The Country Girl Reviews

It’s good enough when a movie can impress me with an excellent performance delivered from an actor whom I didn’t think had the chops to do so, now multiply that by three and you’ve got The Country Girl.

 

I had only previously seen Bing Crosby in several musicals and comedies. He’s never struck me as an enigmatic screen presence but serviceable none the less. Thus surprise performance # 1 in The Country Girl. Why didn’t Crosby do more dramatic roles in his career? This is one of most powerful performances I’ve ever seen as a washed-up alcoholic performer who has hit rock bottom. Like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend and Jack Lemon in Days of Wine and Roses, Crosby’s performance has helped convince me never to start drinking (or at least that would be the case since I’ve never had any intention of starting).

 

Yet I would still say he’s outdone by William Holden, surprise performance #2. I’ve found Holden to be very hit or miss as an actor, possibly relying on great directors to get a good performance out of him otherwise he comes off to me as forgettable. The jury is still out on his abilities as an actor but never less after watching The Country Girl again, I can say this is my favourite performance I’ve seen him deliver giving so much raw energy as a driven stage producer.

 

Finally in the triangle of surprise is Grace Kelly. Prior to watching The Country Girl, I was becoming increasingly anti-Grace Kelly, questioning if she was even a very good actress. Here in this dowdy, playing against type role, my opinion of her changed. I have a rule when it comes to reviewing not to talk about Oscars as I see complaining about awards to be futile and cliché. Yet this is one exception in which I’m forced to break it due to the controversy surrounding her win. Judy Garland’s role in A Star Is Born is one of my favourite film performances of all time and should have won her the Oscar that year however if The Country Girl had been released most other years I would have been more than happy to see Grace Kelly get the Oscar.

 

Without delving into a mindless praise fest I really was left flabbergasted by this trio of performers aided with the help of the film’s unforgettable sense of atmosphere as Grace Kelly puts best herself: “There’s nothing quite so mysterious and silent as a dark theatre, a night without a star.”

There was a time when talking meant more to the movies than gargantuan special effects and oppressive sound design, the awkward fantasias that occur in a twelve-year-old boy’s head and what hasn’t been sequelized into a bloated and diminished franchise. That doesn’t mean that every play or novel got a great translation to the big screen, but they usually turned out a little bit better than the creaky, outdated The Country Girl.

Perhaps the biggest impediment I had in this film were the two central performances. Grace Kelly, so wonderful in light comedy or in the three Hitchcock films she made, is a wooden bore. Movies like High Noon and this prove that drama wasn’t her strongest acting skill. She must have won that Oscar because she forgoes glamorous makeup, plays a character that allows herself to be viewed as unlikeable throughout much of the film, and indulges the long-suffering housewife trope to Bing Crosby’s alcoholic entertainer. I said it in my review of A Star Is Born, and I’ll say it here again: Judy Garland’s career-defining performance was so much more deserving than this pedestrian dramatic work (and the films contained more than a few similarities in story beats). Not that Bing Crosby fares much better turning in a sleepy performance that’s more overacted than grounded in true alcoholic desperation and hellish neediness and self-destruction. Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend was a more fully realized performance of an alcoholic-artist. The interior angst and deceit of these two characters is never truly explored. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? delivers a far more realistic and better performed portrait of alcoholic martial co-dependence and destruction.

Once it seems like the entire film is going to be about the backstage melodrama between a co-dependent married couple who live in a hell of their own making, Kelly and William Holden, as the acid-tongued playwright who has hired Crosby to star in his Oklahoma!-like musical, share a passionate kiss. Then the film quickly descends into a dull love-triangle and a third act that revels in tossing skeletons out of closets. The whole thing is bloated with stagey and overtly mannered emotionality and little to no true knowledge over alcoholism, and addiction, as a disease.

The entire time while watching this movie I kept thinking of better movies, before its release and since, that explored aspects or the overall themes and tropes in more highly detailed and artistic ways, probing into their characters psychologies with more insight and offering up better performances. Skip The Country Girl and rent any of the movies that I’ve mentioned inside of this review instead.