Fly Like An Eagle: An Appreciation of Anne Heche

This is a story about cannibalism.

It shouldn’t have happened, this pointed industry-sanctioned slight.

But let the record show that Hollywood ate one of its own. The people in charge got together and blacklisted Anne Heche.

It’s both tragedy and travesty, a crime against the natural order of celluloidal history.

Her ascent to the A-list curtailed, then obfuscated and expunged from the consciousness of the general public.

Myself included, when Heche’s personal life took precedence over her professional career.

Almost overnight, she became fodder for the insatiable appetite of a new animal called The Twenty-Four-Hour News Cycle, an inorganic beast always on the prowl for fresh meat.

If the dead could speak? The dead would say, “you’re reaching.”

But if there is a silver lining to this sutured tear of the filmic timeline, it’s that Anne Heche’s journey in motion pictures reset her on the road less-traveled.

Instead of playing the lead in David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, or taking a smaller part in Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids, Heche made a quiet return to film in 2011, which resulted in her best performance in an career put on pause, made uneven by truncation.

Cedar Rapids, directed by Miguel Arteta marked the first time many had laid eyes on Anne Heche since Gus Van Sant’s 1998 Psycho. The universally-panned shot-by-shot remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic promptly ended her career in mainstream film. It was a timely and opportune excuse for the studios to deem Heche as an unbankable commodity.

Cedar Rapids should have been her calling card that made the veteran actress employable again, the caveat being, at the very least, on the indie scene. Inexplicably, Heche, who had the skillset to be an ace character actor, never became the Sundance darling, or anybody’s darling. Forty-two at the time, Hollywood treated the former “it girl” like a has-been. A living specter in the Norma Desmond-mode that the industry pretended wasn’t a sideshow curiosity of their own making.

Cedar Rapids offers a tantalizing glimpse of what-could-have-been. 

Heche plays Joan Ostrowski-Fox, an insurance agent, who every year like clockwork, sheds her mom jeans and gets to be the life of the party, a woman who lights up every room she walks into. Joan is one of the guys, capable of out-drinking any man under the table. Heche makes a serial adulterer likable, which is no small feat. But the comeback kid plays the philandering insurance agent like a matryoshka doll.

Joan’s own husband and kids wouldn’t recognize her. Mom doesn’t do shots. Mom doesn’t take off her top in swimming pools. Mom doesn’t get into ice fights with people like Dean Ziegle (John C. Reilly), a self-styled party animal.

But with her latest conquest, Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), a nerd gone wild with a serious Oedipus complex, we can see the qualities that makes Joan a good wife and mom, even though she does the guy. Her rules, of course, predicated on an alternate universe are bullshit. But Joan is a charmer, as well as a minx, in equal proportion.

Cedar Rapids, or rather, Iowa, as Joan explains, is more than an annual vacation; it’s a “fantasyland.” It’s a two-star hotel she conflates into a theme park, where she gets to be somebody else: A full-blooded woman containing multitudes, latent qualities she compartmentalizes, left dormant in her real life as an upstanding citizen of her community.

Swinging is child’s play. Heche, in essence, portrays Joan as a twin, the naughty one, a throwback to her soap star days on Another World, where she spent four years playing Vicky Hudson and Marley Love. The ability to meld her maternal persona with this horny doppleganger is a highwire act that the veteran actress straddles adeptly. She never once strays too far from the right side of the line between mother and whore.

Heche brought her A-game; she really did. Understanding, no doubt, that Joan Ostrowski-Fox was her best part since playing Harrison Ford’s love interest in the Ivan Reitman rom-com Six Days, Seven Nights way back in the twentieth century. She was ready for her close-up.

Cedar Rapids should have marked the beginning of Anne Heche’s second act.

Sadly, the phone never rang.

Heche remained persona non grata with the major studios, left for dead in Phoenix; slumped over a bathtub at the Bates Motel, clutching a shower curtain dislocated from its rod.

Catfight (2016) has three fight scenes; three cat fights.

Slow them down, go frame-by-frame, and try to spot the body double. Catfight is Anne Heche’s last hurrah, her parting shot. She plays Ashley Miller, a misanthropic artist, a painter whose violent canvases look inspired by Cannibal Corpse covers. Veronica Salt (Sandra Oh), a haughty defense contractor’s wife, stands on the other side of a grudge match that the former high school buddies can’t settle with conciliatory words.

Reversals of fortune is this pitch-black comedy’s schematic. After Ashley emerges from her respective coma, she becomes even more repellent, more sociopathic, whereas Veronica wants to call a truce, to be forgiven. It’s a crying shame that Catfight was never released theatrically, given both ladies’ Grace Jones-like commitment to stunt work. Catfight allows the viewer to imagine how Anne Heche would have faired in a big-budgeted action film.

Independent film can be likened to a Hollywood farm system. Wild Side (1995), directed by Douglas Cammel, was rookie league fare. Nicole Holofcener’s Walking And Talking (1996), however, was AAA, where she kept pace with Holofcener’s muse, Catherine Keener. Hollywood called her up to the big league, for good.

