Calendar Goes To the OSCARS : The Acting Awards--Tough Choices : An assessment of skills that went into creating 10 memorable roles

It’s only fitting that Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy are both up for Academy Awards for their roles in “Driving Miss Daisy” (adapted from his play by Alfred Uhry), since they play off each other in a quiet pas de duex whose overriding simplicity is built up through small, eloquent details. The setting is 1948 Atlanta and covers 20 years. Tandy’s Miss Daisy is a feisty, prideful 72-year-old Jewish widow of some means. Freeman’s Hoak is a widower 10 years younger, hired--initially against her will--to chauffeur her around.

Tandy’s brittle compendium of sharp, worrisome gazes, thin querulous voice, and a mouth set in a perpetual series of reproachful judgments, tells us a great deal about a woman who expects things to be Just So and is acutely sensitive to the hierarchy of appearances in a Southern community. She’s by no means a racist (and in fact is a visible supporter of Martin Luther King Jr.). She’s a stubborn, intellectually principled woman whom the world has failed so regularly that she’s beyond didacticism. But never her standard. When Miss Daisy suffers her first touch of Alzheimer’s, Tandy takes on the appearance of spectral alarm. The ghostly aureole of her disheveled hair and the panic in her face shows us the terror of an exacting woman who’s lost her sense of place.

Freeman’s Hoak is stripped of all contemporary urban references in reaching back to a specific time and place where to be black was to live in a spirit of caution that seeped out of the marrow. Up to now, Freeman’s performances have been fires well-tended; here he gives us the feel of Southern weight, which is always oppressive--even in the weather. He walks as though his flat feet ache. He affects an old black man’s stiff hips and jocular self-effacement. He laughs with sealed lips.

Still, this Hoak is not someone to be pushed around. He’s expressive within a circumspect frame. When Freeman says “Oh I jus’ love the smell of a new car, don’t you, Miss Daisy?” he looks like someone who’s awakened to a brilliant morning. Outside her synagogue, after she’s scolded him for bringing the car up front with its suggestion of ostentation, he peers at her and says, “You needs a chauffeur. I needs a job. Let’s leave it at that.” Wordlessly, something in her relents to his sharpness. By the time they’re ready for the drive to the King fund-raiser in Mobile, they’re fussing at each other like comfortable old marrieds (later, his glance at an Alabama state trooper says everything about primal black fear in the South). By story’s end, he’s the only one she’ll admit within the iron gates of her censure. He’s become living proof of the efficacy of kindness.

There’s an infinitely more violent restraint at work in Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal on Christy Brown in “My Left Foot.” Brown is the Irish author and painter afflicted with cerebral palsy--his left foot is the only thing he can control--and Day-Lewis vividly shows us what it means to have a lively and precocious spirit held at the mercy of a body mostly paralyzed and perpetually wracked by neurological firestorms.

Day-Lewis’s performance is no Movie-of-the-Week sympathy card; the pain of living underwater, as it were, where virtually no impulse has a direct expression, is sometimes unbearable to watch. His Christy hasn’t the time and energy for the luxury of dissimulation--in a restaurant scene in which a woman he fancies announces her engagement to someone else, he throws a frightful, drooling, red-faced tantrum of such fierce torment that you fear he’ll perish on the spot.

In nearly any setting, Day-Lewis’ jaws grind in pained derision and his eyes flash with anger and recrimination before they roll into fear and pain. He is a true prisoner of the flesh. The beauty of this performance is in how many quickly closing crevices Day-Lewis finds to express a fierce intelligence, a pleasure at finding pleasure, a thirst for life (both literal and sexual), a sidelong humor, and the hard-won truths about living which most of the rest of us tend to forget.

Five years ago Robin Williams would have played the boys’ private school literature instructor John Keating in “Dead Poets Society” as a poetry-spewing zany whose fatal collision-course with the administration leaves him a sentimental object of pity. Here, not only are Williams’ highs more restrained, he successfully risks the quality that’s almost always fatal to a performance by playing foreknowledge. His clowning around here for once refers more to his character than to his standup routine--it’s a way of getting the boys to loosen up. At heart Keating wants to show them that one’s compact with poetry is a link with freedom and self-discovery, and what truths others have had to say about experience.

A sad, circumspect element in Williams’ performance suggests that Keating knows well how transitory the impressionable openess and headiness of youth really is. He’s their champion because he understands them and can awaken in them the notion that in literature everyone is contemporary with everyone else. He also knows the odds. There’s nothing he can say to the boy who passionately wants to act but whose father forbids it; watching them drive away, his face grows drawn and bitter. In the final scene, as the students stand on their desks in recalcitrant tribute, he pauses on the way out to say “Thank you, boys,” and leave them with a smile full of prideful understanding and sympathetic pain.

Thick-waisted, jowly, snaggle-toothed and possessed of a small, ceramic British voice, Pauline Collins in “Shirley Valentine” is this year’s entry in the Women’s Picture sub-category. Last year it was Melanie Griffith’s “Working Girl” whose triumph was to make it into a small boxy office in a big corporation while a billowing musical score sang improbably of arriving in the new Jerusalem.

This year, Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s insipid opener, “The Girl Who Used to Be Me,” suggest that we may be in for a case of the cutes. But Collins is a genuinely likable woman with a sly wit. She plays a 42-year-old London housewife whose lips are forever pursed in disdain towards those dreary domestic encumbrances that leave her feeling dull and neglected, chief among them a loutish husband who treats her like a salesclerk. Fortunately, Greece beckons in the form of a friend with an extra tour ticket. There Shirley finds, if not love, then a bout of good sex with the roguish Tom Conti, and an unslakable thirst for freedom.

