March 21, 2004

Ashley Judd has the face that launched a thousand conventional women-in-jeopardy movies — not just her own, which usually depend on Judd’s push and drive for their ratcheting momentum, but the rip-offs on TV as well.

The genre as we now know it belongs to her; she and her writers and directors propelled it in liberating directions. A Judd suspense film like Double Jeopardy (1999), in which a foul husband sets up his wife for a fake murder, doesn’t just reverse the moral and gender dynamics of hard-shelled Hollywood melodramas about a femme fatale and a male sucker. It also makes the duped character virtuous and tough enough to achieve a healthy payback and emerge without scars.

At age 35, Judd has come a long way from Ruby in Paradise (1993), her breakthrough role as a Tennessee girl gaining self-knowledge through trial and error in a West Florida town. She’s transformed herself into a mainstream action heroine and a jack-of-all performing trades, recently switching off between movies and the Broadway stage, where her presence as Maggie the Cat, despite grudging reviews, turned a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof into a hit.

 

Judd is not a superwoman but she is a take-charge woman, with all her faculties keenly tuned. And she has an innate classiness that transcends social class. A childhood that encompassed 12 schools in 13 years in California and Kentucky, with patches of poverty along the way, has helped make her gritty, sure and real on screen. Viewers respond to the hard-scrabble texture beneath the doll-like features — doll-like, except for the way her grin and twinkle can expand them into mischief or wiliness
 

In her latest movie, Twisted, she plays a San Francisco cop newly elevated to the homicide division. She sports a short-and-spiky-hairdo — something she developed with her director, Philip Kaufman, for what he calls that “pop-out-of-bed” look. She’s more aggressive than usual, with a temper that flares up in an instant and wreaks havoc in seconds. And she has an upfront sexuality that topples male expectations, whether those of her guardian and police mentor (Samuel L. Jackson) or her homicide division partner (Andy Garcia).

Before working with Judd on this movie, Kaufman suggested she watch “a lot of Steve McQueen films.” After all, the prototype for modern San Francisco movie cops was not Eastwood’s Dirty Harry but McQueen’s Bullitt. “Even the car she drives,” Kaufman says, “is either Steve McQueen’s car or a duplicate of the Mustang he drives in Bullitt.”

More importantly, “McQueen had an energy and efficiency in his movements — just in the way he would pick up his frozen dinners and take the paper out of the news rack. And Ashley does, too. She has this confident physicality.”

When Judd was interviewed by phone before the movie opened, she was McQueen-esque — driving herself through Manhattan gridlock to have a pre-show dinner with director Anthony Page, who guided her through Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Reassuring me that her cell phone was attached to a headset, Judd shrugged off my surprise that she would agree to be interviewed while driving to dinner and a demanding performance; after all, she’s been married to race-car driver Dario Franchitti since 2001.

She took the lead in Twisted because “Sara Thorp’s script presented me with a somewhat unprecedented character.” She becomes “her own best suspect” because she’s had a series of one-night-stands with men who end up dead. “In terms of gender stereotypes, she’s as ‘male’ as she is ‘female,’ and she’s unapologetic about it.”

That mix is what attracted her. Old Hollywood would have advertised Twisted with the slogan “Ashley Judd as you’ve never seen her before!” Of course, audiences would have known in those days that they’d get Judd as they had seen her before, but with some delectable new twists.

Male and female audiences enjoyed seeing Judd race through movies like Kiss the Girls (1997) and High Crimes (2002), getting physical while parading her characters’ expertise in medicine and law, respectively. She’s not a superwoman but she is a take-charge woman, with all her faculties keenly tuned. And she has an innate classiness that transcends social class. A childhood that encompassed 12 schools in 13 years in California and Kentucky, with patches of poverty along the way, has helped make Judd gritty, sure and real on screen. Viewers respond to the hard-scrabble texture beneath the doll-like features — doll-like, that is, except for the way her grin and twinkle can expand them into mischief or wiliness.

As she talks, Judd doesn’t just display a knack for summation, but also an instinct for the elegant phrase. Asked how she kept her footing in Twisted’s psychological maelstrom, Judd says “I just opened myself up to each scene and took on the mantle of imaginary circumstance.”

The difference between her character in Twisted and the male characters in The Big Clock or No Way Out is that the guys in those movies know whether they’re innocent. In Twisted, Judd does not. Her character’s having a series of puzzling blackouts, and she’s beginning to worry that homicide is in her blood: Her father was a serial killer who murdered her mother before killing himself. Of course, to handle all this Judd didn’t just “take on the mantle of imaginary circumstance.” She also stepped up her yoga practice, learned to wield a lethal Japanese hand weapon called the yawara, and hung out with a real-life female San Francisco homicide investigator. And after shooting stopped, she stayed in bed for a month.

“There’s no question,” Judd says, “that I got this script because I made Kiss the Girls and Double Jeopardy with Sherry Lansing. And it started as this very Hollywood afternoon. I was at the Laguna Seca racetrack in Carmel, Calif., with my husband when I got the call from my agent about a hot script that I had until the end of lunch to finish.” She had been married for two years, and was enjoying being a newlywed, but something about the script’s “sexy cop-stuff attitude” got to her.

And then she thought of doing it with director Kaufman, best known for The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

“He was my first choice of director, because I never thought of it as a thriller, but as a psychological mystery — something with more subtle tensions. I know marketing it as a thriller is a way to bring people into the theatre. I hope people enjoy what I hope is a more delicate taste and aroma.”

Kaufman was especially drawn to working with Judd after watching her in the little-known Normal Life (1996), where she played “a contemporary Bonnie and Clyde character — I could see Ashley wasn’t afraid of going off the deep end.”

Judd gives Kaufman credit for fleshing out the story’s emotional vectors with Jackson, Garcia and Mark Pellegrino as Judd’s ex-partner and ex-boyfriend. But Kaufman says it was Judd’s energy that made it possible to portray a range of relationships within a plot-driven drama — between woman and father figure (Jackson), woman and healthy partner (Garcia), and woman and unhealthy partner (Pellegrino). Judd makes a point of saying that from the beginning of her career she has studied the Sanford Meisner acting regimen at the Playhouse West in Los Angeles. Meisner taught a more “objective” form of method acting than Lee Strasberg. With characteristic brusqueness Judd objects when I call it method acting at all.

“Ashley and Mark had been in acting school together in LA,” Kaufman recalls, “and when I saw the two of them together, they were hot. You could see they knew how to tango together, even with a gun, a pair of scissors and a yawara. She lets go with a little laugh and says, ‘We gonna rumble?’ — and a moment later, she summons a look of absolute terror. It was fun to watch them work out that dance.”

Judd is so sharp and quick-witted that as soon as I broach the delicate subject of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof co-star Ned Beatty’s remarks to The New York Times that she and male lead Jason Patric lacked sufficient stage training, I hear her say to an attendant “Can you park this for me? I’m acting at the theatre right over there and I get out at 11:30.” And the phone goes dead.

I mention that McQueen was also the last of the genuine juvenile-delinquent movie stars. “Ashley is a Phi Beta Kappa,” says Kaufman, “but she’s a Judd, too — people instinctively connect her to Tennessee or Kentucky and a knock-around country life and poverty. That’s part of her make-up. We’re used to giving recognition to actors who do extreme things with weight gain and make-up, but Ashley’s characters strike a note with average women and their aspirations. She fights the fight for women who break through glass ceilings. And that’s a heroic thing, not just in the homicide division or in the military.”—Dawn/The WP/LAT News Service.

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