The truism is that Madonna cannot act. Throughout a career that spans almost four decades, the pop star has been in plenty of films, but everybody agrees that she is there of her own ego. The talent towards performance, her penchant for showmanship, that sparkle on stage; it has allegedly never translated when saying lines against a castmate. But I’m not sure that’s true.
To start this off, I want to reiterate that Madonna has an almost uniformly terrible resume in terms of cinema. The worst of it ranges from insipid to offensive, and the best of it rarely rises above forgettable. She’s been a missionary, a witch, the mother of a gay man’s son, a baseball player, a murderer, and a beloved political figure. None of it is necessary viewing.
I have seen almost every one of those films.
There’s an almost universal thread throughout, and that’s an acquiescence to her fame. Not her persona, mind you, but the very idea that Madonna is famous. Much in the same way movie stars are regularly shot, Madonna is always subsupposed to be a focal point.
It's quite strange that her film persona rarely even attempted to touch upon the cinematic aspects of her musical persona. Throughout her career and especially during her active acting period, she was a femme fatale. Running from Marilyn to Marlene, there was a maneater quality to her. A knowing look out into the crowd, a languid hand as she sang about desire. The growing maturity of her 30s made Madonna an incredibly compelling figure, even if sometimes distasteful. But that underlying passion never actually made it on screen. Or where it did, it fell flat.
It is, quite frankly, appalling that Madonna only has one erotic thriller in her filmography, and that the one she chose was a Basic Instinct knock off by the title of Body of Evidence (1993). The story of a woman who fucks a man to death for her inheritance, this is a film where you have to believe she is attracted to Willem Dafoe. Unfortunately, despite the internet’s daddy issues, he looks too much like his Green Goblin mask for that to be believable.
The best performances in erotic thrillers are, even for the time, outdated. These are film noirs in a true sense. In the case of the femme fatales, this means seduction by the way of knowing looks. There’s the slinking allure of the traditional female antagonist, but she also actually gets to have sex. Denise Richards, in her best role (one of two good performances) as Kelly Van Ryan in Wild Things (1998), is the spoiled teen by the way of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944). There’s a lot of room to play, but control is needed. In Body of Evidence, Madonna gets her turn, as the woman on trial for literally being too sexy.
Madonna as Rebecca Carlson is pointedly amateurish, particularly for her eighth film. She fumbles with pointedly horny dialogue like a preteen attempting to flirt. For a woman who a year prior was posing nude for an erotic photography book and moaning on tracks about being a dominatrix, this is embarrassing. She cannot be too appealing, to enticing, because she’s the villain. The performance is thus bad, but that performance reflects the film.
That’s the issue with accessing Madonna’s acting. She usually reflects the script she is given. For example, her performance in A League of Their Own (1992) is solid. The jokes come easy to her and there’s real chemistry with her castmates. Likewise, Evita allows her to actively use her performance skills in a film. There’s a lot of sentiment that she cannot sing the songs in the Andrew Lloyd Webber penned musical, but she can sell them remarkably well. When Evita dies, Madonna sells the tragedy. Her face was naturally expressive at the time and here, instead of the twitchy mess of someone grabbing an expression with both hands, it flows out of her.
Patti LuPone, the originator of Evita on Broadway (although not the stage in general), has repeated over time that she is not fond of Madonna’s turn as Eva Peron. In fact, she called her a “movie killer”. But I think that comes from a basic misunderstanding of the performance. In contrast to her Carlson, Madonna’s Peron is enticing, human, and vulnerable.
LuPone, even in what survives of her original performance on YouTube, is simply a bulldozer of a performer. Her voice cuts through everything else and she commands the stage like only a veteran can. Yes, she can do vulnerable, but it’s a theatrical version. That’s a throughline of cinematic career. She’s a character actress off the stage, and for Evita to work, it needed someone who performed as a movie star. Surprisingly enough, Madonna actually did it right. Her real-life star power was a benefit, not a drawback.
The truth is, Madonna isn’t an actress by trade, she’s a performer. So is Eva Peron as written in Evita. She walks into every situation, whether it be a radio station, a political dinner, or a speech on a balcony, and performs. That artificiality extends to her death. But it’s a brittle performance, and it shatters at the end as she fades away. She’s an actress, explicitly in the text of the film, and at the end, Peron is literally begging “what happens now”. Twice. At the end, she begs for direction, even as she lays dying.
Madonna’s most successful turns on screen play with her star power in ways that reflect persona. The performative quality of Peron is one, but as Breathless Mahoney in Dick Tracey (1990), she’s Madonna as Mae West as Marilyn Monroe as a generic Femme Fatale. Once again, I must reiterate that the film is bad. But she isn’t. Madonna plays Mahoney like a cartoon character, and she sparkles. The fact that the soundtrack album hosts the classic song Vogue adds an additional layer of weirdness there.
Mahoney is the femme fatale role that Carlson in Body of Evidence was meant to be. She spends her time slinking across the screen and heaving her chest towards a baffled Warren Beatty. Seriously, he is objectively terrible as an action hero. But for Madonna, she just gets it. As her eyes wander across the landscape of a scene, part of you wonders if, in another timeline, she could have found herself as a Bond girl.
I know she is in a James Bond movie. It’s objectively bad and she should feel bad.
Weirdly, Dick Tracy is another film where Madonna gets to actually perform music. Eventually even at the Oscars! That obviously isn’t a throughline of quality, or her performance in Swept Away (2002) wouldn’t be so shrill. Nor is the cartoony nature of the role an indicator of success. Who’s That Girl (1987) proved that she made a poor Fran Drescher type. No, what works about Mahoney and, by extension, Peron, is that the films instinctively get what about her persona people are attracted to.
In 1990, Madonna was provocative, but in a way that was less real than it would become. Sexual like Jessica Rabbit, not like a literal porn star. The average person can get into that. Erotica (1992) would firmly topple the balancing act, and Body of Evidence proved she had no idea how to make it work long term or translate it into other mediums. By 1996, she had basically transformed her appeal to something softer, and every song that had seen success post-Erotica was firmly easy listening. Evita completed what was an active 3-year PR campaign to resolve issues she had created with projects like the Sex book.
And that’s ultimately the issue with Madonna as an actress. Her persona is often too big not to bleed into her performances. It’s often at odds with the role, cramping whatever talent she possesses. When they overlap, she’s fine, and when the material is good, she’s often reflecting that, but she never rises above the material. In theory, this is a bad thing, in practice, it’s about where most actors sit. So no, I don’t think Madonna is a bad actress. I just don’t think she’s a particularly good one.
She can always find work at Marvel.