Melissa Anderson
Sheila McLaughlin and Lynne Tillman’s 1984 Frances Farmer biopic gives the actress, who struggled with mental health and involuntary institutionalization, room to breathe.
Sheila McLaughlin as Frances Farmer in Committed. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
Committed, directed by Sheila McLaughlin and Lynne Tillman,
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, New York City,
November 15 and 18, 2024
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Although riddled with untruths, Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, first published in the US in 1965, remains an essential compendium of the scandals and broken lives that cast a sinister pall over the Golden Age of Movies. Among his misunderstood, mistreated martyrs, Anger reserves his most ardent beatification for Frances Farmer, an American stage and screen actress born in 1913 who was once dubbed “the New Garbo.” But not even a decade into her career, Farmer—an alcoholic prone to depressive bouts—was involuntarily confined, from 1943 to 1953, to a series of psychiatric institutes and her domineering mother’s control. “Genius and Madness compose Janus-faced creativity,” Anger writes, with characteristically florid élan, of his beleaguered heroine. “Of all the Hollywood Magdalenes who have drunk at the well of madness—Clara Bow, Gail Russell, Gene Tierney—we nominate as their patron, Frances, Saint.”
Less than ten years into her own career, Jessica Lange played Farmer in Graeme Clifford’s Frances. That 1982 biopic—the genre that serves as our most secular form of canonization—is distended by the excesses (loud, broad acting; a dramatis personae starkly divided between victim and victimizers) typical of those films recounting the lives of “troubled” actresses (of which Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, his 2022 Marilyn Monroe project, is a wretched recent example). But in 1984, another movie, completely unknown to me until just a few weeks ago, entered Farmer’s market: Committed, directed by Sheila McLaughlin (who also plays the actress) and Lynne Tillman (who wrote the screenplay for what has so far been her sole feature-length film, arriving three years before the publication of the first of her sixteen books to date). This rarity screens at Anthology as part of a quartet of titles assembled as “Unraveling Women,” a series organized by Lizzie Borden (whose landmark radical-lesbian-feminist sci-fi verité Born in Flames, made the year prior, features McLaughlin). Shot on black-and-white 16mm (by Heinz Emigholz, the German-born experimental filmmaker and cinematographer who also has a small part here as an imperious psychiatrist) in storied New York City cinemas, hotels, and alt-culture institutions, Committed shuns the high histrionics of its Universal Pictures–backed antecedent for a more detailed look at the ideas that mattered to its protagonist.
Sheila McLaughlin as Frances Farmer in Committed. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
The double-entendre title of McLaughlin and Tillman’s movie refers not only to Farmer’s coerced institutionalization but also to her political and artistic allegiances, the latter a not insignificant factor contributing to the former. Where Frances painstakingly, if listlessly, dramatizes Farmer’s support of left-wing causes—the actress utters a perfunctory “No pasarán” at a fundraiser for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War—Committed conveys her beliefs through more unconventional means: by telling, not showing. Farmer’s political past (and much of her backstory) is brought up in conversation, primarily between her and an unnamed psychiatric nurse (Lucy Sanger), her lone confidante/confessor. In a deliberately heightened mode of address, Farmer, at the movies with her caretaker, explains one of the origins of her current predicament: “It’s bad enough I was a Communist, sympathetic to socialist causes. That was abnormal enough. Not only did I give migrant workers money—perish the thought—I went into the fields with them. I got my lily-white hands dirty. And that meant I was really crazy.” With this succinct recollection, viewers are free to conjure their own images of the episode rather than endure a potentially mawkish depiction of it. (How much this narrative strategy resulted from a budget funded primarily by NYC arts foundations and family members as opposed to big-studio coffers is largely moot; it succeeds in demonstrating that, when recapitulating the arc of a notorious person’s life, less is more.)
Sheila McLaughlin as Frances Farmer in Committed. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
This oblique mode of representation is also effectively used to provide a précis of Farmer’s professional triumphs and setbacks. Signed by Paramount for a seven-year contract in 1935, she quickly grew weary of the inane projects offered her and left Los Angeles briefly to do theater on the East Coast, ultimately joining the Stanislavski-indebted Group Theatre and starring in the original 1937 Broadway production of Golden Boy, by the Group’s most renowned playwright, Clifford Odets. “I didn’t want to be a star; I wanted to act,” Farmer tells her nurse friend in the common room of the institution. “Hollywood never forgave me for preferring the theater.” Potent, the words alone suffice; in Frances, they are demonstrated, to increasingly diminishing returns, by scenes of malefic studio machers plotting the headstrong performer’s humiliation.
Sheila McLaughlin as Frances Farmer in Committed. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
For all its pleasing matter-of-factness, Committed occasionally slips into the fervidness favored by its predecessor, never more so than when dwelling on Farmer’s torturous affair with the married, pompous Odets. Yet even these flamboyant segments are mitigated by the gravelly charisma of Lee Breuer, one of the cofounders of the East Village avant-garde theater company Mabou Mines, in his seductive portrayal of the stridently leftist dramatist. (Similarly, it’s also possible to think of Farmer and Odets’s stormy love scenes as a link to McClaughlin’s keen exploration of romantic jealousy’s derangements in her sapphic cult classic from 1987, She Must Be Seeing Things.) And while shots of Farmer struggling in a straitjacket, flanked by two stonily indifferent male attendants, may be all but inevitable in any project devoted to her, Committed only alludes to the gruesome procedure that became one of the defining set pieces of Frances: her transorbital lobotomy (an event later determined to be completely fabricated by unscrupulous ghostwriters and biographers).
Sheila McLaughlin as Frances Farmer in Committed. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
What most distinguishes Committed from Frances—and from nearly all biopics, so clamorous and hectic, trying to cram a whole noteworthy life into two hours—is its investment in subdued moments with little or no talking. Early in McLaughlin and Tillman’s movie, Farmer’s mother, Lillian (Victoria Boothby), is filmed alone at home, mum as she goes about a series of domestic tasks. Later, at that same home, which for Frances, now under Lillian’s conservatorship, will essentially be another prison, the two women sit in the living room, listening to the radio: a four-minute segment in which not a word passes between them. In another, slightly longer sequence, Farmer reclines on the couch in the lounge of the sanatorium as other patients and a coffee-sipping nurse are absorbed in their own distractions or thoughts. A jazz record plays, but the women do not speak. Exploring the turbulent world of Frances Farmer, Committed grants the actress something that the bumptious Frances, in its clumsy attempt to exalt her, refused: silence.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.