(Every
month or so, I choose a different performance in a film to highlight
and analyze what makes it work so well. This is the first:)
The Performer: Jennifer
Tilly
The Performance: Playing
"Jennifer Tilly" and "Tiffany Valentine" in Seed
of Chucky
Why Her?
For the debut entry in my "Performance Piece" series, I
wanted to write about an actor whose performance I believe is
legitimately iconic. And what better performance to select than
one from a film that I personally love, but has otherwise been dubbed
by some people as, and I quote, "truly the shit stain of the [Chucky] franchise"? While I won't deny that Seed of Chucky
is...baroque, to put it lightly, there is at least one reason to give
it at least one watch: The performance courtesy of the film's female
lead, Jennifer Tilly.
Jennifer Tilly as Tiffany & herself in Seed of Chucky (2004)
Jennifer Tilly stars alongside Brad Dourif (reprising his role
as the titular doll) in Seed of Chucky. Tilly plays a dual
role in this film: She plays Tiffany, Chucky's wife and fellow doll,
as well as herself. Seed has many, many plots, but one
follows Tilly, dissatisfied with starring in the movie within a movie
"Chucky Goes Psycho", trying to fight for the role of the
Virgin Mary in rapper/director Redman's (playing himself) upcoming
biblical epic. Meanwhile, in another plot, the newly resurrected
Tiffany, who is coincidentally Tilly's number one fan, plots to
switch bodies with Tilly so that she can usurp Tilly's fame and be a
star. Tiffany also plots to secure Redman for Chucky to switch bodies
with, and also plans to use Tilly's body as a surrogate to carry a
baby for her and Chucky's gender confused spawn Glen/Glenda (Billy
Boyd) to use as a host. If you didn't get the hint from that small
description of two of Seed's various subplots, Don Mancini,
who wrote and directed the film, stacked this film with a lot.
However, the main aspect of Seed that makes this movie work,
despite it having possibly too much going on, is Tilly's performance.
To begin with, Seed would completely fall apart without
Tilly's total commitment to lampooning herself: One of her first
lines in the film is lamenting the state of her career, saying "Look
at me: I'm an Oscar nominee for Christ's sake, now I'm fucking a
puppet." That line sets the tone for not only the film's meta
humor, but also Tilly's willingness to go all the way to satirize
herself in more ways than one: At one point, when Tiffany is dragging
an unconscious Tilly away, you can hear the doll grunt, "Fuck
she's fat; I can't believe that she's not even pregnant yet."
Not only does Tilly as Tiffany's delivery make that line land, but
Tilly revealed on Seed's DVD commentary that she improvised
that line while recording. Not many would be willing to go there
about their looks, but Tilly goes there. Not only does she crack
jokes about her weight, but also of her trademark unique voice:
During one scene in which a distressed Tilly is calling her assistant
Joan (played by Hannah Spearitt of S Club 7 fame) Tiffany intercepts
the call to mess with the two women. Tilly, who thinks Joan is
impersonating her, shouts that she does "not sound like that",
to which Tiffany responds, "Oh, yes you do!" Which, again,
thanks to Tilly's deliver makes the joke hilarious instead of eye
roll-inducing.
"Why don't I get taken seriously?"
Which brings us to another reason why Tilly's performance works so
well: Using her skills as an actress, including her trademark voice,
she is able to separate Tiffany and herself as two individual
characters. Tilly as herself is a self-centered somewhat unlikable
diva, while Tiffany is struggling to transform her new family into
her ideal of the perfect family, while remaining in denial of her
unhinged psychopathy and the effect it has on others. On a purely
vocal level, Tilly uses a subtly higher register for Tiffany, while
using a lower register for her performance as herself. This acting
choice by Tilly works in her favor, as her separating of the
characters wouldn't work without it, especially in scenes requiring
the two of them to interact. Tilly's separation of herself and
Tiffany allows for a hilariously antagonistic dynamic between her two
characters to be formed, resulting in exchanges like Tiffany repeatedly urging Tilly, while giving birth to Chucky's spawn, to push, which
gets the response, "I am pushing, you little starfucker!"
from Tilly. Again, this may not seem super funny in text form, but
Tilly's line deliveries will make you laugh hard.
Jennifer Tilly does not get along with Jennifer Tilly
Finally, the other thing in Tilly's favor is, surprisingly, Mancini's
screenplay or, specifically, the material Mancini's screenplays
affords her. Outside of the Chucky films, Tilly commonly plays
two types of roles: Either the bimbo, or the vamp. While she
definitely gets to play shades of those two types in Seed,
Tilly also gets to perform aspects of several different genres
throughout the film, sometimes more than one at once. You've got her
impeccable comedic timing on display throughout, successfully
delivering lines like "Hell would be ending up on Celebrity
Fear Factor in a worm-eating contest with Anna Nicole Smith,"
and "Well, Bound is on cable. Gina Gershon is fingering
me." Then, you've got her playing through horror tropes: In one
sequence, Tilly's attempt to seduce Redman to secure the Virgin Mary
role is interrupted by Tiffany knocking Redman unconscious. Tiffany
then looks to attack Tilly next, as part of her plan to use Tilly's
body as her vessel and surrogate, and the latter reacts as you would
expect one to act in a horror film. Tilly sells the horror with her
facial expressiveness and her screaming capability. She even gets
some dramatic beats, such as the end of the climax where Tilly
comforts the tearful Glen after he kills Chucky via cutting off his
limbs and head in what is a surprisingly moving little moment. No
matter what Mancini throws at her, Tilly is ready, willing and able
to knock it out of the park.
The versatility of Jennifer Tilly in Seed of Chucky
No comments:
Post a Comment