/ Johnathon Schaech and Jessica Lange in Hush /
Recently watched: Hush (1998). Tagline: “Don’t breathe a word …”
Hush is a long-forgotten, misbegotten hot mess of a psychological thriller very much in the late eighties / nineties lineage of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle or Fatal Attraction. (We know it’s a psychological thriller from the opening credits, which features the eerie lullaby “Hush, Little Baby” and a toy carousel spinning).
Jackson Baring (Johnathon Schaech) and girlfriend Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow) are a strikingly attractive young New York yuppie power couple who live in an enviable loft apartment (heavy on the glass bricks). When Jackson takes Helen home to Kentucky for the Christmas holidays to meet mom for the first time, she’s surprised to see that “home” is an ominous and palatial estate called Kilronan (picture a replica of Tara from Gone with the Wind, complete with pillars). There she meets manipulative widowed matriarch Martha Baring (Jessica Lange), who we VERY quickly establish is stark raving mad beneath her genteel patrician façade. Seething with neurosis, brandishing glasses of whisky and furiously puffing cigarettes, Lange’s histrionic (and self-parodic) performance – seemingly channeling Geraldine Page, Faye Dunaway and Blanche Dubois (or perhaps Faye Dunaway as Blanche Dubois) – firmly anchors Hush in campy hagsploitation horror territory. Her honeyed Southern accent also evokes Bette Davis in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte and Tallulah Bankhead in Die, Die My Darling. (Speaking of which – how come Martha has a pronounced Southern accent but her son doesn’t seem to have one?).
Anyway, Martha harbours dysfunctional Oedipal feelings for Jackson and is scheming for him to return to Kilronan and take over the family horse farm. Martha breeds purebred horses – and seems intent that Helen will deliver a purebred male heir for the Baring family! Once that’s achieved – Helen will be superfluous! Hush reaches a crazed zenith when Martha bakes a cake for Helen spiked with a veterinary drug used to induce labour in pregnant mares!
Hush - apparently the first and last film directed by Jonathan Darby - was filmed in 1996 and due to be released in ’97, but when test screening audiences roared with laughter at all the wrong moments the cast was reconvened almost two years later to shoot additional scenes. Hence the plot holes, wild shifts in tone and the fact that in some scenes Paltrow (who’d cut her hair in the meantime) is wearing an ill-fitting wig so transparently fake it rivals Christina Aguilera’s in Burlesque. Even after it was drastically re-edited (with an entirely different ending), Hush flopped at the US box office and went quietly straight-to-DVD in the United Kingdom. (I demand to see the director’s cut with the original ending!). “I’ve never been able to keep my mouth shut,” Jessica Lange has declared. “So, if somebody asks me how I feel about Hush, I’ll say it’s a piece of shit.” Presumably Paltrow would love this one scrubbed from her résumé too. But I wonder if Ryan Murphy saw Lange in Hush. It makes a great audition for her subsequent work in American Horror Story.
(Hush is viewable on Amazon Prime and YouTube - at your own risk!).
