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Rafelson makes handsome, careful movies (Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens) about outcasts fighting a system all too ready to ignore them. At times, his Postman is too handsome, too careful: Rafelson caresses every ladder in Cora's stockings, every crescent of dirt under Frank's fingernails, until they become aspects of art direction. Jack Nicholson's performance as Frank is studied too. The dashing star of a decade ago has dared to inhabit the molting seediness of the character actor. So Cora must choose between two middle-aged galoots: one offers her security, the other release. This is her chance to come alive, and she grabs for it.
As Cain saw it, woman was the temptress, and Cora was a wailing siren —Circe in a highway diner. Jessica Lange's Cora is trapped, no less than Nick and Frank, by the grim imperatives of the Depression and her search for the deepest sense of identity through sex. The actress's presence and gestural eloquence provided Rafelson with this point of focus: Cora knows who she is and what men will do to possess her. A fraternity of appraising eyes follows her on the streets, in court, at the diner. One managing, sad-faced, respectably poor-emerges from the crowd to remark that they are from the same town; he brightens a moment as he adds simply, "Oh, you don't remember me, but I remember you." Jessica Lange deserves to be remembered as Cora. Her fierce commitment makes this Postman something more than the sum of its private parts.
As Cora in The Postman, Jessica Lange is tall and erect and self-possessed. Her anarchic blond hair frames a face dominated by classic cheekbones and sulfurous dark eyes, suggesting a Faye Dunaway who does not yet know she is beautiful. She has the strength and solidity of a heroic sculpture—Maillol's Leda, perhaps—a peasant-goddess rooted in the earth. With this performance, Lange has passed from the status of minor curiosity as the heroine of Dino De Laurentiis' King Kong to that of respected actress and, maybe, star. Jack Nicholson thinks so: he calls her "the sex star of the '80s."
Just now, the sex star has another priority: breast-feeding an eight-pound girl named Alexandra, the first child of Lange and Mikhail Baryshnikov, artistic director of American Ballet Theater. When he heard the news two weeks ago, Baryshnikov, who was in Buffalo with A.B.T., flew back to Manhattan to see his daughter. "She's beautiful," says Lange, 31, of Alexandra, who was delivered by natural childbirth. "I was enormously proud that she came into the world naturally. But then my baby is bright and alert. She made it easy." Lange seemed almost as pleased to talk about her other "first-born": the starmaking role she calls "the first real acting I've done."