Anne Heche and What Should Have Been

I’m sure there will be any number of articles on the death of Anne Heche that will focus on her history of mental illness and substance abuse, and I’m certain that many will be worthwhile reads. However, that’s not why I’m here. While I don’t want to dismiss Heche’s battles with those two related demons, I’d like to focus on Heche, the actor. Because when she got a hold of a solid role, not only was she up to the task, she often elevated the part above what was on the page.

She was so close, wasn’t she? In the early part of her career, Anne Heche showed off serious acting chops, ended up in some high profile projects, and it must be said that she was such a particularly beautiful woman that it almost seemed inevitable that Heche would be a major star. But heat has a way of leaving a career and turning an actor’s journey into a seemingly haphazard succession of television guest appearances and roles in increasingly smaller films. 

While that’s not an inaccurate assessment of Heche’s career from 30,000 feet, a closer look at her resume reveals that quick take to be a reductive one. 

Heche got her start in soap operas with Another World (for which she won a daytime Emmy), but unlike so many actors, she escaped the daytime serial ghetto in 1992 and never looked back. Three years later, Heche started getting truly consequential parts. Wild Side is a hard-to-find (especially in the original director’s cut) sexually explicit gonzo thriller across from Christopher Walken and Joan Chen. It’s a movie that my dad would watch and say “I can’t make head nor tails of it.” While true, there could be no denying Heche’s portrayal of an occasional call girl who gets involved with a criminal and his wife is electric and deeply erotic. 

In that same year, she made the wonderful, but woefully underseen, Pie in the Sky. It’s a lovely little romantic comedy with fantastical elements about a man (Josh Charles) fixated on his city’s traffic issues who meets an avant-garde dancer (Heche) and together they find their many differences melt away whenever they look into each other’s eyes. I discovered Pie in the Sky one afternoon on cable and was as smitten with the film as Charles was with Heche, which is no mean feat. I wish more people would have seen it, and maybe, if enough people read this piece, a few more will. 

Heche could also clean up trash too. Take 1996’s Demi Moore/Alec Baldwin thriller, The Juror, a barely watchable mess, save for the small number of scenes with Heche in them. Baldwin’s character meets Heche (who plays Moore’s best friend) and goes home with her, where after some very sweaty relations, reveals himself to be a killer and forces Heche’s character to take pills and drink copious amounts of alcohol until she dies. The movie is garbage overall, but that one sequence is horrifyingly effective. Baldwin raises his game with Heche, and her acceptance of her fate is truly rending and disturbing. There was very little part for Heche to play, but she seemed to invent a heartbreaking resonance that the film did not deserve.

That same year, Heche got a hold of one of her very best roles in Nicole Holofcener’s wonderful Walking and Talking about two best friends whose relationship changes when one of them gets engaged. Heche and Catherine Keener were so well-matched as the friends that you didn’t feel like they were acting. You just believed these women had known each other so long that they had the kind of shorthand where an expression could easily substitute for words. Walking and Talking is a rare film about a friendship between two women that continually upends your expectations of where it might go. 

While none of the films I’ve mentioned reached large audiences, casting directors clearly took note of Heche’s talent, and the size of the films she would become involved in grew exponentially. Over the next two years, Heche was in hot demand. She appeared in the thrice Emmy nominated HBO film, If These Walls Could Talk as a college student about to receive an abortion when a protestor breaks in and murders her doctor (played by Cher). The film is told in three segments, and it’s Heche and Cher’s portion that hits the hardest, and suddenly seems all too relevant today. 

The next year she played the believably beleaguered wife of Johnny Depp’s undercover cop title character in the brilliant low-down gangster film, Donnie Brasco. Her role is very much a “the wife” part, but she invests every moment she gets on screen with authentic trepidation over the potential fate of her husband, who brings enormous amounts of stress home on the few occasions he can get away from the scoundrels he’s trying to bring to justice. 

