Julie Harris, The Member of the Wedding

You're four minutes in to The Member of the Wedding before Brandon deWilde's John Henry proclaims aloud, "Frankie's crazy!" It's a flippant line, executed quickly and in a humorous, charming manner, and yet it also serves as a forewarning for what's to come for the next hour and a half: Frankie Addams, played by a fiercely dedicated Julie Harris, is batshit insane, and you the viewer are in for a helluva ride.

Harris was hovering around her mid-twenties when she brought the twelve year old character of Frankie to life for the big screen. With her slender figure and a neutral face that reads more as juvenescent than it does womanly, her age does not deter from the physicality of the character and the performance.

What is a deterrent is the character herself: Frankie Addams is a young girl in the throes of preteen puberty, navigating a brand new world of mental muck which includes crippling insecurity, a yearning for acceptance and, presumably, turbulent hormones running amok. As such, she is prone to selfishness and berserk emotional outbursts, which in and of itself already makes for a rather trying viewing experience.

It's been a struggle reconciling my own feelings towards Harris' performance and my own chaotic preteen years. From a viewer's standpoint, I hate Frankie. I think she's a sociopath. Just to give you a taste: over the course of the film's first half hour, we are witness to Frankie wishing she were dead, threatening to shoot some neighborhood girls with her father's pistol in a fit of rage (after attacking one of them), chasing John Henry with a fly swatter in a separate fit of rage, crying on two separate occasions and nearly moved to tears on a third, throwing some shit, and threatening Ethel Waters' Berenice with a knife (in addition to wishing aloud that Berenice's tongue was pulled from her mouth). Tweens are pretty awful, but this one's a royal pain-in-the-ass - and Frankie simply did not induce any sympathy from this particular viewer.

However, on a personal retrospective level, I think my twelve year old self (and perhaps your twelve year old self) would've been able to relate to Frankie. Wild adolescence is tough terrain, and on this register, Harris delivers a highly physical, wholly committed performance that's excessive on bravado. She is masterful with the lyricism of her lines, and she restlessly fires on all cylinders in tackling Frankie's oscillating temperaments (often times swaying between playful, belligerent and vulnerable in a matter of minutes). That being said, Frankie is a horribly disagreeable character. And Harris' go-for-broke approach, while admirable for its sheer stamina, tries one's patience a bit too much for my liking. The irony is that Harris' adroitness with the role comes off as too commanding, in turn spiking Frankie with an adult-like hard-edge that amplifies the unlikable qualities of the character.

In order to make this inherently difficult character more digestible, I'd wager that the role requires an intrinsic innocence and naiveté from the actor, both of which Harris lacks. Glimpses of a fifteen year-old Anna Paquin's take on Frankie Addams indicate a much greener actress than the one in this profile, and I'd have liked to have felt a balance between Harris' fire and Paquin's unworldliness. Interestingly enough, this snippet of a forty three year old Harris in a 1968 episode of Run for your Life show histrionics that align quite similarly with what we see in The Member of the Wedding - in a way validating to me that Harris' barbs are much too sharp, she herself much too intelligent and mature an actor to feasibly bridge the gap between chaotic adolescence and a wide-eyed protagonist to whom you can fully root for.

Don't get me wrong, Harris totally excels when she's not shrieking at the top of her lungs. When she's tender, she's very much so: close-ups of that freckly face show so much anguish and longing - advanced acting that I imagine few actresses aged twelve to fifteen could handle effectively. In the film's last act, which has Frankie traipsing around town at night, Harris channels some profound innocence and purity.

This was an utterly divisive performance for me to assess. It's manic and frustrating yet kind of brilliant. I'll probably find more to say about it if I were to revisit it again after a prolonged period of time, but for now...