Georgia

Grosbard is my favorite director. Between "Georgia" and "True Confessions" I simply cannot imagine better motion pictures. "Georgia" has everything right - the right cast, the right details, the right decision to show the entire spectrum of the live music-making process. Grosbard is so correct in showing us the two sisters performing entire songs instead of using more cinematic fades to elapse time. This is about MUSICIANS and you have to show what it is they do, and Grosbard has the audacity to show it in real time. The last shot of Jennifer Jason-Leigh saluting the guy who bought her the shot of whiskey as she was performing brought tears to my eyes - not so much in empathy for her but in the realization that I had just seen a perfect work of art.

While I love Mare Winningham and Jennifer Jason Leigh, I felt terrible for the lead character of Sadie Flood who longs for the same success as her older married, conventional sister Georgia. The film earned nominations for Winningham who plays the role with understanding and grace like most of her performances. I just find it so sad for Sadie who is genuinely a tragic figure of a character who loves and is at loss about her relationship with Axel, a quiet pizza guy, who falls in love with her. I remember them hitch-hiking rather than ride in a car with Georgia and her husband. It is a sad, thoughtful movie about sibling rivalry and relationships.

Jennifer Jason Leigh here pulls off another of her 'impossible' performances. Is there any film actress as versatile as she is? Is there anything she can't do or any role she cannot play? When she acts, she throws herself into the role with the force of an express train. Here she transforms into a hopeless, cheery, ever-smiling flop of a girl, who has failed at everything but just goes on in good humour, taking it on the chin from Life time after time. Her pathetic, sprawling, inept character is endlessly endearing, like a delightful child, even though she drives everyone she knows crazy because she is so hopeless. She can't stay off the drugs, or the booze, or out of bed with anyone for a quickie. She doesn't know when to start, she doesn't know when to stop. She is behaviour-dyslexic. Her thoroughly controlled and successful older sister gets her revenge on little sister by extending icy and permanent tolerance, disguising condescension as devotion. The two sisters are both singers, and the older one, Georgia of the title (though the star is really Sadie, the Leigh character), is a magnificent folk singer with a marvellously controlled and captivating voice (must get Winningham's CDs!). She is played brilliantly by Mare Willingham, who was justly nominated for an Oscar for it. As for Leigh, she won best actress awards from the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (highly prestigious in the USA), and the Montreal Film Festival. Leigh can sing better than she does in the film because it is part of the role that she must not be very good. However, she throws herself totally into every song she sings, and unbearably heart-rending emotion is her specialty. What a contrast to the cold control shown by her sister, who stands erect and formal, while Leigh throws herself all over the stage and repeatedly swallows and vomits up the microphone, and everything hangs out like long johns on the washing line which the neighbours don't want to see. The film is incredibly sensitive and profound, a triumph by Ulu Grosbard, who made too few films in his career, and is now well into his 80s. This is REAL film-making, and one of the endless parade of spectacular achievements by the incomparably brilliant Jennifer Jason Leigh, and surely one of her best.

Sadie Flood wants to be a famous singer like her big sister Georgia.But she has her own demons, and she seeks comfort from drugs and alcohol.Georgia (1995) is a music drama directed by Ulu Grosbard.Jennifer Jason Leigh gives a strong performance in the lead playing the troubled singer Sadie Flood.She is the heart and soul of this film, as her on-screen sister Mare Winningham said, but yet only Mare received an Academy Award nomination.Leigh's mother Barbara Turner wrote the film.Ted Levine plays the part of Jake.Max Perlich plays Axel Goldman.John Doe portrays Bobby.John C. Reilly is Herman, the drummer.The late singer Jimmy Witherspoon plays Trucker.The most memorable moment in this movie must be when Sadie sings Van Morrison's Take Me Back with that Janis Joplin voice.If you have some time, don't miss this independent film.

This film is a tough one for the viewer. Jennifer Jason Leigh once again grips her character with a choke hold and delivers an amazing performance. The dynamics between these two sisters was heartbreaking, and the love/hate relationship was difficult to watch unfold. I was shocked to see how much JJL with her short haircut at the end looked like her dad, Vic Morrow, when he was young -the spittin' image as they say. JJL has some quirky mannerisms that I find irritating sometimes, but she pulled off a top rate performance with Gloria. I thought about why the film was called Gloria, and decided it was just one more "insult" to Sadie. The name of the film should have been Sadie!!!

