Maggie Smith: The Magnificent

[Reza]

I suppose she will get her Oscar nod this year.

latimes.com

Critic's Notebook: Maggie Smith, the magnificent

Over the years, Maggie Smith has played the
dithering and the withering, the brilliant and
the mundane, making it all look effortless. Who doesn't want to watch that?

By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times Television Critic

6:00 AM PST, January 3, 2013

There are now many reasons to watch surprise
mega-hit "Downton Abbey," which begins its third
season on PBS in January. But before the first
episode aired, there was really only one: Maggie Smith.

Some critics and public broadcasting aficionados
may have claimed allegiance to creator Julian
Fellowes, the actor turned writer who had worked
with Robert Altman to give us "Gosford Park," or
even a nostalgic delight at the return of
Elizabeth McGovern. But if we are truly honest
with ourselves, the main reason for all the early
anticipation and adulation was Smith, a performer
of such consistent, elastic and unique
fabulousness that, well into her eighth decade,
she's practically become her own genre.

Querulous class-sensitive companion? Autocratic
aunt? Snobby but possibly sensible
duchess/countess/queen? Over the years, Smith has
played the dithering and the withering, the
brilliant and the mundane. She has Oscars for her
unconventional schoolteacher ("The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie"), wry and brittle movie star
("California Suite) and more Emmy and British
academy awards than is possibly seemly.

In recent years, she has specialized in
sharp-tongued, perpetually appraising women whose
implacable gaze and scathingly insightful retorts
shield, one suspects, a heart broken young. Even
before she began playing the redoubtable
Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter series,
she could freeze a room with a look, orate in a
perfectly timed silence, break your heart by
simply squaring her shoulders or settling her shawl.

It's been a big year for Smith, even by her
perpetually prolific and wide-ranging standards.
In "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," she played a
chronically dissatisfied former domestic worker
without, initially, a kind word for anyone; in
the newly released "Quartet," she is an opera
diva who brings her outsized sense of self to
rest among a group of friends at a retirement
community. She's already received six nominations
this awards season four from the Screen Actors
Guild and two Golden Globe nods.

In "Downton Abbey," she is the dowager countess
of Grantham, a woman who says whatever she thinks
to whomever she pleases. In Season 1 especially,
she was the most formidable, and entertaining,
symbol of a class system collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity.

"What is a 'week-end'?" she asked the
middle-class lawyer set, through the vagaries of
British law, to inherit Downton. She gave the
final word the careful and slightly disparaging
intonation usually reserved for questionable nouns in a foreign language.

It was a glorious moment; the tone for the entire
series set in a single word. Many rhapsodize the
sibilance and hard consonants of fellow "Potter"
castmate Alan Rickman, but no one enunciates like
Maggie Smith; if anyone can pronounce the word
"glacial" with more narcissism-baring
deliciousness than she did in "Gosford Park," I'll eat my tiara.

In her hands, sentences are as much sound effect,
or in some cases, scores, as they are dialogue;
she clatters and clips, slurs and simpers,
dipping into this octave and that with the
agility of an opera star. "Oh, Peter," she sighs,
as the grown-old Wendy in "Hook," and suddenly
that film is a lament for both age and youth.

Like Angela Lansbury, whom the multitudes will
also watch in anything, Smith is one of those
women who has looked essentially the same since
she was 20, whom age has burnished rather than
diminished. In a face softened and
unapologetically lined, those prominent blue
eyes, that expressive slice of a mouth are even more arresting.

When she chooses, Maggie Smith remains one of an
ever-diminishing number of women to whom the term
"commanding" can accurately be applied. Americans
have always been soft, but the modern relaxation
of social strait-lacing has made its way to
Britain, where "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher was
replaced by People's Princess Diana and now beloved commoner Kate Middleton.

As middle age expands to encompass pretty much
any number between 40 and death, the ramrod
stiffness of spine and expectation that once
marked the elderly matriarch or dowager are
quickly becoming antique, the rigors of posture
no longer necessary in a world supported by
Spanx. Smith, and a few of her peers, still have
enough muscle memory to evoke these female
pillars of Freudian nightmare and great
literature, women of principle and control, who
may actually understand the tyranny and
contradiction of their particular social order
but who believe that the chaotic alternative will be, in the end, much worse.

For better and worse, they are disappearing.
These women ruled families without raising their
voices; they ungently tried to prevent the
follies of youth and considered snobbery not just
a necessary sorting of the world but a sign of
intelligence. With her double-edged smiles,
quicksilver timing and easy service of backhand
compliments, Smith not only keeps them vivid but
also offers a master class to a younger generation of performers.

There comes a point in a truly great actor's
career when he or she is both utterly immersed in
character and instantly recognizable as personal
presence. Watching Maggie Smith do just about
anything and she is also one of the more
prolific and varied performers around one is
compelled to sit up a little straighter; to speak
a bit more clearly; to calculate, without
appearing to, the melody of the conversation, the mood of the room.

She makes it look so effortless, she always has
the lift of an eyebrow, the tilt of her chin, and
the world cracks open in her hand.

Who doesn't want to watch something like that?