Jane Fonda as Gertie in “The Dollmaker.”
I’ve never liked Jane Fonda. Her showboating about the Vietnam War fifty years ago turned me off then and the feeling lingers. Even recent interviews display a cranky old lady. However, after seeing her in a made-for-TV drama she starred in years ago, I’m reviewing the situation.
In “The Dollmaker,” Fonda portrays, Gertie, an Appalachian mother of five young children who follows her husband, Clovis, to Detroit, after he left the family farm to try to better their lives by taking a tradesmen’s job there. It’s the beginning of the Second World War and men, mostly, go off to serve their country, some never coming back and those who do often find their families scattered and their own souls scarred by what they’ve endured.
Clovis and Gertie and their kids find themselves living in a clapboard house in a long row of similar shacks provided by Clovis’ employer, an un-named manufacturing company. Gertie has to buy food for the family, a thing that was unfamiliar to her because back home they lived off the land and bartered for whatever else they needed.
School was alright but Gertie’s kids found it hard to relate to city kids. The northerners had trouble understanding her Appalachian children and their country ways. Their southern accent marked the kids as dumb hicks.
In her rare moments of relaxation, Gertie enjoyed carving dolls out of scrap wood. Squirrels and birds appeared, too, even a crucifix. But, what was most interesting to her was working a large cherry tree trunk into a brooding hunched figure of Jesus. She wasn’t quite ready to work on the face of her subject but she was thinking about it and wondering how the finished sculpture — for that’s what it was– would turn out.
Gertie never thinks of herself. She cares for each of her children with strength and dedication. She is an up-rooted Appalachian housewife who fixes three meals a day, washes clothes and tries to keep the family together.
When Gertie’s youngest daughter wanders off to the train yard behind their house, Gertie frantically searches for her. Then, she sees her resting on some train tracks as a freight engine roars towards her. Screaming and running to save her child, she is too late. She witnesses the train crush her little girl who dies later at the hospital. Her funeral uses up the stash of money that Gertie had been saving to buy some farmland back home.
Jane Fonda is wonderful in this movie: strong and loving. She brings Gertie to life. She portrays a woman who somehow manages to hold the rest of the family together when her teenage son runs away and returns to the hills. Now, her little girl was taken from her and Fonda makes you feel the loss. Her Gertie finds a way to rescue the rest of her family and return to the county where they all had been raised. That was home. Not Detroit.
Fonda is convincing as a woman from the hills and captures well the dialect and endurance of a rural “old lady” as her husband affectionately calls her in the movie. In a stunning performance, Jane Fonda evokes something of the character portrayed by her father in “The Grapes of Wrath.” He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance. Jane won an outstanding actress Emmy for hers.
(“The Dollhouse” is available on Prime Video and Tubi.)