Parker Posey
Spotlight By: Steve Mucchetti
Parker Posey has acted in some of the more introspective and off-beat independent movies of the last decade. Her most recent work (Hal Hartley's Fay Grim and Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration) certainly fits this description, but her turn as Kitty Kowalski in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (2006) was a fairly radical departure from anything Posey had done previously. Her newest film, Zoe Cassavetes' Broken English, serves as a piece in a growing pile of evidence: Posey doesn't have plans to re-explore the superhero genre anytime soon. In Broken English, she stars as Nora Wilder, a thirty-something New Yorker who juggles the pursuits of love and happiness with her self-imposed pressures and insecurities.
Posey drew on much of her own experience in exploring her character's personality: 'Nora's at that place where she doesn't know where to go ' she's so afraid to live her life, just so overwhelmed. All these things that have become inflated in her live, the stuff she's carrying around, the neuroses. Just go out of the country and look at the sky and the grass; you won't feel so absorbed by it, which happens when you live in the city. It can be hard to get yourself out of your head. [Nora's] at that point too where, and I've certainly gone through it, when you find yourself in a desperate place of loneliness, and fear, and she's got issues that she's not aware of yet herself. We see someone who's in a tortured, desperate place. And she doesn't know this, but we know as we go through these times in our lives. The second you feel like that, you've got to call somebody and get yourself out of it. She's not asking for help, she's just walking around, kind of dating someone. She's not living her life yet. She doesn't realize the courage it's going to have to take.'
Clearly, Posey took a detailed interest in the background of Nora Wilder, and the motivations surrounding Wilder's insecurities were a source of concentration: 'I think people are born with a loneliness. You see people come from families where the brother's so cool, he's so outgoing, and there's the other child just feeling like they came from another planet. There's a certain sensitivity, it's soulful ' some people can hold on very easily to things. I love New York, because you can be very lonely living in a city with a bunch of other people who have the same kind of condition. [Nora's] got abandonment issues: She lost her dad, it's her fault, and she hasn't gotten over it. So, we find her at this point in her life where the pain is bubbling up. It's becoming obvious.
Broken English is the first-time directorial effort from Zoe Cassavetes (daughter of actor/director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands, who also stars in Broken English). Posey commented on Cassavetes' talents as a director: 'Her mom said that she was very much like her father. There's a certain awareness of everyone that you need to have on a movie set ' you sit in that chair and people respect you, or you want them to, and people either have that [quality] or they don't, or they're comfortable up there or they're not. Actors are kind of puppets, the ones being absorbed into their own worlds, and you just create an atmosphere where it's very relaxed and open. There was also a real love of the story [Zoe] was telling.'
Posey also went into detail regarding her working relationship with Cassavetes, and about trying to create a movie with a sense of uniqueness: 'Working with another woman and someone that lived in New York, we have the same sensibility. The movie had a hard time getting financing because people couldn't read between the lines or see what was underneath it. Actors don't get a lot of opportunities to play a character and do the work, and bring [their work] to the film. And the actors in [Broken English] really do bring a lot. There are a lot of movies that are made strictly by a tone: Something like Fracture is a certain kind of movie. That is what's exciting for me ' to reveal things I haven't seen in a film, or seen in a character.'
Much of Broken English's storyline revolves around the concept and pursuit of love, and Posey had an interesting take regarding love's connection to her life: 'It's fascinating how people get there, and it's instantly relatable. It's not a goal for me, and life isn't a goal; when people come into my life now, I don't go 'Oh, there he is, he's the one.' It's more day to day ' my life is so different from day to day. And I'm happy with it. I can say there were times when I was alone, and I wasn't happy, or when I was in relationships and wasn't happy, but I'm optimistic. I think there's a big change happening.'
So what's up next for Posey' A new TV series: The Return of Jezebel James. Shooting begins in the fall. 'It's an Amy Sherman/Daniel Palladino project. I play a children's book editor named Sarah Tompkins. She works at Harper Collins. I have a sister that I'm estranged from, and I'm recently divorced; I was married for 11 years. I'm a control freak, I find out in the first episode that I can't have children, and I get in touch with my sister, played by Lauren Ambrose, who I haven't seen in a year. We go to a diner in the East Village, which my character finds disgusting, and I ask my sister if she'd like to carry my child for me ' thinking that it would really be fun for her, that it would really be great.'
There you have it. Just when Parker Posey seems on the verge of predictability, she does something a little differently than could be reasonably expected. Needless to say, you probably won't see her in Superman Returns Again. Probably.
