Madonna
As we close the chapter on Madonna the sexual being, the next chapter would open to reveal a brief chapter of Madonna the romantic.

Allow me to go back to the 80s for a brief moment, because certain incidents cast long shadows over your life. The incident that had cast a long shadow over Madonna’s life and career was Sean Penn. Even though Madonna had separated from Sean Penn in 1988, and finalized the divorce in 1989, she had still been married to him for 3 years, and dated him for longer than that. By most accounts, their marriage was passionate and tempestuous, being two blistering beings that loved each other as much as they couldn’t stand each other.

In a sense, the time period from 1989-1994 were Madonna’s rebound years, both personally and professionally. As most people know, both man and women who gets out of a marriage go through a period of mourning marked by a rebound period where they jump from partner to partner in the hopes of healing the wound in their heart. Madonna was doing that both sonically – I’m Breathless, Erotica and Bedtime Story all were about love through sex and sex through love – and personally. She had been seen dating 2-3 men a year every year after Sean Penn, with some of the known notables being Warren Beatty, Vanilla Ice, Tony Ward. At least that was what she was publicly selling.

Soon after Bedtime Story, Madonna started seriously dating Carlos Leon, her personal trainer. They ended up in a three year relationship from 1995-1998. Madonna had a child with Carlos Leon in October of 1996.

1994’s Bedtime Story was the softer side of Madonna, but her next greatest hits collection, Something to Remember, was a collection of ballads only. Where the transition from girl to sexual object was marked with her dedication to dance hits, The Immaculate Collection, the transition from sexual object to mother was marked with her dedication to sentimentality and emotional heartstrings.  From her liner notes:

So much controversy has swirled around my career this past decade that very little attention ever gets paid to my music. The songs are all but forgotten. While I have no regrets regarding the choices I’ve made artistically, I’ve learned to appreciate the idea of doing things in a simpler way. So without a lot of fanfare, without any distractions, I present to you this collection of ballads. Some are old, some are new. All of them are from my heart.

Something to Remember was released while Madonna was filming Evita. As a result, it had two music videos attached to it. One was a cover of Love Don’t Live Here Anymore, and the other was for the song You’ll See. Neither of them made as much of an impression as Take a Bow, one of her ballads from Bedtime Story. The video for You’ll See was also a sequel to the video for Take a Bow in terms of story, but, like most sequels, it paled in comparison to the original.

The video for Take a Bow is the story of a woman in love with a matador. The woman belongs to the upper class, while the matador is a man of the people. She’s neglected by him every time he goes off to the fight. She bemoans the love which is perpetually unrequited.

The video was given a Spanish theme and a romantic Sepia tone because Madonna used the video to audition for this week’s movie, Evita, the cinematic adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical about Eva Peron. Madonna sent a copy of Take a Bow to Alan Parker as her audition, and obviously landed the part.

Julius
Andrew Lloyd Webber. The name strikes hatred in the hearts of many, including mine. He’s the musical theater equivalent of MSG, and that’s putting it mildly. I have enough severe issues with Webber that I hadn’t seen Evita until I watched it for this series. Of all of the Madonna movies covered in this series, this was the one movie which I had avoided simply because I couldn’t judge it with any amount of objectivity.

Added to that, Webber’s musical is politically strange, almost to the point of being irresponsible. Much of Evita‘s book was constructed around biographies made by anti-Peronists. To really get into the heart of the problems with this movie, you kind of have to learn that the Perons were such strong heads of a political movement and revolution that their names have been forever associated with a political party. It would be if a new worker party were started, led by Elizabeth Warren, and called the Warrenists.

In the film Evita, Webber casts Eva Peron as a bit of a slut who slept her way to the top until she finally slept with and married an up and coming politician for political gain. The anti-Peronists had constructed this version of the story to cast sex-negative asperions of immorality on Eva Peron in order to discredit the entire party. Webber is also passing judgement through his lyrics. Through the first half, everybody’s calling Eva a slut in so many words, and the moral judgment that Webber casts on Eva in the first half is so thick that it’s hard to shake off in the second half. Whether he was making a point about the immorality of politics, or the irresponsibility of claiming feminine sexuality is akin to immorality, or saying that she was indeed a slut, I’m unsure. The original production was in 1978, so I’ll bank on Webber thinking that Eva sleeping around was a bad thing, even though it led to her success.

