Sally Field walked away from TV in the 70s to become a film actress and went on to win two Oscars for Best Actress. In the fall of 2006, she returned to starring on TV with ABC's Brothers & Sisters and the main question is why she ever left?
Field, who just got a name recognition Emmy nomination as Best Actress in a TV series, is so hopelessly lost on screen that the (false) rumors are again flying that Ellen Burstyn dubbed her Gidget Goes Verona when she performed a scene from Shakespeare (The Winter's Tale) at the Actors Studio. Field is a genuinely talented actress. She's demonstrated that on ABC in only one scene (when she grabbed a broom and attempted to deal with an errant fire alarm). In that moment, when she treated the dialogue like throw away lines, she created an actual character. The rest of the time?
She's indicating. She's telegraphing "like me." Mainly she's so lost trying to find her character that if the camera didn't keep her in close up, most of the time the audiences wouldn't even notice her. Field's a survivor (infamous for telling Flying Nun co-star and on-set friend Alejandro Rey, shortly before that show ended, that if she never saw him again it really wouldn't bother her) who was always more infamous than famous. A myth has arisen that she was a TV star. Gidget lasted two seasons, The Flying Nun three. Translation, she wasn't a Candice Bergen or Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She was infamous and she was an industry joke. After the cancellation of The Flying Nun, she knocked around doing guest spots on bad episodic TV before returning as a TV lead in the lemon known as The Girl With Something Extra (which she co-starred in with John Davidson). That series bombed from the start. Field could have ended up like a lower level Karen Valentine (a true TV star thanks to Room 222 and a TV cautionary tale after Fred Silverman tied her up in development hell sidelining her career for years).
We're not mitigating the bravery it took for Field to reinvent herself, we're just noting that she wasn't a TV star when she decided she'd now be a serious actress. She was a slightly more famous Jerry Van Dyke and her TV leads led to the same eye rolls Van Dyke's My Mother The Car did. Field studied her craft throughout and itched for something bigger. Playing "the girl" in Smokey & the Bandit didn't make her a star but it did give her visibility. Norma Rae (her first Oscar win) would make her a movie star and demonstrated the same amazing gifts she'd shown (and won an Emmy for) in the TV mini-series Sybil. Noram Rae was 1979. She wouldn't win another Oscar for several years and that was no one's fault but her own. Field followed that career high by appearing in sitcoms passing for films (Kiss Me Goodbye, Smokey and the Bandit II, Back Roads, etc.) and by giving pedestrian, episodic TV drama performances in actual films (Absence of Malice). When she finally got a role she could chew into, she won another Oscar (for 1984's Places of the Hearts) but by that point, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek had already given much stronger performances as women of the farmlands. What Field mainly telegraphed in Places of the Heart was likability (which is why her acceptance speech was not a shock) and nostalgia.
She followed it with two disasters (in which she still played likable) -- Murphy's Romance and Surrender -- before taking a much more active role in her career. (She wisely walked away from No Small Affair -- Field as a rock star a young man lusted for was ridiculous from the start. Demi Moore would land the role. Field unwisely walked away from Moonstruck.) Punchline tapped into something. Though not a huge hit, it allowed her to remind people of how layered a performance she could give. (It also provided Tom Hanks with the best role he's had to this day.) Steel Magnolias followed and Field was lost in the film. Her character M'lynn's onscreen tantrums leave a bad taste to this day and all the other actress ran circles around her. Not Without My Daughter destroyed her career (but did work into Poppy Bush's propaganda push for the Gulf War) and although she achieved moments to be proud of in Soap Dish, that was really it for Field as a lead actress and why she ended up in supporting roles in both Mrs. Doubtfire and Forrest Gump. Her career as a non-acting film producer was pretty much killed with the disaster that was Dying Young. There really was nowhere left to be a star but TV.
ER wasn't her return to TV. The play All the Way Home (performed live on a Sunday evening on NBC in 1981 was her return -- and she was amazing). But her run as Abby's mother, Maggie Wyczenski, was memorable (and provided Field with her second Emmy). In her earliest scenes, before Maggie's illness was full blown, Field brought an edgy nervousness to the performance with her body movements, her posture, her line delivery and the darting of eyes. Audiences could see that even though Maggie loved Abby, there was something below the surface that made Abby's disdain for her mother completely understandable.
As Nora Walker each Sunday night on Brothers & Sisters, Field offers up nothing but surface. She can be shrill and strident and it has nothing to do with Nora, just with Field trying to bring something -- anything -- to an underwritten character. Field joined the cast late after Betty Buckley had already established the character. The characterization was considered too 'harsh' for TV and the role was recast with Field. She stepped into it with promises that have still not been met. There has been no effort on the part of the writers, producers or creator to flesh out Nora.
