In praise of Jane Fonda’s most under­rat­ed performance

When Jane Fon­da arrives mid­way through Pao­lo Sorrentino’s Youth, the tenor of the film shifts. Don­ning a per­ox­ide blonde wig, she is fad­ing Hol­ly­wood star Bren­da Morel, and though Fon­da is bare­ly on screen for a few min­utes, her mono­logue teems with bit­ter, caus­tic invec­tives. The char­ac­ter recalls the cat­a­logue of actress­es Fon­da has played – often so bril­liant­ly – through­out her career: from Glo­ria, the Amer­i­can los­er fight­ing her last war in Syd­ney Pollack’s They Shoot Hors­es, Don’t They?, to Bree, the actress-turned-call-girl who longs for human con­nec­tion in Klute.

Per­haps the most obvi­ous point of com­par­i­son, how­ev­er, is Sid­ney Lumet’s 1986 film The Morn­ing After, which net­ted Fon­da the most recent of her sev­en Oscar nom­i­na­tions. Like Glo­ria and Bree before her, Fonda’s Alex Stern­berg is an actress whose dreams nev­er quite mate­ri­alised. When we meet her, the promise of her ear­ly career has all but fad­ed, leav­ing her embit­tered and rudderless.

Lumet’s film is premised on a wafer-thin mur­der mys­tery. Alex wakes up next to a male corpse and isn’t sure whether she killed him in a drunk­en stu­por. These con­ven­tion­al thriller ele­ments occu­py more real estate than the script’s more com­pelling latent char­ac­ter study. Today it exists as an out­lier in Lumet’s fil­mog­ra­phy, and with good rea­son. As a result, Fonda’s excel­lent work in the film has gone over­looked for too long.

One stand­out scene sees Alex share a late-night drink at her apart­ment with Jeff Bridges’ benev­o­lent cop, Turn­er, who waltzes into her life by chance. Some­what inex­plic­a­bly, Lumet frames the two in a long shot, mean­ing we get no sense of the alchemic rap­port between them until the cam­era movies in on Fon­da. What fol­lows is a mono­logue of pain and pride. ​“I am an actress,” she croaks. ​“Was. I was even good.” A few drinks in, Fon­da wears a mask of proud defi­ance, as if seek­ing to jus­ti­fy her bygone glo­ry to both her­self and Bridges, stub­born in her refusal to crumble.

In the con­text of her act­ing career, Fonda’s per­for­mance in The Morn­ing After is a ton­ic – a return to form in which she did not blunt her edges, play­ing a wised-up woman with a low tol­er­ance for bull­shit. Fon­da spent the ​’60s as a would-be star­let, sub­ject­ed to play­ing sprite­ly naifs in the likes of Bare­foot in the Park and Bar­barel­la. With Hors­es and Klute, she chal­lenged the pub­lic per­cep­tion of her, and off-screen began flirt­ing with polit­i­cal activism. In the late ​’70s van­i­ty projects such as Com­ing Home and The Chi­na Syn­drome retold the sto­ry of her own rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion – Fon­da play­ing women who kow­tow to the men in their lives yet, fol­low­ing moments of polit­i­cal nir­vana, grow into ani­mals of conviction.

Her activism and act­ing made her an sym­bol of Amer­i­can wom­an­hood in an era of cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion. Yet on many occa­sions, Fon­da chas­tened her­self, deign­ing to her char­ac­ters’ naivety. In her 2006 auto­bi­og­ra­phy, ​‘My Life So Far’, Fon­da writes at length about the for­mal train­ing she received at the hands of famed act­ing coach Lee Stras­berg. With his help, Fon­da trained her­self out of her own belief that she didn’t deserve star­dom, low­er­ing her faint voice an octave to tack­le roles like Glo­ria and Bree. In a very lit­er­al sense, she found her voice. Fon­da has worn many faces, from coquet­tish ingénue to polit­i­cal fire­brand to fit­ness maven. Yet The Morn­ing After reminds us of some­thing even more com­pelling and real: an actress deeply inse­cure about her own artistry.