The atrocious 1993 performance Madonna refused to admit was her fault: “I got the blame for everything”
Post-production is a wonderful thing, in that it can tidy up loose ends, aid and enhance a performance, and turn an unwieldy early cut into a finely tuned work of cinema. However, one thing it can’t do is salvage terrible acting, especially when it comes from Madonna.
Good actors are more than capable of doing awful work, as history has repeatedly shown, but it’s impossible to take a good performance, squeeze it through the editing suite, and have something atrocious emerge on the other side. That isn’t how it works, but the ‘Queen of Pop’ saw things differently.
Any performer who delivers a strong turn on set will have that reflected in the final cut, regardless of how much their scenes are snipped, trimmed, or left on the cutting room floor. A shite performance is a shite performance, and as the worst actor in the history of cinema, as per science itself, nobody to have ever graced the silver screen should know that better than Madonna.
She made her name on shit films, and while there has been the occasional big-screen bright spot, her filmography is largely a series of unflushable turds. One of the many cases in point is director Uli Edel’s diabolical 1993 erotic thriller, Body of Evidence, which was pre-targeted as a vanity project for Madge, seeking to capitalise on both Basic Instinct, her recent album, Erotica, and book, Sex.
Lurid and tawdry more than scintillating and steamy, it was deservedly shortlisted for six Razzies. It only claimed one, though, which was even more deservedly awarded to Madonna for her ‘Worst Actress’-worthy attempt at connecting with her inner femme fatale as Rebecca Carlson.
Call a spade a spade, and you’d happily call crap acting crap acting. Not her, though, who insisted that it wasn’t her fault. “I’m disappointed in it, but I’m not sorry I did it,” the pop icon insisted during Body of Evidence‘s post-mortem. “I think I did a good job. But I got the blame for everything.”
“It was like I wrote it, produced it, directed it, and I was the only one acting in it, you know?” she pleaded. Actually, we don’t know, since it was written by Brad Mirman, produced by Dino De Laurentiis, directed by Edel, and co-starred Willem Dafoe and Anne Archer, all of whom were also Razzie-nominated for their woeful efforts; they just didn’t win, like Madonna did.
While the lion’s share of the scorn was aimed at Madonna, which was par for the course because she was the biggest name involved on either side of the camera and a global superstar with a track record for making bad movies, it’s not as if everyone else emerged scot-free and smelling of roses in one of the worst-reviewed releases of the year.
Sometimes, you just have to hold your hands up and admit you’ve fucked it. Unless you’re the early-90s version of Madonna, apparently, in which case you say that your abysmal performance in Body of Evidence is nowhere near as egregious as anyone with two eyes and a brain can see it quite clearly is.
