When you’ve got the luminescent Michelle Pfeiffer starring in your movie, you show as much of her face as you can, as often as you can. Right?
Not so in “Where Is Kyra?,” in which the three-time Oscar nominee plays a New York woman slowly slipping from a comfortable middle-class life into abject poverty. “We wanted to visually create the sense that she’s disappearing in her life,” says Nigerian filmmaker Andrew Dosunmu, who shoots his lead actress in shadow and half-darkness throughout much of the film.
It’s a rare gritty-indie turn for Pfeiffer, who’s always been known for her glamorous looks, from her breakout role in 1983’s “Scarface” to her Golden Globe-winning performance in 1989’s “The Fabulous Baker Boys” to a recent rendition in last year’s “Murder on the Orient Express.”
Her new film, shot in only 18 days in and around Ridgewood, is an unrelenting portrayal of the ways society fails those who become invisible — chief among them, women and the elderly. Pfeiffer’s character, a middle-aged woman who’s gone through a divorce and the loss of her job, has moved in with her aging, ailing mother (Suzanne Shepherd) while she tries to get back on her feet. When her mother dies, Kyra is left without a safety net — and finds it increasingly tough to find any work at all. Eventually, she resorts to disguising herself as her late mother in order to cash social security checks, shuffling through the bank lobby stooped over, wrapped in shawls and a hat and a long coat. Passed over for waitressing and secretary jobs, she’s reduced to handing out promotional flyers on street corners for wages she can’t live on.
“We all know Michelle as a great beauty,” says Dosunmu, “and I think this was an opportunity for her to highlight her range as an actress. She was able to strip that beauty and go deeper into the rawness. I think that’s the thing for me that really attracted me to working with her.”
Pfeiffer, 59, recently popped back up on the film radar after being largely absent for years. Last year, she played the enigmatic, vixenish Woman in Darren Aronofsky’s Bible-allegory “Mother!,” as well as a part that’s the perfect complement to her poverty-stricken Kyra: Ruth Madoff in HBO’s biopic “The Wizard of Lies,” opposite Robert De Niro as famously disgraced financier Bernie Madoff. Though at opposite ends of the financial spectrum, both are women who end up losing nearly everything.
In an interview with Sarah Jessica Parker for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” show, Pfeiffer revealed her reservations about playing Madoff — the first time she’d portrayed a real person. “It was really daunting. It wasn’t until after I had committed to it that it occurred to me that I was playing a real person and it was the first time that I had ever done that, and somebody who had already been through so much tragedy, and I knew was somewhere in the world trying to heal. And I knew this was probably the last thing in the world she would want. Of course, I thought, ‘Can I get out of this?’ And I felt horrible and I couldn’t because I had made a commitment.”
“I thought it was interesting that prior to filming ‘Kyra’ she was playing Ruth,” says “Where Is Kyra?” screenwriter Darci Picoult. “In terms of two spectacularly different women and lifestyles, it was a tribute to her power as an actress. Also, that’s New York, isn’t it? The Madoffs and the Kyras.”
Dosunmu is hopeful audiences will embrace Pfeiffer’s playing against type as a woman no one wants to look at or help. “This movie may not be what they expect. And that echoes, in a way, what we’re trying to say: What you least expect can happen, and that’s life.”