“Jane Fonda makes a triumphant return to the screen in this heartfelt and funny comedy,” reads a marketing blurb for Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, which opens this weekend at Landmark’s Century Centre. Hey, wait a minute—didn’t Fonda already make a triumphant return to the screen with Monster-in-Law (2005), followed by another triumphant return to the screen with Georgia Rule (2007)? How long do you have to be gone to make a triumphant return to the screen, and how triumphant can your return be when all three movies are duds? (A fourth, Et Si on Vivait Tous Ensemble, was released in France last year.) Fonda took a long break from the movie business after costarring with Robert De Niro in Stanley & Iris (1990), and now that she’s triumphantly returned, this fine actress faces a predicament similar to his: she’s too old for the kind of roles that made her an icon but too iconic to disappear into a role anymore.
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Considering the three movies together seems particularly appropriate given that Fonda’s 50-year career breaks down into such distinct phases. During the 60s she played the sort of woman men wanted to see, from the perky newlywed of Barefoot in the Park (1967) to the sci-fi sexpot of Barbarella (1968). That all changed with Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) and Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1970), when she established herself as an actress of real depth and became known for roles that spoke to feminists. In the late 70s and the 80s, while married to activist Tom Hayden, she searched out pointedly social or political scripts, her films ranging from the memorable (Coming Home, about Vietnam veterans; The China Syndrome, about nuclear power) to the forgettable (Rollover, about global finance). Now that Fonda has launched what may be the last phase of her movie career, she seems preoccupied with a subject few people associate her with: motherhood.
As Fonda tells it, her lifelong battle to win her father’s love colored all her relationships with men, including her three marriages (to French director Roger Vadim from 1965 to ’73, to Hayden from 1973 to ’89, and to media mogul Ted Turner from 1991 to 2001). More than anything else, it seems, her ardent desire to please each of her husbands drove her public transformations, from sex object to political firebrand to international philanthropist. But when her marriage to Turner fell apart, Fonda writes, she reached a point of emotional equilibrium unlike anything she’d ever known. In the last chapter of her book, “Leaving My Father’s House,” she rejects “a world that bifurcates head and heart, renders empathy (for oneself or for others) impossible, and makes both men and women, boys and girls, less human than they inherently are.”
In an extraordinary passage from My Life So Far, Fonda recalls how writing the book finally forced her to investigate her mother’s life. Born to a successful New York attorney, Frances Seymour had been physically abused by her father and, on one occasion, sexually molested by a piano tuner visiting their home. After graduating from high school, she became a secretary, went to work on Wall Street, and nabbed herself a millionaire husband, George Brokaw, who died and left her his fortune. When Seymour met the young actor Henry Fonda, she was one of the liveliest, most desired women in New York society, a far cry from the helpless and morose woman Jane Fonda remembered. As startling as these revelations may seem, they’re perfectly consistent with the sense of constant self-discovery that has made Fonda such a fascinating personality for all these years. Her last three movies may not constitute any triumphant return, but understanding oneself can be a triumph all its own.
Directed by Bruce Beresford
