Best Actress in a Supporting Role 1976: Lee Grant in Voyage of the Damned

Lee Grant received her fourth Oscar nomination for her performance as Lili Rosen in Voyage of the Damned.

Voyage of the Damned is a rather poor film about the tragic, true story of 1939 voyage of a ship carrying hundreds of German Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany to Cuba. The movie is very similar to 1965's Ship of Fools - and just like that film, it leaves a lot to be desired. The screenplay is terrible and I have no idea how it managed to get a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination - it's hollow and heavy-handed at the same time. I don't understand the nomination for Best Score as well - there might be only one moment in which I felt it was effective, otherwise it's either overbearing or non-existent. The all-star cast is a mixed bag as well: I felt only three or four members of the cast gave truly remarkable performances, while the others were either bland, underused or downright awful. It's just an overlong mess that I have no desire to watch again.

Lee Grant plays Lili Rosen, one of the many passengers on the ship along with her husband (Sam Wanamaker) and her daughter (Lynne Frederick). It's a rather thankless role for many reasons: first off, she appears little more than ten minutes in a movie that has a running time of 157 minutes; secondly, she never shares the screen with the movie's strongest performers and most of the time she has to act opposite the atrocious Wanamaker, the incredibly bland Frederick and a rather unsatisfying Faye Dunaway; thirdly, she plays the clichéd role of the supportive but worried wife and mother. It's hard to make anything that good out of such a thin material in such a limited screen-time, but to be honest she never really does anything to escape the limitations of the role and her acting style is part of the problems I have with this performance. 

In the beginning of the movie, Lili Rosen appears as a very fragile person - she is very submissive towards her husband and she lives in a perpetual state of terror and anxiety. Grant does a fine job at portraying her character's condition and she is actually quite impressive early on, conveying her character's nervousness through her small gestures (such as constantly looking around her to see if there's something wrong or often holding her daughter as if to shield her). At the same time, though, I never thought she actually stood out much in the ensemble and I found her shtick to become progressively more tiresome - her haunted, worried look might be quite effective in the first couple of scenes but after a while it loses its emotional power, therefore revealing how shockingly empty and shallow Grant's performance actually is: while she does a perfectly decent job at portraying her character's vulnerable state, she does it in a rather one-note fashion and I feel that with her performance she only scratches the surface of her character without even trying to give it more depth or complexity. She never gets us to know Lili - it's hard to imagine her life before the events of the movie because in her performance she barely gives her any nuance or personality. Nonetheless, she has a nice moment in the movie when she tries to cheer up her husband, tenderly comforting him and assuring him that the terror of the Nazism is behind them - it's a rather sweet moment and Grant is quite touching in it. At the same time, though, it has to be said that the scene could have been much more powerful if only Wanamaker weren't so awful - he gives such a poor performance that Grant can't even strike up a remotely interesting chemistry with him and his work undercuts the impact of their few scenes together. To a lesser extent, the same goes for her scenes with Lynne Frederick - the latter is not quite as awful as Wanamaker but she kind of sleepwalks throughout the whole movie and fails to create any chemistry with her on-screen mother. 

(The following paragraph features some big spoilers about the plot) Lee Grant's biggest scenes in the movie come later on as tragedy begins to strike: her husband finds out that Cuba is not going to let them enter in the country and, in a mad rage, injures himself with a knife and has to be hospitalized: in this scene, Grant does the most obvious and forced type of dramatic acting and her screaming in despair feels painfully phony. Then she has her flashy scene towards the end after her daughter commits suicide with her boyfriend: overcame by grief, an emotionally unstable Lili starts to cut off her own hair as an "atonement" for not being able to protect her daughter. First off, it's a horribly written scene and its whole concept couldn't be more ridiculous and Oscar-baity: in the beginning of the scene, Grant is actually quite effective at portraying Lili's desperation with her shaking, trembling voice but soon she goes into atrociously over-the-top territory and she's downright atrocious. Some of her line-deliveries are simply awful (especially "There are things I have to do" couldn't be more odd, stilted and awkward) and even unintentionally hilarious. 

Overall, this is an extremely uneven performance as she has a few impressive moments and a few terrible ones: most of the time, though, she is just unimpressive, going through the motion without leaving any sort of impression whatsoever. If they had to nominate a supporting lady from this movie, it certainly should have been Katharine Ross (who actually beat Grant that year at the Golden Globes). It's frankly a bad role in a bad movie, and while I wouldn't necessarily call her performance bad she certainly is not good either. 

2.5/5