The “Big” World View of Penny Marshall
Penny Marshall’s movies weren’t about superheroes or the heads of state. They didn’t explore faraway places or try to dismantle evil and wrongdoing. Her characters don’t go far or change much. Instead, like Josh Baskin in Big or Dottie Hinson in A League of Their Own did, they usually end up by the last scene returning home.
That makes Penny Marshall, the actress-turned-filmmaker who died last month at age 75 from complications due to diabetes, sound like Norman Rockwell with a Bronx accent, a plainspoken, cautious artist who knew they could make you feel good and stayed right there. But the great gift of Penny Marshall and her movies, one that we should ache for and weep over now that there will be no more of them, was how big the worldview of those simple gestures was, how they did not recommend those of us who loved her movies to be content with what we have and not ask for too much. No, a Penny Marshall movie insisted that wanting more-for your community and family, for yourself, out of life — was not greed or ego but optimism, faith in how big you and really, all of us, could be.
Penny Marshall always wanted bigger for herself, even though her public image was that of a matter-of-fact everywoman: She’d been an actress for nearly 10 years, supporting a young daughter after a divorce, when her older brother Gary, an established TV writer/producer, cast her as Laverne DeFazio in Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983). Laverne & Shirley’s a sitcom in the most classic sense — workplace and home settings, neatly wrapped 22-minute episodes, laughs based on vaudeville-era physical comedy — whose ambitions have only seemed larger with time: It normalized both female best-friendships and women in blue collar jobs on television thereby laying the roadwork for Roseanne, One Day at a Time and Insecure. That enduring influence begins very much with how Marshall played Laverne, as a women who wanted more from life not only because she felt she deserved it but because, very simply the world should have room to make everyone’s dreams come true.
It was as Laverne that Marshall began directing, first episodes of her own sitcom, then steadily on television before breaking into feature films with Whoopi Goldberg’s first comedy Jumpin’ Jack Flash in 1986. Jumpin’ Jack Flash is about 20 minutes too long and smoothers Goldberg’s effortless comedic touch in a ridiculous plot about Russian secret agents. In retrospect, it’s the first example of where Marshall’s sure hand as a director could tremble: Her seven movies are bookended by not-quite successful projects like Jack Flash, The Preacher’s Wife and Renaissance Man each relying too much on the existing wattage of their stars. Always known as an actors director (maybe because she’d been one herself), Marshall’s best films have actors that push beyond their public image as a way of widening our view of them.
And oh my, that run of best films! Big (1988), Awakenings (1990) and A League of Their Own (1992) IN A ROW. Big got Tom Hanks his first Oscar nomination, Awakenings made Marshall only the second woman to direct a Best Picture nominee. In 2012, A League of their Own was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry alongside Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
As important, each of these movies changed the career and lives of their principals. Can you imagine Tom Hanks with range (and two Oscars), Robin Williams with gravitas (and one Oscar) or Drew Barrymore as an actress (and a powerhouse producer) not just a pretty face as in Marshall’s last film Riding in Cars With Boys (2001) without Marshall seeing it first?
At the same time, you never get the sense Marshall cast against type to demonstrate how smart she was or how generously she dolled out roles to famous friends. In fact, her prescience doesn’t feel like casting “against type” at all but rather “casting with breadth.” A Penny Marshall movie sees its performers as having range already inside them — the straight line, say from classical Hollywood Madonna in “Vogue” to sultry mid-century outfielder All-The-Way-Mae in League — and Marshall provided the movie for it to be let out.
It’s probably too easy to link Marshall as a woman in the directors chair to the idea of her movies as hostessing rather than hogging credit for their great performances. She certainly cared about the stories of women; Of her seven movies, only Big, Renaissance Man and Awakenings have male protagonists. But all are about society’s overlooked — adolescents, female athletes, the struggling black church in The Preacher’s Wife — who rewrite the rules of that society to include themselves. Little screen time is given over to villains (poor John Heard in Big who punches Tom Hanks on the pickle ball court only brings Hanks and love interest Elizabeth Perkins closer together) and their job is never to shame someone in the audience those who don’t see things as the hero does. Instead, the Penny Marshall hero widens the movie’s field of view, inducts more Rockville Peaches into the Baseball Hall of Fame and argues that the world is always better when it includes more of us.
This happens not when her protagonists slay dragons but come back home to what they already knew. For as much activity that happens in a Penny Marshall film (you’d have a hard time arguing that any of them are short on plot), rarely does their protagonists undergo profound change. Instead, their growth as characters, usually involves self-awakening rather than the story changing who they are: The All American Girls Professional Baseball League realize that courage and athleticism wasn’t unfeminine but a feminist revolution, Josh Baskin demonstrates that innocence and intelligence are not a contraction, the once-catatonic Leonard Lowe (Robert De Niro) literally awakens what is already alive inside him.
Maybe that’s the aesthetic of a filmmaker born into show business, a world that orbits around movie stars and characters rather than carries on without them. But if Penny Marshall’s concerns as an artist were myopic and self-satisfied, if they were small instead of big, we might hold great respect for her greatest movies. We would not deeply love them 30 years after their arrival.
I missed Penny Marshall before she was gone. We’d been waiting nearly 20 years for Penny Marshall-directed movie #8 when left us. She’d been plenty busy since directing Riding in Cars with Boys in 2001 — producing for Ron Howard and Nora Ephron, directing episodic TV and serving as a kind of class president to the generation of women comedy auteurs like Lena Dunham, Elizabeth Meriwether and Diablo Cody who followed her. But bigger than any one next project, I’ve been missing in our current political moment how Penny Marshall made us feel — that people have power, that dreams have space and time to become real, that our promise is bigger than we realize.
It isn’t a set of priorities for an artists that screams for attention. We could attribute that to Penny Marshall being a pioneer, a woman making feature films in the wake of 1970s “New Hollywood” which was all about venerating boy geniuses like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and her not feeling the same right to speak. Or we could look at her seven movies and say she spoke not loudly but clearly — about everyone’s right to be the biggest best version of themselves without stealing it away from anyone else, an idea that seems so basic on its own and yet lately, so in peril.
Thankfully we won’t have to “miss” Penny Marshall’s finest moments — A certain dance-on-a-floor-piano or how there’s no crying in baseball — because those films will be with us forever. Right now though we can miss not only Penny Marshall but her big heart, the big dreams of her movie’s characters, and the big space for them and by extension for all of us, to dream them.
Kevin Smokler is a writer based in San Franciso
