Jane Fonda in Five Acts movie review (2018)
Fonda’s work as an actor deserves its own appreciation, as her tantalizing description of her improvisations in “Klute” and “On Golden Pond” and comments from directors Alan Pakula and Sydney Pollack tell us. But this survey of her life, or more specifically, her very distinct lives, is the story of a woman looking for love but convinced until very recently that she was unloveable. The interviews and archival material are illuminating but the heart of the film is her own commentary, her engagement with her past and her honesty about her mistakes and regrets and the way she gave up part of herself in each of her marriages. Near the end, she says she wishes she had the courage not to do cosmetic surgery, and be truly herself like her friend Vanessa Redgrave. And yet her next comment shows how truly herself she is: “I wish I was braver, but I am what I am.” Later she adds, “Trying to be perfect is a toxic journey …Good enough is good enough.”
Baby boomers may think that they know the scope of Fonda’s life already because she has been a public presence since the late 1950’s. She seemed to personify and even define so many of the upheavals of the second half of the 20th century. The first four “acts” in the film’s title are labeled with the names of the men she was trying to please: Henry, Vadim (as she calls him), Tom, and Ted. The fifth act is her own: Jane.
No one was more free love in the free love mid-1960’s than Jane Fonda, who went from playing the good girl ingenue who couldn’t have sex outside of marriage even if she tried (“Sunday in New York”) or sometimes even in marriage (“Period of Adjustment”) to posing nude on the beach, marrying the notoriously louche Roger Vadim and appearing in his films (“Barbarella”). She then became an outspoken activist against the war in Vietnam and on behalf of minorities, and married one of the notoriously radical Chicago 7 defendants, Tom Hayden. She infuriated Richard Nixon by going to Hanoi and posing with North Vietnamese soldiers, and infuriated many veterans by claiming that the North Vietnamese did not torture American POWs. The movie opens with one of Nixon’s tapes. We hear him ask, “What is the matter with Jane Fonda?” and express sympathy for her father, “a nice man.” He would have been pleased to know that Henry Fonda told his daughter that if he found out she was a communist, he would turn her into the authorities.
Fonda and Hayden lived in a tiny house with no dishwasher or washing machine. They drove a station wagon to the Oscar ceremony when she won her first Best Actress award for “Klute.” To communicate with people in a way that speeches and protests could not reach, she made movies like “Coming Home,” “The China Syndrome,” and “9 to 5.”
All of those films were critical and box office hits and cultural touchstones. But it was a very different kind of movie that had her greatest influence. Fonda and Hayden decided to start a business to make money to support their efforts. She said, “The one thing I know is workouts.” VCR technology was just becoming available, and Fonda’s first workout tape hit at exactly the right time. It is still the number one all-time best-selling video and the companion book she wrote was at the top of the best-seller list for two years.