Madonna
With the back story of Eva Peron possibly being an immoral sexual being, the casting of Madonna in the role of Eva Peron is ripe for meta dissection of parallels in Madonna’s personal and professional life, even though the musical was written years before she even hit the scene.

I’m also getting ahead of myself.

Apparently, somebody finally hit Madonna over the head and told her that she needed to fucking do a musical for once in her goddamned life. I’d like to imagine it was Sandra Bernhard. We’re late in November, 12 movies in, and we finally get a musical from a woman famous for being a singer. She had one role where she sang a couple of times as a showgirl (Bloodhounds of Broadway), and a couple of brief singing cameos (Vision Quest and Blue in the Face), but this was Madonna’s first full-fledged musical.

Madonna’s acting isn’t necessarily terrible, but she’s such a master of pantomime that all of her music videos are infinitely better. Plus, it’s common wisdom that her voice is her biggest hurdle when it comes to real acting, and not musical acting. She’s best in pantomime (Four Rooms) and conveying emotion through motion (Desperately Seeking Susan), but generally terrible at delivering dialogue (Shanghai Surprise) or creating characters (Who’s That Girl?).

Evita is styled so that all of the dialogue is sung and not spoken. It isn’t dialogue, song, dialogue, song, dialogue. It’s big number, little number, BIG NUMBER, interstitial number, little number, etc. As such, there is no room for Madonna to be delivering dialogue. She is singing from her first frame to her last (except when she’s dead or quiet). Added to that, Evita is directed by Alan Parker. Alan Parker’s style always hewed closer to a music video than a movie. His main claim to fame was Pink Floyd’s The Wall, though he also directed Fame and The Commitments. In turn, Evita‘s style, though much calmer than The Wall, shared much of its iconography and sense of motion and editing.

Madonna’s Eva Peron, therefore, wasn’t heavy lifting in terms of delivering dialogue. But, it was all pantomime. In turn, Madonna shines as Eva Peron. As she should, as she’s practically acting out some people’s perception of her life on screen. Going to the big city, hooking up with men in a constant drive for power, finally finding the right combination, and making a name for herself as well as for him. The metaness of casting Madonna as Eva Peron should not be understated. This casting choice is on par with casting Lana Turner in Imitation of Life. As we’ve seen, Madonna’s cinematic career has been ripe for these types of meta discussions, even down to the tiny parts like Four Rooms.

As such, its hard to not view songs and storylines like Goodnight and Thank You as being commentary on Madonna’s life. Her singing seems to be a little offkey throughout the movie, but I’m unsure if that’s the case or if Webber wrote her role so that it was slightly off kilter with the rest of the music to both stand out more and to be offkey with Che’s (Bandaras) Greek chorus. It could be a little sharp, but not having nor wanting to hear any of the original cast recordings, I’m loathe to make any tonal judgments.

What is on display is Madonna’s physicality. She can nail the emotions of the scenes with her body and with her face. I apologize for the low-resolution of these clips, but all of the songs were so damned long, and I didn’t want to screw up the timing, so I just included the ones that have already been on the internet.

In Rainbow High, the use of mime to communicate the story is most evident, and Madonna is strongest here, alternating between Model and politician, and combining the two to create a power woman who controls her image, even though it is elevating her past the image of a peasant. One should notice how she handles herself in meetings, even taking some tips from Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford.

Alan Parker knows where Madonna’s strengths are, and he uses her to his full advantage. Madonna has always had a screen presence, even as she sucked at acting. All eyes were magnetically drawn to her, so when she failed she failed hard. Here, she isn’t given the option to fail, so when she soars through her image, she scores big time.

Even in Eva’s Final Broadcast, Madonna’s pantomimes are playing to the cheap seats, as if she’s in a Broadway production. Taken alone, the miming would be a bit broad, but the whole movie has been a Parker production from frame one. Everything in the film is relatively overblown, to match the style of Webber’s music, and so overmiming is perfectly fitting with the tone of the movie. Besides, Madonna rarely overacts, except for Who’s That Girl?

Madonna would win a Best Actress Golden Globe for her role as Eva Peron, her first. Though she was ignored for the 69th Academy awards, the song You Must Love Me won Best Original Song.

Julius
Well, despite the great performance, this was the most painful film of the bunch. Everything from here on out is more terrible Madonna acting, but they’re at least hilariously terrible Madonna movies. Just say no to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

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Good Actress – Average Actress – Bad Actress: 7 – 1 – 4

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