Brooke Adams plays capable people whose doubts remain visible. Her restraint gives a supernatural story a convincing emotional life; opposite Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone, it is a large part of what makes the film matter.
Fi1m perspective
In The Dead Zone (1983), Brooke Adams plays Sarah Bracknell, Johnny’s former love, without making his disappointment an excuse for a grand display of her own. Her underplaying suits Christopher Walken’s, and the relationship feels substantial enough to deserve the time spent on it. We were moved by their scenes because Adams makes the life Johnny cannot recover seem worth having. She gives us a reason to care quite apart from the supernatural dangers. It is quiet work, and essential to the film.
Her breakthrough came with leading roles in Days of Heaven (1978) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). She plays Abby for Terrence Malick and Elizabeth Driscoll for Philip Kaufman, two useful starting points for understanding her mixture of intelligence, self-possession and vulnerability. In Days of Heaven, her restraint helps make the romance credible. There is warmth in this sort of acting, but also room for doubt. She can make uncertainty seem a reasonable response rather than an invitation to perform panic.
David Cronenberg gets particularly good use from that restraint in The Dead Zone. He allows time for Johnny’s disappointment, and Adams and Walken never seem to be competing to make it register. The storytelling is sometimes disjointed, but these passages are among the film’s most involving. Their relationship also makes the psychic premise harder to enjoy as a simple fantasy of having all the answers. Adams is part of that complication: Sarah has enough substance to stop his loss becoming merely a device for making the leading man sad.
Fewer suitable screen parts contributed to her stepping back in the 1990s, before a return to stage, television and occasional film work from the early 2000s. That thinner screen record gives us less to judge, not a reason to discount the precision of the performances already there. Start with The Dead Zone for Adams and Walken together, with a little patience for the uneven storytelling.
Biography
Brooke Adams is an American actress. She was born on 8 February 1949 in New York City and trained at the High School of Performing Arts and the School of American Ballet.
She appeared in Days of Heaven (1978), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and The Dead Zone (1983) as Sarah Bracknell. Other film credits include Cuba (1979), Key Exchange (1985) and Gas Food Lodging (1992). On television she has appeared in Moonlighting (1985), Monk (2002) and BrainDead (2016). She has also worked in theatre. Adams has been married to actor Tony Shalhoub since 1992.
