I feel a little bad forKate Capshaw. She’s been the target of scorn and derision over the years because people don’t particularly like her performance as Willie Scott inIndiana Jones and the Temple of Doom(on the other hand, her work in that movie got her to meet her future husbandSteven Spielberg, so I’d say it worked out for both of them). With the release of the new 4K, I decided to go into a re-watch ofTemple of Doomwith an open mind about her character and performance, and discovered that Capshaw isn’t really the problem here, nor is the character of Willie. The larger problem is thatTemple of Doomnever quite cracks the balance of madcap energy and twisted darkness that permeates the entire film.
Before you even get toTemple of Doom, you have to acknowledge that Willie is at a disadvantage. TheIndiana Jonesfranchise already has a bit ofJames Bondenergy (you can spot it in Indy’s outfit in the nightclub or the flat-out casting ofSean Conneryas Indiana’s dad), and it’s clear they wanted to carry that over a bit into the leading ladies. SinceTemple of Doomis a prequel, it doesn’t make sense to bring back Marion since inRaiders of the Lost Arkshe tells us she hasn’t seen Indiana in years. However,Raidersdid its job too well, and audiences fell hard for Marion as an individual character, not just a love-interest for Indiana.Karen Allen’s performance is fantastic, and you believe that this is a character who could hang with our hero on his adventure. If you don’t want to repeat yourself, you go to a character who’s the polar opposite of Marion, and you get Willie.
Also, I think there’s an element with Indiana Jones and Marion of wish-fulfillment. We’d like to believe that if you sent us on some grand adventure into tombs filled with snakes and spiders, we’d be freaked out, but we would manage. But Willie is who we actually are. If you put me in the room where I had to reach into a bunch of bugs to pull a lever and save Indiana and Short Round’s lives, they would absolutely die. I’d feel bad about it, but there were like a billion bugs in that room and that hole, and I would have “nope’d” out of there so fast it would set a new land-speed record. There are those of us who welcome the great adventure, and those of us whose vacations are about room service, and I am firmly the latter, so I can sympathize with Willie.
The problem with Willie as a character is that she’s sometimes at cross-purposes with the larger film. If you take her in the nightclub scene, she’s totally in her element with madcap adventure, chasing a diamond that’s kicking around the floor or even in a plane that’s about to crash. But the writing does her no favors when she goes to the poor village and rejects their food or schemes to seduce the Maharaja until she learns he’s a child. These are moments where the script crosses the line from “Willie is out of her element and having a bad time,” to “Willie is a bad person whose selfishness is deeply off-putting.” So when you add up, “She’s not Marion” and “She’s kind of self-centered,” you can see that Willie has an uphill battle.
And that’s a shame because you can kind of see how the character would work in a better movie whereTemple of Doommanages its madcap energy better. Spielberg has always struggled with comic lunacy (see1941), andTemple of Doomdoes him no favors when trying to introduce some disturbing levels of darkness. The film’s opener of “Anything Goes” feels like a mission statement; an invitation that on thisIndiana Jonesadventure, you’re going to see some wild stuff that’s not merely a repeat ofRaiders. But this means going to some dark places that Spielberg couldn’t quite balance with the thrills he hoped to deliver.
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A large part of that stems from the fact that what’s “dark” in Temple of Doom is colonialist. You can see this painful balance (or lack thereof) in the grotesque dinner sequence. You can see that this being played for comedy—our characters are hungry, they’re sitting down for what they believe will be a lavish meal, and each course is grosser than the next. But the subtext here is that these Indians are savages who happily eat gross things because they’re not refined and civilized like Westerners. Yes, there’s a joke, but it’s being made at the expense of The Other, and the darkness of it like eating monkey brains or eyeballs in soup only emphasizes that those others are “backwards” and our heroes are right to be revolted.
That puts Willie as a character into a difficult position because you can’t really hold the madcap energy when the film around you undercuts its own comedy with grotesque moments that don’t land. I don’t think there’s a way for Capshaw to play that scene or even to write the Willie character where she comes out as more endearing when the scenes she has to go through don’t allow her to be a funny audience surrogate. And that’s a shame because I think there’s room for someone like Willie on an Indiana Jones adventure who is out of their element and still manages to rise to the occasion or at least provide a good comic foil for the excitement around them (you can see this a bit with Marcus Brody inIndiana Jones and the Last Crusade).
When you look at the larger context ofTemple of Doom, I see Willie more as a symptom of a tonal problem rather than anything to do with Capshaw’s performance or even how the character is written. To put it another way, I don’t thinkTemple of Doomimproves if you somehow put another actor in that role because the film is dealing with much larger issues than how Willie reacts to things. Her performance is broad and outlandish because that’s what the story demands of the character, and then it backfires when the story also wants to be deadly serious like when Indy and Short Round come across a child slave who’s praying for the sweet release of death.
I wouldn’t go so far as to sayTemple of Doomis a “bad” movie, but I will say its problems extend far beyond what Capshaw is doing as Willie. Even the thinking behind the character—someone who is Indy’s opposite would make a good foil—is sound. But unfortunately, Willie has come in for too much blame for the film’s problems (sexism also plays a part here where it’s easier to blame the female actor rather than the male filmmakers) when really you have to look at the totality ofTemple of Doomand see that the film’s struggles go far beyond a nightclub singer from Shanghai.
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