Mary Steenburgen as Lynda West-Dummar in Melvin and Howard
Best Supporting Actress at the 53rd Annual Oscars (1980)
Notable Quote:
“We are poor, Melvin. We’re poor.”
Synopsis:
Melvin? Melvin Dummar, a Midwest factory worker trying to get out of poverty, who always manages to mess it up for himself. Howard? Howard Hughes (yes, that one), eccentric billionaire that Melvin helps out in a crisis. Lynda? Okay fine, she’s not in the title, but she’s Melvin’s wife, and she’s sick of his shit.
The character:
Lynda does not want a scrub in her life, but unfortunately for her, she’s married to Melvin, perhaps the biggest scrub of them all. Melvin isn’t a bad guy, but he’s a complete doofus, especially with money. Lynda desperately wants to get out of the poverty that she’s trapped in, and makes several valiant attempts at raising herself up, like leaving Melvin and becoming a stripper, or learning to tap dance so she can go on some goofy gameshow and win what’s behind door number two (lol, this movie is wild y’all). She’s actually quite successful in her ventures, but Melvin always manages to fuck it up, whether showing up at her dance club and getting her fired, or blowing all of their money on a fancy boat (they literally live in the desert), so finally, she moves on from him for good.
This might all make Lynda sound like some badass feminist, and she is, but I love her most because she’s really just a weird dodo bird that happens to have extremely strong opinions. For the most part, she’s mild-mannered, and almost oddly unbothered by what’s going on around her, but when she goes off, oh baby. My favorite instance of this is when Melvin dares to serve her divorce papers (after she already left him, lmao), and she screams at him in a crowded bar before tossing a pitcher of beer over him.
The performance:
Melvin and Howard is a bonkers movie that doesn’t always work for me, but Mary Steenburgen’s performance is perfection. It’s weird and delightful and managed to both move me, and make me laugh. As noted above, I love Lynda’s contradictory personality, and Steenburgen really brings it to life. Lynda is soft-spoken and doe-eyed, and maybe not a genius, but she never seems like an idiot, when she could have easily been cast aside as a silly joke. Instead, she’s got a groundedness, despite how goofy and flighty she is.
It’s wonderful to see Steenburgen young because my experience of her has been as “the mom” in so many movies, and I like seeing where she started. She’s amazing at using her natural abilities to bring her characters to life – she does it constantly with the warm motherly figures she plays, and she does it to perfection in this movie, with her sweet Arkansas accent and her awkward swan appearance all contributing to what makes her so enchanting.
The movie:
Melvin and Howard is a seriously weird movie, but not necessarily in a bad way? At times, it feels like a comedy sketch that’s somehow been stretched out to an hour and a half (thank you God for handing me a short movie for once), but it also often feels genuinely subversive, and certainly not like anything else that I’ve seen. I love that it deals, to a large degree, with poverty, even if it’s sometimes kind of condescending towards its characters. And I love that it’s directed by freaking Jonathan Demme, who would later win an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs. It’s far from an essential film, but a fun watch if you ever get your hands on it.
Was the Oscar deserved?
Yes, Steenburgen delivers a supremely endearing performance.