There are some crucial oversimplifications in “Shirley Valentine,” but they’re hidden in Collins’ adroit expression of quiet metamorphosis. Where once she was dumpy, now she’s lush; her sharp-eyed, brittle expression of unhappy self-reproach has resolved into a more purposeful reflectiveness. Where once she was a character you joked with in the kitchen, now she’s someone you want to hear from in a long talk. Shirley has keen memories of her rebellious schoolgirl self, as well as considerable dismay over how that early fire gutted out. If she’s discovered a new resolve, we also see in Collins’ solemn figure, seated beachside at dusk, that she will never be without regret.

Kenneth Branagh’s “Henry V” is a lithe, smallish, incandescant figure with a carnivore’s swollen jaw and eyes that don’t miss a trick. In the early scenes with his council, he generates the quiet assurance of resolution (and as an actor, leaves himself with someplace to go). Clearly this Henry sees himself as a creature of destiny not to be trifled with, but his face isn’t abstracted in the spooky otherworldliness of the zealot. It takes things in. Presence of mind is a king’s imperative (and it show our jaded post-Vietnam eyes why men will go to war behind sufficiently clever and inspired leaders). Kranagh’s lyrical voice reminds us too that hearing Shakespeare well-spoken is a joy bordering on the sensual--this is language people once enjoyed as an ambient sixth sense, before it was razed by the modern mass media.

When Henry comes to claim his French queen, Branagh underscores the coltish uncertainty of a young man who hasn’t spent much time around women. He’s a little in awe of her--but never out of reach of his wits. When he says “You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate; there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the tongues of the French council . . . “ Branagh’s open-faced, exuberant charm demonstrates why Henry would be king even if he weren’t entitled. He’s king because he’s irresistible.

In “Born on the Fourth of July,” Tom Cruise plays Ron Kovic, the paraplegic Vietnam veteran who as a Long Island high school kid was an earnest subscriber to the myths of the All-American Way before they soured with brutal experience and he took up the cause of anti-war and veterans’ rights activism. Cruise is particularly effective in his early scenes where he captures a teen-ager’s dorky self-consciousness, and the veterans’ hospital scenes are gruelling for what we see him suffer. But as the story develops, his performance begins to lose its continuity and tension. In interviews Cruise likes to talk about how hard he works, but working should never be as obvious as it is here, where few of his gestures and takes seem linked to something going on deep inside him.

Oliver Stone offers a number of telling observations on how fiercely we hold on to our self-deception, and how--aside from the PR euphemism--the heated, rancorous expletive has taken the place of political dialogue in America. But his whiplash editing and Kovic’s apparent inarticulateness aren’t much help for an actor of Cruise’s limitations. He has a boy’s voice that rises to an androgynous whine when pressed, and his idea of passion is to high-beam his sincerity. For all the bitter, shattering experience Kovic has endured, Cruise gives us a soft-shelled man with a creamy center. If you recall Marlon Brando in “The Men,” you’ll see what a light talent is at work here.

In “The Music Box,” Jessica Lange plays a successful trial lawyer named Ann Talbot who works for a tony Chicago firm and takes on the defense of her father in a deportation suit after he’s been accused of Nazi World War II crimes. Given her literal circumstance, Lange would not have the histrionic accoutrements available to someone who worked, say, as a samba instructor, and she’s harrowingly expert at conveying the implosive pressures at large in someone who’s wracked to her emotional core but can’t enjoy the luxury of letting go.

Early on her worn, slightly disheveled look says much about what it’s like to work day-to-day in the law, with its endless stops and starts, continuances and delays. As the trial delivers its mounting challenges against her father, who, it’s clear, is fighting for his life, the horrific suffering of the testifying war victims also takes effect. Lange moves us through every turn of Talbot’s struggle to maintain clarity and control. We see the stabbing anxiety at work in her--a catch in the voice, a tendon that involuntary leaps out of her neck during a cross-examination, a breakdown in her car where she weeps from every facial orifice.

The performance is both detailed and gradually built up. When she suffers a crucial betrayal at the end, her voice sounds like that of a small animal whose back has been broken. If the definition of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposing ideas in mind and still function, the test of a first-rate performance is the ability to play the opposing emotions of love and hate and show how human tragedy is the expression of their closeness.

It’s going to be a close call for the men this year, but Isabelle Adjani and Michelle Pfeiffer have to figure in the long odds for Best Actress. Adjani, who has an ethereal dewiness that often shows up in young French beauties (maybe it’s the vegetables) offers some piquant moments in “Camille Claudel,” in which she plays a promising sculptress undone by an affair with a feckless August Rodin--and she certainly gets this year’s Susan Hayward Award for the fall-down, bust-out Big Scene. But “Camille Claudel” is a dull French picture-book movie that smothers everyone’s energy with commemorative dutifulness.

In “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” Pfeiffer plays a laconic tough-talking lounge singer to the dual cocktail piano team of Jeff and Beau Bridges. In concert she’s a throwback to those slinky Hollywood chanteuses of the ‘40s, but how she came by her contemporary smarts is impossible to fathom, as is the background for her crusty passivity. It’s not Pfeiffer’s fault that all she’s been given to play is a couple of attitudes. That she can parlay them into an Oscar nomination is a tribute to her skill.

Who should win? For degree of difficulty, Jessica Lange and Kenneth Branagh.

Who will win? Jessica Tandy, because this is probably Hollywood’s last chance to honor a long career in which everything she did turned into music. Tom Cruise, because right now America’s Number One pinup boy can do no wrong. There is, however, a lot of late action moving on Morgan Freeman, and on Daniel Day-Lewis as well, for having done the impossible.