WASHINGTON — She made us laugh in “Animal House” and cheer in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Now, Karen Allen plays Joan Anderson from the best-selling memoir “Year by the Sea,” which opened in select cities over the weekend and opens in Allen’s D.C. hometown on Sept. 22.
“I was not familiar with Joan’s work,” Allen told WTOP. “I was sent the script and was very taken by her story. I literally, half an hour later, went out to a bookstore, found Joan’s first book, ‘Year by the Sea,’ brought it home and read it. I just found her very unsparingly honest about herself. … A week or so later, I had lunch with Joan. We spent about four hours together just talking, talking, talking. … I was quite delighted to just dive into this particular story.”
Based on a true story, the film follows Joan’s journey as an “empty nester” whose husband Robin (Michael Cristofer) accepts a career move to Kansas. Instead of following, Joan takes a personal sabbatical to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, trying to find herself. As she writes at her typewriter, “We’re all as unfinished as the shoreline and meant to transcend ourselves.”
“She wakes up at 55 and her children are grown,” Allen said. “She looks into her future and has no idea where she wants to go or what she has to offer. … So she makes an impulsive decision [and] decides to live in a little shack on the New England coast [and] spend whatever time she needs to get to know herself, reflect on life and see if she can find a way forward.”
Upon arriving in Cape Cod, she meets another Joan (Celie Imrie), widow of psychologist Erik Erikson, who invented the term “identity crisis.” This wise sage schools Joan on the notion of a “vision quest,” in which once a year Navajos spend 24 hours in the wilderness believing that “truth emerges from the silence.” This wilderness also includes primal urges with a flirtatious fisherman (Yannick Bisson) in a romantic subplot that smartly subverts our expectations.
“[It’s] not wanting to end her marriage but wanting to renegotiate her marriage, wanting to get to know her husband again, and allow him to get to know the part of her that she feels she’ll be carrying into the future,” Allen said. “We all love the thought that we can start over. It’s such a liberating thought that we aren’t so mired in the baggage of the past, [but rather] there is a way to take a deep breath [and] just move forward with a sense of possibility.”
This sense of rebirth connected with debut director Alexander Janko, who reinvents himself after a career composing scores for such hits as “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Now, Allen hopes this same theme will connect with audiences from the Baby Boomer generation.
“In the way that Joan is searching for her voice, I feel there’s a whole generation of audience that’s searching for: where is our voice?” Allen said. “It’s a rare kind of film that we don’t get to see very often. We don’t get to be with people of that age who are still trying to figure out their lives. … There are four people in the film that are over the age of 60. That’s unusual.”
Allen is herself a proud product of the uber-creative Baby Boomer generation. Born in 1951, she moved from Illinois to the D.C. area when she was just 10 years old, attending Charles Carroll Junior High School and graduating from DuVal High School in Lanham, Maryland.
“I moved to New York when I was 17, but I came back to D.C. when I was 21,” Allen said. “I went to Georgetown University and lived at Dupont Circle for years. I started to work in the theater there, I worked with the Washington Theatre Laboratory and was involved with the Washington Project for the Arts. Then I lived over in Adams Morgan for a number of years.”
She still credits the nation’s capital for her creative spark.
“I will always think of D.C. as my creative home,” Allen said. “As a young person, you can feel that you want to work in the art world, but you’re never quite sure what your medium is. I was living in D.C. when I saw an extraordinary performance by an actor [and] my whole life turned on that. … It was a really wonderful time, a very creative time. There was a lot going on in D.C.”
In 1976, she returned to New York City to study at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, seeking a more traditional background in acting compared to her more experimental work in D.C. It was here that she was discovered by the filmmakers of her debut film “Animal House” (1978).
“It was serendipitous,” Allen said. “I saw a 3×5 card on the wall that said, ‘Feature film casting college-age actors.’ … I just put a picture and resume in the mail and I got a call saying, ‘We’d love to meet you.’ I walked over to Universal Studios in New York City on Park Avenue. The casting director strode over to me and she said, ‘I know you’re not in the union, I know you don’t have an agent, but I want you to meet [director] John Landis because you’re my girl.'”
Thus, she made her feature film debut as Katy in National Lampoon’s instant comedy classic.
“Talk about seat of the pants, just learning as I went,” Allen said. “Fortunately, many of the actors were also doing their first film, so we were all in the same boat for the most part and helped each other. John Landis was an awful lot of fun to work with. He’d done a couple indie films, but this was his first real big film, so we all didn’t know enough to be intimidated.”
Not only did the film launch director John Landis, writer Harold Ramis and producer Ivan Reitman, it made household names of actors John Belushi, Kevin Bacon and Tom Hulce.
“I never was really in a scene with Belushi, but I did watch him work,” Allen said. “Whenever I wasn’t in a scene, I was often on the set watching because it was so much fun — like Katy doesn’t go to the toga party, but I was there off screen watching. … I got to watch John, just his spontaneity and his ability to do the most outrageous thing that was available. If you put something in his hand, you put a jar of peanut butter in his hand, he knew what to do with it!”
Three years after these frat-house keggers, Allen would drink Nazis under the table as Marion Ravenwood in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), in which Steven Spielberg cast her across Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones. Allen delivered countless memorable scenes, from reuniting with ex-lover Indy in her saloon, to sprinting across Cairo with a mangy monkey, to closing her eyes during the famous climax so her face isn’t melted by the Ark of the Covenant’s spirits.
Still, Allen’s most memorable scene comes as Marion attempts to escape Nazi villain Belloq (Paul Freeman) by drunkenly seducing him in a wedding dress inside a Middle Eastern tent.
“I was never quite happy with how that scene was going, so we went in and kind of created that scene with each other and then we showed it to Steven and he loved it,” Allen recalled. “Me hiding the knife, pulling the knife, Paul starting to laugh — that was invented on the fly.”
As Spielberg was gearing up to make “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989), Allen married soap-opera star Kale Browne in 1988, birthing a son in 1990 before their divorce in 1998. While she continued to make movies, from “Scrooged” (1988) to “The Sandlot” (1993), Allen says her mother-son relationship helped her relate to Joan’s arc in “Year by the Sea.”
“Even when I stepped away from a lot of the travel necessary to do big feature films — I wanted to be there raising my son — I never felt like I put my own creative life on a back burner,” Allen said. “What I very much did relate to was when my son moved out, there was this abyss. It’s a universal thing. As much as people act as though they’re going to be relieved when their children are finally out in the world, there’s also this terrible sense of: What now?”
The answer to that question lies in “Year by the Sea.”
“I’ve never been in a film where, at the end of it, people come up and throw their arms around me and thank me for making the film,” Allen said. “There are some people who have said, ‘Oh my god, I think you just saved our marriage.’ I mean, that’s a pretty big statement!”
Click here for more on “Year by the Sea.” Listen to our full conversation with Karen Allen below:
