Metacritic-Rezensionen

Jessica Lange plays Frances Farmer in a performance that is so driven, that contains so many different facets of a complex personality, that we feel she has an intuitive understanding of this tragic woman.

Rare to the memory is a film like Frances which runs 140 minutes and its star is on the screen 85% of the time in one intense scene after another. It’s quite an accomplishment for Jessica Lange and it’s too bad a better film didn’t come of it.

It contains too many show-down scenes, too much raw material that hasn't been refined, and more brutality than either the movie or the audience can make dramatic sense of. Yet it also contains a magnificent performance by Jessica Lange in the title role. Here is a performance so unfaltering, so tough, so intelligent and so humane that it seems as if Miss Lange is just now, at long last, making her motion picture debut.

Farmer, as scripted here and played by Lange, unsurprisingly remains something of a cypher.

This relentlessly depressing film biography boasts a moving performance by Jessica Lange as Frances Farmer, one of the most beautiful movie actresses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, shown here as the victim of a forceful mother (Kim Stanley) and a tyrannical studio system.

First-time director Graeme Clifford, a former editor, hasn't set out merely to exploit this lurid legend, and he tries to suggest the multiple layers of the story, but he simply doesn't do his job well. The film has no rhythm, it's stagy and inauthentic-looking, and the patchwork script has that tinny ring that so often infects movies about real people. [06 Dec 1982, p.152]

Jessica Lange brings so much energy and personal involvement to her portrayal of Frances Farmer that you can't help but feel sorry for her; nothing else in the film remotely matches her talent and dedication, and she seems alone—and even slightly absurd—in her feverish creativity.

Biographical stinker that insists on remaining unreasonably disjointed for 2 1/2 hours. [28 Jan 1983, p.D1]