The big budget disaster movie, Volcano followed. Heche did her best with a movie that harkened back to the Irwin Allen era (not that anyone needed that), but even she couldn’t do much with her underwritten stock role. She had a stunning cameo that year in I Know What You Did Last Summer. A turn so creepy and convincing that she practically shamed the performances of the young principals (Jennifer Love-Hewitt, Sarah Michelle-Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Ryan Phillipe) who nominally carried this Scream knockoff to sleeper success at the box office.

A sharp supporting turn in the David Mamet political satire Wag the Dog followed. In a film with such heavy hitters as Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman, Heche more than held her own. Heche took another big swing at the box office with 6 Days, 7 Nights, a romantic action comedy where she played the harried love interest of Harrison Ford. 6 Days underperformed at the turnstiles despite the size of its production and its main star. I can’t help but wonder how Heche’s career might have been different had 6 Days been more Romancing the Stone and less, well, 6 Days, 7 Nights.

Much better was 1998’s Return to Paradise where Heche played a lawyer representing a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who has received a death sentence in Malaysia. Heche’s lawyer convinces one of the man’s friends (Vince Vaughn) to return to Malaysia to accept his share of responsibility for the hash purchase that led to his friend’s capture and sentence. Return to Paradise is a harrowing film that didn’t get much studio support – likely due to its grim subject matter, and perhaps because they were worried that audiences wouldn’t see Vaughn as a convincing dramatic actor (he’s quite good, by the way). Heche is terrific as a lawyer with a nearly impossible job. If Vaughn’s character accepts his culpability, he puts himself at grave risk. If Heche isn’t convincing in selling him something he has no earthly use for, the film doesn’t work. But sell she does, and like gangbusters.

Still, the film wasn’t seen, and has largely disappeared from the minds of moviegoers. Heche did score a plum role across from Vaughn once again that same year, but sadly, it was at the service of Gus Van Sant’s foolish shot by shot attempt to recreate Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Stepping into the role Janet Leigh originated, Heche was the film’s clear high point, and the only part of the picture that you might argue was up to par with the original. At the risk of speaking sacrilege, I actually found her to be ever so slightly superior to Leigh, but the whole endeavor was so misbegotten that it did all involved more harm than good, despite the exacting efforts that went into making the film.

The waters got choppy for Heche after the failure of Psycho with both critics and audiences. Whatever chance she had at full-on stardom seemed to disappear with Psycho’s second weekend box office gross. The remainder of Heche’s career was primarily dotted with small roles in the occasional high profile film (John Q, Birth) more sizable parts in quality indie films (Cedar Rapids, Rampart, and the grindhouse, looking for a cult following film, Catfight), and a number of short-ish stints on TV (Ally McBeal, Everwood, Men in Trees, Hung, and Chicago P.D., to name just a few). 

Perhaps her greatest triumph after the disappointment of Psycho was her 2002 Broadway debut in Proof, in which the NY Times praised her by saying, “Ms. Heche, whose stage experience is limited and who is making her New York stage debut at 33, plays the part with a more appeasing ear and more conventional timing, her take on the character is equally viable. Her Catherine is a case of arrested development, impatient, aggressively indignant, impulsive.” A friend of mine took in the show, and describes the experience of seeing Heche in the role as “life-changing.”

In another life, Anne Heche might have had the graceful arc of someone like Marisa Tomei or Jennifer Connelly. The potential was always there. So were the chops and the beauty. Instead, Heche ended up with an acting resume that is both notable and somewhat short of what she was capable of. A troubled life has a way of keeping someone from reaching their full potential. But if one is willing to comb through the ledger of Anne Heche, they will find numerous electric moments that cover over the large number of mediocre projects that she took part in over the back half of her career. 

Anne Heche was special. The saddest thought I had in writing up this memoriam is that I’m not sure that she knew. 

What a god damn shame. 

Anne Heche died yesterday. She was 53 years old.