Inspired by Dan Callahan’s The Art of American Screen Acting 1960 to Today, I watched “Bed Among the Lentils,” the 49-minute Alan Bennett monologue, done direct to camera by Maggie Smith. It’s an astonishing piece of work. As I watched, time stood still. I sat motionless, not blinking, totally sucked into this character’s misery and bitterness. Crucially, there is a total lack of catharsis, in the script and in her performance. She holds back. Maggie Smith is TOUGH. No leakage for her own/the audience’s comfort. But then, near the very end, there’s a tiny glimmer of the character’s sense of loss. It’s just a glimpse, though.

Maggie Smith, with her impeccable technique, gives you just a tiny glimpse of the character’s misery, and you, the audience member, are wrecked. She shows a little bit of what’s there, and you feel ALL of it. This is what total control looks like. Amateurs are not capable of what Smith does here, with text, subtext, gesture (the moment above with the water glass), backstory (even if not expressed), vocal technique – everything. And yet you don’t feel the control. Control/technique is invisible. You don’t “see the work”. Smith is like De Niro in that way. These are tough people. They go deep deep in. If Smith had lost control of her technique and broken down into stormy sobs, allowing herself to express what she was feeling, it’d be a very different experience. Strangely, catharsese like that sometimes alienate audiences. The actor is feeling so much there’s little room for the audience to feel.

Civilians (and this includes many critics) are way too impressed by the presence of tears, mistaking visible tears for true feeling/excellent acting. This reminds me of a story my friend Shelagh told me years ago. Shelagh was in an acting class and a girl was up there doing a monologue, and my GOD she was feeling things. You could see her emotions from the space station. This takes ability (including an ability to release). But … there was nothing left for ME to feel since SHE was feeling and showing ALL of it.) Credulous critics are bowled over by tears because it seems like a magical ability to produce actually cry in a make-believe situation. But those who work in the field know it’s not magic. The sobbing student finished the scene and after a long pause the teacher said calmly, “You were feeling everything and I am …. curiously unmoved.”

In “Bed Among the Lentils,” Maggie Smith IS feeling everything but the context of the character – who is a very unreliable narrator – means the only emotion visible to the naked eye is a kind of coiled contempt swimming in a sea of existential boredom. It’s the only thing she allows others to see … and then … over the course of the monologue, her rigid facade starts to (very subtly) disintegrate. But only once does she let you see what her public persona is hiding. We may PERCEIVE it all along, we can FEEL it emanating off her in waves, but the character will be damned if she lets you see any of it.

When the feeling rises in her like a volcano, surprising her as well as us, it’s shattering.

Sheila O'Malley is a regular film critic for Rogerebert.com. Her work also appears regularly in Film Comment. She has written for The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Criterion Collection, Sight & Sound, and others. Follow her cultural commentary on Substack: The Sheila Variations 2.0