So you get Sally Field floundering from scene to scene, indicating light emotions and bearing down (too hard) on heavy ones while coming off like Joan Crawford in Secret Storm. It's not pretty. Most of the time, she just falls back on likable ticks and it's hard to slam for that when her character -- which she stepped into late -- has still not been developed.
The writers seem to think that widow Nora dating her college professor is, in and of itself, a plot and storyline. They seem to confuse screen time with characterization. And if you're confused as to why that is, look no further than behind the screen.
Jon Robin Baitz is supposed to be a playwright but, in any form, dispenses the sort of canned milk his father did (at Carnation) that no one sees as real or healthy. He created the show and, along with Ken Olin and Greg Berlanti, produces it. Not one of them knows from writing a TV show. Berlanti gets a lot of credit for Jack & Bobby with most people ignoring the other disaster (Everwood). If Field wants to have a character, she's going to have to grasp that she's working with boys (not men) and, like Christine Lahti in Jack & Bobby, create the character outside of the scripts. Ignore the text, toss it aside. (That is why Field's one scene attacking the fire alarm worked.)
But the question remains as to why she even wants to try? Her light comedy skills are such that she could star in a sitcom. Her strong drama skills are such that she could land a real drama and not this weak soap opera. It's not even fair to call it a "soap opera." It's more of a "cleanser opera." It's something you wipe across your face at the end of the night that tingles lightly and removes the make up.
Brothers & Sisters is a badly cast and badly written show. Patricia Wettig and Ron Rifkin, in supporting roles, are the only ones who aren't embarrassing themselves. Rifkin's added a darkness to a light character and ended up with something. Wettig has made her character very detached and it works within the role (Wettig isn't detached in her performance, she commits, however, to making the character detached -- it works because she's playing the mistress of Field's late husband).
We know people working on the show and were asked to review it last fall. We said we'd wait. We had hopes that promises made to Field would be delivered and that Nora would actually be written as something an actress could perform. Not only did that never happen, ABC got hot for the very bad actor Rob Lowe and decided he was an "element" that could improve the show.
Apparently they were confused as to the box office on Tommy Boy?
Rob Lowe started out a bad actor and he will die a bad actor. When he taped himself sleeping with two females (one of age, one of underage) his career almost ended and, if it had, that would have been the most damage he did to the Democratic Party (he was at the DNC convention during the self-filming of the sex tape). Sadly, bad movies brought him back and he was able to publicly endorse Ahnuld and take up with all sorts of right-wing crazies. But when you have no talent, you need something to drive up a following apparently. Though early promoted as beautiful and gorgeous and sexy by a fellow actress (who was in the closet and had reason to pretend she was hot for Lowe), he probably summed up himself better as George Jetson of cartoon fame. He is as stiff and cardboard as Jetson and seeing him get break after break must really rankle the likes of his fore bearers (for instance, Bobby Sherman).
Lowe plays a politician, a US Senator, who is involved with Calista Flockhart's Kitty. Kitty is Nora daughter and underscores every flaw with the series. Flockhart's got her Happy Face stamp out again and this decade it's being used to sell the Republicans Are Really Nice lie. (If only Shelley Long had not suffered from the desire for bad perms, she could have had Flockhart's career.)
Nora is supposed to be the oddball in her family, the political oddball, because she's a Republican. For that little conceit to work, she'd have to come from a liberal family. No one connected with the show can grasp that her family is not liberal.
Her brother Kevin (played by the boxy Matthew Rhys) is gay. If that's supposed to be the contrast -- one child is gay, the other is a Republican! -- we'd remind everyone that The Second Family has a lesbian daughter named Mary (who is both gay and Republican).
Brothers & Sisters plays politics the way Crossfire and other media outlets have. You present a right winger and you pair them up with a centrist but dub them "from the left." If that's not clear, the season cliff hanger (a very low cliff) was Nora's son, the drug addicted Afghanistan war vet Justin, preparing to ship off to Iraq. The series began with Justin somewhere stateside and Nora, Kitty and Kevin having to search for him, finding him drugged out, and then attempting to encourage the veteran to rebuild his life. A lot of boring scenes existed between the debut and the cliff hanger. Kitty's supposed to be Ann Coulter with niceness. What are the rest supposed to be?
It's a question worth asking when Nora's big scene as Justin prepares for Iraq doesn't involve pointing out that the drug addiction could get him a discharge, doesn't include pointing out the war is illegal, doesn't include her contacting any of the family's supposed high power friends to get him out of service. What is the scene built upon?
Nora's screeching that if Justin ships over to Iraq with a bad attitude, he will die, so lose the attitude, little mister. It's Field using all the technique left over for her nostalgia trip in Places From The Heart, but it is no way contemporary.
