“Carrie,” the 1976 Cinderella-goes-to-the-bloodbath horror film that gave Piper Laurie, who died Oct. 14 at 91, the role for which she’ll probably be best remembered, is the movie that changed my life. I was 17, home for the Thanksgiving weekend of my freshman year at college. “Carrie” had opened earlier that month, and I went to see it on Friday at our local mall. I knew nothing about it. (I’d never heard of its director, Brian De Palma.) I was just a naïve budding film geek who saw everything that played in town. But “Carrie,” for me, was the film-geek equivalent of watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan.” By the time the movie was over, I was a different person.
During the big shock sequence at the end, when Carrie’s hand pokes up through the earth in front of her grave, I literally stood up out of my seat in terror. That’s how real it all was to me. But it’s not just that “Carrie” struck a note of primal fear. The film’s prom-turned-nightmare fairy-tale high-school dreamscape felt alive to me like nothing I had ever seen.
And that was all about the interplay between Sissy Spacek, as the squishy pale telekinetic teen wallflower Carrie White, and Piper Laurie as her raging fundamentalist mother — a Jesus freak who wanted to rule over her daughter, who hated her for the fact that she was turning into a woman (a sexual being), who subjected her to a born-again Christian version of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. It almost sounds like “Mommie Dearest” recast as an over-the-top Evangelical nightmare. Yet the way that Spacek and Laurie played it, “Carrie” came closer to being “The Glass Menagerie” directed by Hitchcock on drugs. These two had an intimacy that could shake your soul.
For the thing about Margaret White, Laurie’s puritanical terrorist of a mother, is that she didn’t simply hate. She loved. That was the flame that lit Laurie’s performance. In her red ringlets and white nightgown, speaking with the testimonial rapture of a preacher who’d seen the light, but who had also touched the cauldron of sin and was terrified that she liked it, Margaret was so desperate to save Carrie from the outside world that she was willing to crush the life right out of her to do it. Laurie made this mother from hell a clinging monster who was also a figure of touching agony, a holy roller who used her daughter to make herself into God.
“Carrie” is a movie that hits many people on a deep level. The reasons for that are legion. I personally think it’s De Palma’s greatest film. The story, from Stephen King’s first novel, is a balancing act of psychodramatic ingenuity. Spacek’s performance is a chameleonic marvel of crumpled misery…and radiant yearning…and bulging-eyeball vengeance. Yet “Carrie” is also the most powerful movie ever made about the thing that makes abusive parents tick. And the force of that is rooted in the grandeur of Laurie’s performance, which is operatic, terrifying, darkly funny, and ripped from the heart. She achieves what movie acting, at its most transcendent, is all about. Bringing to the surface what lies beneath.
The movie netted her an Oscar nomination, putting Laurie back on the map, quite spectacularly, after a 15-year break during which she had abandoned Hollywood. At the time, I had no idea of all that; she was just Carrie’s splendid psycho mama to me. But then I saw “The Hustler,” the movie Laurie made in 1961, starring opposite Paul Newman in one of his finest roles. And when you experience that film in light of the fact that it was the last one Laurie did before she left the movie world (for a few years, she appeared in a scattered handful of TV episodes), it’s notably haunting, because she plays a woman who seems to be deciding to leave life behind.
Laurie, born in 1932, was groomed to be another ’50s starlet and had little interest in going through those motions. Yet in “The Hustler,” playing the limping alcoholic waif who Newman’s cocky but self-hating pool hustler “Fast” Eddie Felson meets in a desolate bus station (until “The Hustler,” you’d never seen a bus station in a movie look this much like a bus station), Laurie brought to the screen a lyrical neuroticism so authentic you weren’t sure whether you wanted to weep or try to get her therapist on the phone. Her delivery of a line like “I’m not drunk, I’m lame” was poetry. She achieved a heightened realism that pointed toward everything movies would be after the New Hollywood revolution. Laurie’s performance won her the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actress, and she received her first Oscar nomination, yet the role was so downbeat that the offers did not come pouring in. So she left, moving to Woodstock, NY, after marrying the film critic Joe Morgenstern.
Following the success of “Carrie,” Laurie became a born-again actress, appearing in dozens of roles on the big and small screen, earning attention for her ferocious turns on “Twin Peaks” and “The Thorn Birds” (she received a total of eight Emmy nominations, finally winning one in 1987 for “Promise”). She was one of those priceless actors who always knew how to use her simmering undercurrents to perk up a scene. Yet as good as she continued to be, it’s her two defining movie roles that achieved a larger-than-life quality. On Broadway in 1965, she played Laura in “The Glass Menagerie,” and her lost wastrel in “The Hustler” feels like a Laura who’d been let out into the world and couldn’t cope with it. Yet how telling is it that Margaret White, in “Carrie,” was like a heightened version of Laura’s destructive mother? Talk about a yin-and-yang. In these two roles, Piper Laurie circumscribed the experience of modern women who faced a world — or a force of parental oppression — that was only too eager to shut them down. In portraying that devastation so memorably, she let in the light.
From Variety US