Ulu Grosbard's "Georgia" looks at the tense relationship between two sisters, the established, upstanding country singer Georgia (Mare Winningham in an Academy Award-nominated performance), and the aspiring but damaged Sadie (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The latter's efforts to make it big stretch the former's tolerance to the limits, especially since Sadie defines herself in relation to Georgia. Both actresses put their all into the roles, especially Leigh. The whole sequence where she tries to board the airplane is one of the most impressive that I've ever seen in a movie. I wholeheartedly recommend it. Also starring Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill in "Silence of the Lambs") and John C. Reilly in an early role.

This film started off with a certain amount of promise. Interesting cast, good production values, et cetera. Mare Winningham was good, as her Oscar nomination testifies to. Jennifer Jason Leigh was good, also, but in an intensely dislikeable way. Not her fault, it was written that way. Ms. Winningham showed off her pipes as well as her acting chops, but Ms. Leigh was playing a singer with basically no ear, who's ambition to sing was all to emulate her sister. I have no idea if Ms. Leigh can sing or not, but if so, it must have been tough to play a character who could not, but tried to (in public!) constantly. But the character's struggle with addiction made my mind wander. It has been done to death, and the arc is always the same. Eventually the movie bored me, the cardinal sin of cinema.

Usually I like films that are good character studies, but Georgia fell flat as a character study. At almost two and a half hours long, the film grew dull and too long very quickly. I have the highest regard for Jennifer Jason Leigh's work as an actress/writer/producer, but I can only hope that her real singing is much better in real life than in this movie! It's just that Leigh's Sadie is an unlikeable, unsympathetic character, and her and Georgia's sibling rivalry is not gone into nearly enough detail to MAKE Sadie a sympathetic character. Mare Winningham does a very good job, and the woman has some beautiful pipes! Who knew? An OK film, but with the talented Leigh at the helm, it should have been MUCH better.

I don't know the city. I don't know the music. I don't identify with the scene. But, man, do I know Georgia and Sadie. I'm Sadie; my sister's Georgia, only our ages are reversed. This was the most realistic portrayal of sisters and sibling rivalry I've ever seen. We love and hate and resent and would die for each other too. She's the one I'll miss when I leave this plane. Congratulations to all involved.

I'm not going to say that this movie is horrible, because I have seen worse, but it's not even halfway decent. The plot is very confusing. I couldn't really figure out what was happening and where things were going. When the movie was over, I was left scratching my head. I watched through to the end of the credits to see if they had something after them that may clear things up, but once the credits were over, that was it. I felt like I was jarred from one weak plot point to another throughout the whole movie, with little or no transition between the two. Character development is very shallow. I couldn't figure out when somebody was angry or had a grudge against someone. I couldn't tell if half of the characters were just supposed to be drunk, stoned, mentally challenged or they just had a bad actor to portray them. This film seems to be based around stereotypes (to it's credit, they are hard to avoid using when you are making a film about a singer in a rock band), which SHOULD make character development easier, since so many other films have already illustrated the suffering of an abused child, or the trials of a heroin addict trying to come clean. Stereotypes are easy to depict, which would explain why so many bad films tend to overuse stereotypical characters. This film, on the other hand, uses stereotypical characters left and right, but then tries to keep them as incomprehensible as possible. Another problem with the characters is that they seemed to be dismissed with no explanation. I guess that's OK because so little time was spent developing the characters that I really didn't get a chance to know any of them, so I never really missed any of them. And last but not least was Sadie's singing. It's awful. The music backing her up is not prize winner, but it is usually drowned out by the screeches that are released from Sadie's vocal cords. I swear that there's one point in the movie where she sings a song for at least 10 minutes. I seriously thought I was going to have to turn it off during this howl-a-thon. As a whole, this movie is confusing. Characters are ill-developed, Georgia's acting is wooden and stiff, Sadie's character is yanked from one bad situation to another, with no back story or explanation. The music was unbearable, and I can think of no good reasons to see this film unless you have a thirst for cinematic pain.