This is not a show about a left family. This is not a show about a liberal family. This is a show about flag wavers and one of them happens to be a Republican while the rest are squishy centrists who are more concerned with who they are sleeping with or might be sleeping with (or whom their partners have slept with) than anything in the world around them.
At one point, GOP Kitty's informed, with awe, that there's no one else like her to which she responds, "That's probably just because you haven't met enough Republicans." She gives it the same pert, Ally McBeal delivery as though she's on a mission to make the Republican Party the craze she made anorexia a decade earlier.
We have had loud and intense arguments with friends working on the show about exactly that sort of nonsense. They truly think they are making an adult, political drama and that it's something to be proud of. Sally Field declaring, to her children at the dinner table, "If your brother wants to give you his sperm . . ." only qualifies for "adult" to someone browsing the Adult Video section of a DVD store.
With the exception of Kitty, it's an apolitical and annoying show. They want points for the character of Kevin who is openly gay. They want points for being slightly more daring than Dawson's Creek which is where producer Bertnali hails from. Just as there was nothing adult about that teen opera, there's nothing adult about Brothers & Sisters. It's a horny teen's view of the world where getting your clothes off is the end-all-be-all whether you are straight or gay, whether you are over forty or under. With the exception of Republican Kitty, no one is motivated by anything other than hoary cliches.
As to the supposed breakthrough role of openly gay, mid-thirties Kevin, he's as boring as Matt on Melrose Place but he can get a little onscreen action. He frequently has to explain he's gay over and over which is rather surprising when his sexuality should be firmly established in the family. He also frequently runs to the right of Kitty (while allegedly not a Republican). [In one scene supposedly addressing the issues of gay fatherhood, Kitty would tell him, "I don't necessarily agree with your views" and come of as more 'progressive' than her supposedly 'left' (centrist) brother.] His conservative nature is a cheap trick by the writers to get credit for doing something while doing nothing. A light peck (don't call it a kiss) takes place with Scotty (one of Kevin's two onscreen boyfriends in the first season) and Kevin's appalled by a public display of affection. He later ends up in love with closeted daytime soap star Chad. If you're not getting the point, the issue isn't that Kevin's not a flamer. The issue is that Kevin -- in a show where everyone but Rifkin is talking about the sex they've had and are having -- believes his sexuality begins and ends with the announcement that he's gay.
That's nothing to be proud of, that's nothing to point to as a breakthrough. He's a dull, whiney character who's not even physically attractive. When you cast Calista (forget Field who's very slim herself), someone needs to wonder why all the males in the cast have obviously not skipped a meal their entire lives?
The show wants a lot of credit and some are willing to give it to them. Rob Lowe wrinkling his brow over the death of an assistant (on a helicopter he was supposed to be on!) passes for acting the same way that recycling toned down Jerry Springer Show dialogue passes for mature drama. And throughout, the show refuses to address political issues.
If that's not clear, let's note that 70% of Americans have turned against the illegal war. In the most recent CBS-New York Times poll, 61% of Americans do not favor further funding of the illegal war without a timeline for withdrawal while 8% favor no further funding of the illegal war.
People with the show can argue (as one did loudly in the middle of last week) that this is a new poll. The response to tying withdrawal and funding is new, those results are new. But approximately 70% of Americans being against the illegal war has been a fairly consistent view for 2007, for all of 2007. So when a show films their cliffhanger at such a time and the baby of the large family, Justin, is about to be shipped to Iraq and the family is supposedly a political family and all supposedly to the left of GOP Kitty, that Sally Field's Nora is giving a big speech about the need for a positive attitude is 100% crap. All attempts to pretty that up or pretend otherwise are 100% crap.
Nora's refusal to address the issue of Justin getting out of the military are beyond laughable. Her son is a drug addict -- one that she moved heaven and earth (in the first episode) to track down. The mere fact that he's active in his disease qualifies him for a discharge. That's before you factor in Nora's high powered friends or the fact that her daughter Kitty is dating a US Senator. (For the record, GOP Kitty did ask the Senator for help in keeping her brother from being sent to Iraq.) That this supposedly left mother is more concerned with waving the flag than saving her own son is rather shocking. That she has no concerns about the legality of the war is appalling.
Viewers would be smart to wise up that this isn't a political show, it's not an adult show and it's not a show worth watching. Field may or may not win the Emmy. She hasn't earned it for her performance but she may get it due to her name and some residual good will for her last TV work on ER. Instead of spending the next weeks working on an acceptance speech, she should work on a cough and take to the sickbed until the promises she was made when she joined the series start showing up on the written page. Brothers & Sisters coasted through season one and it may not have more than a second or third season. If that happens, Field will not be the noted two-time Oscar winner but instead the lead of bad TV she started out as. That may not be pretty, but it is reality.