Heche was a known commodity; she had multiple stints, cups of coffee in The Juror (1995), Milk Money, (1994), and A Simple Twist Of Fate (1994).

But her turn as Maggie Pistone, a harried FBI agent’s wife, in Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco (1997), was to witness the actualization of a star before our very eyes.

Heche found transcension in a stock character, giving Maggie a verisimilitude, and more importantly, a character arc that, perhaps, was not readily-apparent in the Paul Altanasio screenplay.

It’s not just Joe Pistone (Johnny Depp) who undergoes a transformation. Maggie, a homemaker and mother of three, is first seen washing dishes, at her wit’s end with worry over Joe’s dangerous job, cosplaying a mafioso. On paper, Maggie Pistone is the accommodating wife and mother, a reactive character. Sad and scared, render those two emotions with conviction, and you’ve fulfilled the assignations of a supporting actress with flying colors.

But to Heche’s credit, Maggie hardens in equal proportion to Joe as the stakes get higher, the lines get blurrier, and ends up being a de facto mafioso’s wife, a tough broad who doesn’t cry after “Donnie” slaps her across the cheek. Not a tear is shed; no histrionic bawling; that’s an acting choice, as Maggie’s altered self surrenders the bag of laundered money to her husband, who in turn is more feral and felonious than fatherly. Heche, a late bloomer at twenty-eight, transforms Maggie Pistone into Maggie Brasco. 

No Oscar nomination. That’s fine.

There would be plenty of opportunities, surely. Donnie Brasco was Anne Heche’s lab. She stood toe to toe with an actor of higher caliber, and leveled the playing field when it was all said and done.

Heche didn’t just fill the frame, she inhabited it. Hollywood’s movers and shakers took notice. To dramatize a disintegrating marriage in irreversible freefall, Johnny Depp needed a domestic gladiator he could spar with, a war of words with no obvious winner from either party, and earn a split decision from the audience.

Donnie Brasco also starred Al Pacino as Lefty Ruggiero, the second vertex of a bizarre love triangle. Metaphorically speaking, Anne Heche never makes it to the main stage. She and Al Pacino were on separate call sheets; they existed in different filmic localities. Only Depp got to bask in Pacino’s limelight.

Heche, literally, has a seat at the table, sitting next to Robert DeNiro, a spin doctor, in the war room, as a small team of insiders strategize on how to distract the public from their boss’ transgressions. Heche looks like she belongs. It’s so obvious that this girl was going places. Heche also gets to cuss like a drunken sailor, reading the riot act to no other than Dustin Hoffman (Stanley Motss), when the Hollywood producer’s scripted war encounters a considerable setback.

Scene after scene, Heche brings her dancing shoes. Old dancing shoes, seemingly, handed down from her grandmother, ready to tap with snap and precision, leaving behind a storm. On the airport tarmac, in silhouette, Heche argues with military personnel about sending her public relations team a bipolar felon on meds, to play the decorated war hero they created out of thin air: Sergeant Robert Schumann (Woody Harrelson), an American held hostage by the Albanian army.

Backpedaling in the rain, Heche confers with soldiers, recalling, to my eyes, Ginger Rogers, who may or may not have said “backwards and in high heels” in regard to her footwork with Fred Astaire.

It’s Wag The Dog, however, that better exemplifies Anne Heche’s singular talent, which Levinson encapsulates and crystallizes in an iconic scene at the film’s midpoint.

The invented war gains traction. Like Conrad Bean keeps repeating, the people “saw it on television.” The three principal players touch flutes brimming with red wine. Motss, with Robert Evans-like grandiosity, makes the toast: “To the beginning,” which can be read as the cast and crew predicting a bright future for Anne Heche, bestowed with accolades galore. 

It’s 1996. A young actress gambled.

A presumptuous eagle, some would have argued. Countless actors, if they’re lucky, can point only to a nationwide commercial, let alone being in people’s living rooms five days a week, as their crowning achievement in the hard-knock life of showbiz.

For five years, Anne Heche paid her dues, bouncing around from off-Broadway theater to television guest spots. The gamble paid off.

Heche plays Laura, the BFF who graduates to adulthood first. Walking And Talking picks the action up in midstream, after the recently-engaged, unseasoned therapist realizes that life with Amelia (Catherine Keener), her childhood friend and roommate, was creating an epoch of protracted adolescence.

Flirty, but virtuous, unsure about the future like all young people, Heche plays Laura as a true blue friend, both sweetie and bedrock; it’s no wonder that she breaks Amelia’s heart, because she’s breaking ours, too.

I know.

To me, it’s not a secret. Anne Heche made bad films look good, or at least, watchable.

She made good films great, and if given the opportunity, she would have made a great film…transcendent. Anne Heche should have stood at a podium to give her acceptance speech at the Oscars in a beautiful designer dress, or shower curtain. Either/or. It wouldn’t matter. 

Anne Heche died on August 11. She was 53.

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