely sadistic—brings a new, vital energy to what had quickly begun ossifying into down-home flop-sweat mannerism (despite strong work from both Dennis and Cher); it's abundantly clear that some bombshell is due to be dropped, but M —> F trans representation onscreen ca. 1982 was no more nuanced than John Lithgow in The World According to Garp, or so I thought. Never even occurred to me. And given that hiring a trans actor was all but unthinkable at the time, Black makes for a truly fascinating choice: She was always a radically eccentric talent, with a look and demeanor that, while not exactly androgynous, did fall somewhere in the middle of the gender continuum, at least to my eyes. Which is perhaps just a prolix way of saying that I believed her in the role, even though there's really very little continuity between her performance and Mark Patton's. (Altman does his best to obscure that by literally projecting/reflecting one of them onto the other at various points.) What's more, Joanne gets accorded a surprising amount of dignity for the era, with several of her old friends (Sissy, Stella Mae, Edna Louise) instantly accepting her, and even Bible-thumping Juanita reluctant to openly disapprove. Were Jimmy Dean x 2 (really hate the trying-too-hard title, btw) actually about her return, and its effect on the Disciples' reunion, I suspect I'd have completely come around.

That's not the case, however. In fact, Graczyk's play seems utterly incoherent to me, striving to do several incompatible things at once. On its most compelling level, it's a portrait of people trapped by destructive gender stereotypes, with Joe actively rebelling and Sissy forced to redefine herself minus what she'd been told were her key attributes. I have little trouble crafting a thesis from those two elements. Damned if I can figure out, though, how Mona's lifelong James Dean delusion fits in...especially as it pertains to the unseen title character, a 19-year-old who may or may not be cognitively handicapped (and whose paternity is painfully obvious—what's the opposite of being blindsided?—long before Stella Mae finally blurts it out for the benefit of ultra-dense viewers). There's nothing intrinsically female about Mona refusing to accept reality in this particular way; it feels rooted in the go-nowhere locale (as emphasized during the closing credits), not in any struggle with others' blinkered perception of who she is. Sure, rural Texas wasn't the ideal place to have a double mastectomy or be deemed insufficiently macho, but milieu seems secondary; try as I might, I can't reconcile Joanne and Sissy's transformations (voluntary and involuntary, respectively) with Mona's amber-trapped fantasy world. And other characters' micro-arcs—Juanita defending her dead husband, Edna Louise developing a spine—only further the impression of Graczyk working through a notebook of disparate ideas, giving little thought to how they function as a whole. 

Part of me thinks that the film might have worked better without any flashbacks, even though Altman's transitions are consistently dazzling and arguably the aspect of most interest to cinephiles. (One abrupt lighting change, accompanied by the sound of a flash-bulb pop, took my breath away.) As with Da 5 Bloods, I balked at the decision not to have anyone visually age across multiple decades; it's perhaps a smidge more defensible here, as a theatrical conceit in what couldn't more be obviously be a stage adaptation, but the presence of one "ringer" (Chadwick Boseman, Joe/Joanne) prevents it from functioning smoothly. More to the point, the shifts are superficially arresting, more notable for their technical facility than for their emotional affect. They don't contribute much to our understanding of who these people are, or even of who they once were (and, again, I think Black's performance would be even more persuasive without Patton's getting in her way). Still, I'm a sucker—as recently noted in my Double Suicide review—for audacious amalgams of cinema and theater, so it's hard to begrudge Altman his formal ambition, especially when it's so magnificently realized. Few directors have accomplished so much with a single chintzy set (shot on Super 16, no less). And for all the play's shortcomings, it, too, at least does swing for the fences. That's something I can't help but respect, and I'll take a foul tip like this one. 

(Did I get that right? Not a sports guy.)