WELCOME back, Jane Fonda.
No matter what you think of her politics – or her remarkable lifetime of personal or professional re-invention – it’s great to have her back onscreen after a 15-year absence in “Monster in Law,” a comedy with Jennifer Lopez opening Friday.
Playing a Barbara Walters-type icon who retires after a public meltdown, Fonda is a real hoot – and throws vanity cheerfully to the wind – as a self-absorbed woman who goes to increasingly nutty lengths to separate her son from his new fiancee, played by Lopez.
It’s a major return for Fonda who, as always, combines intelligence and a fearless willingness to go for broke as an actress with a screen presence that puts most contemporary movie stars to shame.
I’ve been seriously smitten with Jane since pre-adolescence, when I was mesmerized by her as basketball player Anthony Perkins’ cheerleader wife in her screen debut “Tall Story” (1960), which I saw at the old Astoria theater in Queens.
Though I’ve interviewed countless celebrities, I was reduced to a stammering schoolboy when I finally met Fonda last year at the Sundance Film Festival, where she firmly but humorously refused to discuss anything except the feminist documentary she was there to promote.
After all, us teenagers considered her just about the hottest woman in the movies; a bunch of us snuck in to see the then-notorious “adults only” sci-fi spoof “Barbarella” (directed by her first husband, Roger Vadim) in which she does a striptease during the opening credits.
It wasn’t until I was a bit later than I appreciated that she was also a terrific actress.
While she could have coasted on her looks and her heritage as Henry Fonda’s daughter, Jane never did – it’s impossible to find a lazy performance in even her worst films like “Hurry Sundown” (1967) in which she plays Southern farmer Michael Caine’s wife.
Fonda’s considerable technique and directness as an actress holds up even in very dated films like “The Chapman Report” (1962) a now-risible drama about a Kinsey-like survey in which Fonda never resorts to cliché even when she is playing a caricatured role of a “frigid” wife.
Many of her later films, most of which she produced, uncannily capture the zeitgeist of the ’70s and ’80s even if they’re not great movies.
These include her last big hit, the sex-harassment revenge comedy “9 to 5” (1980) with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton; “On Golden Pond” (1981) a schmaltzy tribute to her father, who won an Oscar; and “The China Syndrome” (1979), a serious thriller about a nuclear power plant that became a surprise hit because its release coincided with the meltdown at Three Mile Island.
She played a TV reporter in “The China Syndrome,” but it’s a testament to her versatility – and yes, her endless capacity for reinvention, from antiwar activist to exercise-video queen to corporate wife of Ted Turner – that she seems like a distinctly different person in “Monster-in-Law,” or for that matter, “The Electric Horseman” (1979) in which she also played a newswoman.
Now Fonda is back in the public eye with a vengeance – accompanied by a media blitz to promote not only “Monster-in-Law,” which looks like a monster hit, but her recently published and fascinating autobiography.
She calls it “My Life So Far,” and this unabashed fan certainly hopes that the remaining chapters of her amazing life contain lots more movies.
My five Fonda favorites:
“Klute” (1971) Fonda’s first Oscar, and her most memorable performance, as an emotionally unstable Manhattan call girl stalked by a john – who finds herself unwillingly falling in love with a detective (Donald Sutherland) tracking a missing friend.
“Coming Home” (1978) Fonda’s second Oscar, a tour-de-force as a relatively uneducated woman whose political consciousness is raised as she’s torn between two Vietnam veterans (Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Dern).
“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” (1969) Fonda is unforgettable as a hard-bitten, Depression-era marathon dancer in Sydney Pollack’s drama, which netted her first Oscar nomination.
“Cat Ballou” (1965) Fonda became a bigger star than her father, Henry Fonda, after playing a sexy, gun-toting schoolmarm avenging her father’s murder in this delightful western spoof with Lee Marvin.
“Barefoot in the Park” (1968) The funniest of Fonda’s early romantic comedies finds her and Robert Redford as dewy-eyed newlyweds in Neil Simon’s version of Manhattan.
