24 Hours of Movies: Jennifer Jason Leigh

 by Patrick Bromley

Spend all day and night with my favorite female actor.

Jennifer Jason Leigh has been my favorite actress since the mid-'90s. She's the definition of a fearless performer, time and again demonstrating a knack for selecting interesting projects that almost no other female actor this side of Nicole Kidman would dream of touching. She also looks a lot like Erika, which doesn't hurt when it comes to me loving her. With her wild taste in material and her propensity to make big, often outrageous choices as an actor, she's basically the female equivalent of Nicolas Cage. No wonder she's my favorite.

10 am - Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982, dir. Amy Heckerling)

Though technically not the very beginning, we'll start with the movie that made Jennifer Jason Leigh a movie star and Somebody's Baby. From the very beginning, she was taking chances with material that was way grittier and edgy than her teen-movie counterparts, never shying away from sexuality and darkness. People remember a lot of things about Fast Times, whether it's Sean Penn hitting himself in the head with his shoe or Phoebe Cates' topless scene, but it's Jennifer Jason Leigh that provides the heart of the movie. If her casting or her performance didn't work, the movie wouldn't have worked.

11:30 am - The Hudsucker Proxy (1994, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen)

Because it's going to get very easy to wallow in darkness with this marathon, I want to make sure to include something that's just fun and funny to lighten the mood. This film, the Coens' ode to 1930s and '40s screwball comedies, is the one that first cemented JJL as my favorite actress because she takes a huge Nicolas Cage-like swing in playing the fastest-talking gal reporter of all time. I've always loved just how bold and risky her choice is and the way that the stylization of the performance puts Tim Robbins' goofy sincerity into even sharper relief. This would be my pick for the most underrated entry in the Coens' filmography if it wasn't for Hail, Caesar!.

1:30 pm - Rush (1990, dir. Lili Fini Zanuck)

Ok, we've had enough fun. Time to get dark and depressing. JJL and Jason Patric are electric in "based on true events" account of two undercover narcotics officers who wind up getting in too deep and hooked on drugs in the process. For some reason, I wanted to see this movie so bad when I was a kid. Maybe it was the '70s aesthetic? Maybe because I liked "Tears in Heaven?" Maybe because Jennifer Jason Leigh is so pretty in it? Whatever the case, young me was not ready for it. I came back to it a few months ago and discovered a fantastic neo-noir that I loved despite my allergy to addiction movies. I know it's early to get so grim, but let's be honest things aren't going to get much better from here.

3:30 pm - Flesh + Blood (1985, dir. Paul Verhoeven)

Speaking of grim! Paul Verhoeven's English-language debut seems on the surface like a medieval epic starring Rutger Hauer (Verhoeven's leading man of choice during this period) as a mercenary and a young Leigh as the virgin girl he claims as his own. Because it's Verhoeven, though, it largely flies in the face of anything audiences expected from a Hollywood adventure film in the 1980s and winds up a muddy, ugly, disease-ridden film about terrible people doing terrible things and succumbing to the plague. I love that Leigh wanted to work with a madman like Verhoeven this early in her career, again demonstrating her excellent taste in collaborators and material. When an ugly rape scene was cut down for ratings purposes, Leigh objected because it resulted in the scene not being ugly enough. She's one of a kind.

5:30 pm - Georgia (1995, dir. Ulu Grosbard)

Of all the movies that are part of this marathon, this is the one I remember the least, having seen it only once on VHS in the late '90s and never since. It has stuck with me, though, in a way that most of the other movies I saw only once during that period (or any period) have not. Leigh plays Sadie Flood, the fuckup younger sister of successful folk singer Georgia Flood (Academy Award-nominated Mare Winningham), whose life is thrown into chaos when Sadie returns with aspirations of becoming a singer herself. The screenplay, penned by Leigh's mother Barbara Turner, is full of heavy and raw observations about familial relationships and the songs, performed live by Leigh and Winningham, are great (Winningham's much more so than Leigh's, which is the whole point). This is a terrific indie drama that fell through the cracks even for me, so I'm excited to revisit it during our marathon.

7:30 pm - Single White Female (1992, dir. Barbet Schroeder)

The PrimeTime Pizza slot goes to this '90s classic and the movie in which Jennifer Jason Leigh's brand of Freak finally matched up with a mainstream commercial effort, resulting in one of the biggest successes of her career. In the pantheon of "_____________ from Hell" thrillers of the '90s, this "roommate from Hell" entry is one of the best and most memorable thanks to the leading turns from Bridget Fonda as a yuppie businesswoman and (especially) Leigh as the new friend and roommate who becomes dangerously obsessed with her. I love the performance because Jennifer Jason Leigh does things on camera that no other actress would do: masturbate on camera, murder a puppy, and blow Steven Weber.

