Themes: Southern Gothic, Woman In Jeopardy, Mothers and Sons
Main Cast: Jessica Lange, Gwyneth Paltrow, Johnathon Schaech, Nina Foch, Debi Mazar, Hal Holbrook
Release Year: 1998
Country: US
Run Time: 95 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG13
Plot
Jonathan Darby made his directorial debut with this thriller, set in Kentucky (but filmed in Orange County, VA). Jackson Baring (Johnathon Schaech) wants his girlfriend, Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow), to meet his mother, Martha (Jessica Lange), so he brings her home for Christmas to Kilronan, their sumptuous Kentucky estate and horse farm. Later, after Helen gets pregnant, they marry and return to Kilronan to have the baby, but Martha aggressively intrudes and manipulates, telling obstetrician Dr. Hill (Hal Holbrook) how to deal with the birth and forbidding Helen from seeing Jackson's invalid granny, Alice (Nina Foch). After learning some of Martha's past history from Alice, Helen soon decides she must make an escape from her demented mother-in-law. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
Review
Jessica Lange has earned enough accolades, including a Best Actress Oscar for Blue Sky, that a person tends to forget she's also capable of scenery-chewing histrionics that are rife with self-parody. In Hush, she submits just such a performance, due in no small part to the inexperience of director Jonathan Darby. Her Kentucky-fried mother-in-law from hell (with Oedipal tendencies) is actually toned down a bit -- they reshot the original ending almost two years later, excising footage of Lange screaming and brandishing a butcher knife (but, confusingly, leaving such footage in the trailers). While the new ending is more life-sized, it's also so boring and anticlimactic that it hardly helps. Never mind that the actors look noticeably older in the final scene, and their work seems dissociated from the rest of the film. Nothing Hush might do would make it anything more than what it is: the type of cheesy, paint-by-numbers domestic thriller in which only the victim can see the torturous behavior of her tormentor, while everyone else (most crucially, her husband) is blind to it. If Darby occasionally does something smart and chilling, he quickly returns to the status quo of clichés and melodrama. As tremulousness seems like less of an acting sin than overblown wickedness, Gwyneth Paltrow comes off a little better than Lange, but it's obvious she would have never made this movie if she'd been more established. Johnathon Schaech is basically a cipher who gets lost in the shuffle. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
Kaiulani Lee - Sister O'Shaughnessy; David Thornton - Gavin
Credit
James F. Truesdale - Art Director, Billy Hopkins - Casting, Heidi Levitt - Casting, Ginny Nugent - Co-producer, Ann Roth - Costume Designer, Carla Corwin - First Assistant Director, Thomas Davies - First Assistant Director, Jonathan Darby - Director, Lynzee Klingman - Editor, Robert Leighton - Editor, Dan Rae - Editor, Christopher Young - Composer (Music Score), Thomas A. Walsh - Production Designer, Michael Johnston - Production Designer, Andrew Dunn - Cinematographer, Doug Wick - Producer, Michael Seirton - Set Designer, Easton M. Smith - Set Designer, Jay Meagher - Sound/Sound Designer, Jonathan Darby - Screen Story, Jonathan Darby - Screenwriter, Jane Rusconi - Screenwriter, Alec Hirschfeld - Second Unit Director Of Photography