9:30 pm - Buried Alive (1990, dir. Frank Darabont)

It's getting late but we're not ready to switch over to full-on horror just yet, so let's ease into things with this made-for-TV effort from Frank Darabont, his first credit as a director. Leigh is in full Femme Fatale mode as a wife who conspires to murder her husband (Tim Matheson) after cheating on him with a skeezy doctor (William Atherton, ever the prick). The movie is decent, not great, but fun in a programmer way. Leigh and Atherton are having a blast playing the worst people.

11 pm - The Hitcher (1986, dir. Robert Harmon)

I want to program this one as we head into the overnight slot because it's one of the few full-blooded horror films in which Jennifer Jason Leigh starred and it's a good movie even if it's an almost total waste of her talents and does things to her I can never forgive. She reunites with her Flesh + Blood co-star Rutger Hauer (sort of), who plays a hitchhiker that begins terrorizing Leigh's boyfriend played by C. Thomas Howell. This is a beloved cult classic that I think I've only seen one time, so I'm excited to revisit it within the context of this marathon even though I'm going to need to wash one specific sequence out of my brain afterwards.

12:45 am - eXistenZ (1999, dir. David Cronenberg)

Ok, it's late enough that we can get weird. Not just weird, either. Canadian weird. My favorite Jennifer Jason Leigh performances are the ones that match the material to her own eccentricities as a performer -- the movies that allow her to be a freak -- and this is definitely one of those. She's video game designer Allegra Gella, who has developed a new virtual reality experience in which fleshy pods plug into the user's spine for gameplay. Eventually, the lines between fantasy and reality begin to blur. This has more Cronenbergian imagery than almost any other Cronenberg movie, and even the director is more or less reworking themes and ideas from Videodrome, I still mostly love the movie. It will play so well this time of night.

2:30 am - Annihilation (2018, dir. Alex Garland)

The most recent movie in our marathon is another sci-fi horror masterpiece from writer/director Alex Garland in which a team of scientists enter a mysterious energy field (called "The Shimmer") in which all life seems to be mutating. Though Jennifer Jason Leigh's character is pretty normal, her participation in the film once again reflects her excellent taste in unusual and challenging material. I still won't pretend to understand everything in Annihilation, but watching it in the middle of the night will allow us to just coast on the vibes and will give anyone in the audience who dares fall asleep endless nightmares about that fucking screaming bear.

4:30 am - Sister, Sister (1987, dir. Bill Condon)

The debut movie from writer/director Bill Condon (who would go on to make Gods & Monsters, Dreamgirls, and some Twilight movies) is a big slab of Southern Gothic melodrama nonsense in which Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a sexually frustrated young woman who enters into a relationship with Eric Stoltz and then a ghost story breaks out. There's also a subplot about Leigh's older sister because she plays a lot of sisters. The degree to which this becomes overheated and downright silly ought to make it feel like a fever dream after being up all night, which is probably the best way to enjoy it. As usual, Leigh doesn't shy away from the movie's sexuality but manages to generate little chemistry with Stoltz. We can pour ourselves a cup of coffee every time someone says "Etienne."

6 am - Margot at the Wedding (2007, dir. Noah Baumbach)

Let's wake up with a splash of bitter acid in the face. Leigh was married to writer/director Noah Baumbach when the pair collaborated on this 2007 dramedy about a self-absorbed woman (Nicole Kidman) who goes to visit her sister (Leigh) just before she gets married to Jack Black. This is Baumbach in Squid & the Whale mode, attempting to mine humor from the discomfort of awful people being awful to one another. Though probably considered a minor work from the director these days, it's one I revisit more than most because the performances are so good and the relationships so sharply drawn. I would like to have seen Leigh collaborate more with Baumbach, but unfortunately he left her for Greta Gerwig and ruined a good thing.

7:30 am - The Hateful Eight (2015, dir. Quentin Tarantino)

I won't say we're saving the best for last because all of these movies have kicked ass, but we're kind of saving the best for last. Jennifer Jason Leigh got her long overdue first Oscar nomination (she lost to Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl, a movie that does not exist) for her portrayal of Daisy Domergue, managing to be the most colorful character in an ensemble of the most colorful characters of any movie in the last 25 years. Supposedly Tarantino wanted Jennifer Lawrence to originally play Daisy, and while I'm sure she would have been great (she's almost always great..."almost" because I just rewatched American Hustle), there's no one as fearless as Leigh. The way she's able to not just go toe to toe but actually out-ugly all them sumbitches is a kind of miracle, and Daisy is sure to join the actor's short list of iconic movie characters (a list that also includes Stacy in Fast Times and Hedy in Single White Female). While The Hateful Eight isn't my favorite Tarantino movie -- Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will be pretty hard to unseat -- but it is the one I revisit the most. It never gets old.