Michelle Pfeiffer: Out of the Past

Pfeiffer's classic beauty naturally appeals to men, but she remains a woman's woman simply because she consistently portrays a female who accomplishes with character what she could more easily achieve with charm. That quality can be seen in her independent pursuit of a new life in Married to the Mob, in her religiosity in Dangerous Liaisons, in the honorable way she conducts her life and business in Tequila Sunrise and in her early determination to fend off Jeff Bridges in The Fabulous Baker Boys because it would be "weird" to sleep with a man she works with. In portraying each of these characters Pfeiffer carries herself with an endearing bravery, a quality that brings her closer to personifying what women themselves want to be than any other actress in recent memory. Pfeiffer's Susie Diamond became, in fact, a role model for Pfeiffer herself: "She's very courageous," Pfeiffer says of Susie, "and I think that there are a lot of things about her that I would like to be more like."

Pfeiffer is easily the most interesting female star to emerge from Hollywood in a while. And yet she doesn't fit easily into even the more woman-oriented, "post-Ghost" era.

1990 was supposed to be the Year of the Comic Book Character (again), but Ghost and Pretty Woman (on the heels of 1988's hit Working Girl) turned it into the year of the 100-million-dollar-plus love story. Part of the reason cartoon action pictures dominated the box office up to this summer is that, after two decades of the feminist movement, there is still no consensus about what an "attractive" woman is. (Not that men are defined any more clearly, but male stars have finessed that liability by replaying the most familiar and long-accepted male characteristics--physical strength and deadpan humor--so shamelessly that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and Harrison Ford have become virtually interchangeable.)

Given the audience's predilection for cartoon characters, it really isn't surprising that Madonna is the female who has dominated the entertainment scene in the '80s. Her persona is an amalgam of every significant blonde vamp Hollywood ever produced, and her much-touted business acumen is really just an instinct for knowing the limit to which being a cartoon can be pushed. But Michelle Pfeiffer-- and most other actresses--either cannot portray a cartoon or will not, which means that as long as hit pictures require characters who have the veracity of Jessica Rabbit, surviving as a female star will never be easy.

In fact, the new blockbuster "women's pictures" don't dare very far beyond the cartoon--and their notion of what constitutes an attractive woman is, at best, curious. In Working Girl, the positioning of Sigourney Weaver's character opposite Melanie Griffith's suggests that women who honor the Calvinist ethic of hard work are obsessive, disagreeable neurotics who deserve to be robbed of the man and the deal by women who run around in their garter belts. Pretty Woman attempts to graft the world's oldest fairy tale onto a member of the world's oldest profession and works a clever audience-pleasing hedge by implying that Cinderella Julia Roberts is worthy of affection not despite the fact that she is a hooker, but rather because she has been a hooker for such a short time. Then there is Ghost, a kind of The Way We Were meets The Terminator meets The Shining. Demi Moore, it is revealed in several pretty close-ups and various comments about her excellent "work," is an artist, as if that should be sufficient to establish her credentials as a wonderful person.

Compare the women in these box office smashes with Pfeiffer's fully-drawn Susie Diamond in the modest hit Baker Boys. Susie's interesting precisely because she's a Madonna and a whore rolled into one. But well-drawn characters are difficult to craft when MTV has so influenced the movie business that the average line of dialogue is pared down to less than a dozen words. In fact, never mind words. It takes only one of Julia Roberts's blinding smiles, or one of Demi Moore's radiant tears, to woo and win over an audience. Of course, it can be argued that this is precisely what a visual medium should be about: Star power is visceral. Still, Myrna Loy's smile--which had abundant charm and radiance--did not exempt Albert Hackett and Francis Goodrich from writing charming dialogue for her in The Thin Man. In the era of the much-reviled studio system, actresses like Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck were loved and admired because their appeal was harnessed to material like that in The Awful Truth or Penny Serenade or My Man Godfrey or Ladies of Leisure. The characters those actresses played were witty and sensual and lovable and admirable.

In the face of scripts that reflect the absence of any fixed notion of what constitutes a charming woman these days, contemporary actresses of substance retreat in desperation to the merely admirable. Meryl Streep and Glenn Close, for example, are widely admired, but seem destined to be loved primarily by grateful directors. Of course, actresses themselves compound their problem by insisting on being smarter than they are beautiful. After an exquisitely confectionary performance in Tootsie, one for which she received an Oscar, Jessica Lange used the resultant clout to spearhead deadly projects in which she thoroughly deglamorized herself (Country,/i>, Far North, Music Box). In a truly admirable performance in A Cry in the Dark, Streep made herself much worse looking than the real-life woman the story was based on.

Michelle Pfeiffer, now established as a ravishing onscreen presence, and as a comedienne who touches the heart, appears to be gearing up for a stroll down the path Lange took before her. She plays a Russian-accented book editor who falls for Sean Connery in the spy thriller The Russia House, but it's unlikely she's gotten too proletarian in that role. And, it's difficult to tell what's in store with Love Field, in which she plays a dissatisfied housewife in the early '60s who fantasizes about Jackie Kennedy. But one of Pfeiffer's future projects may be based on Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris's The Crown of Columbus, a book that Pfeiffer recently purchased, apparently attracted by the opportunity to play an anthropology professor. Even at this early date, it is a project brimming with the leadenness that accompanies Good Intentions.

Not that there is anything wrong with good intentions, or serious characters. The problem is that they tend to be played and written in the spirit of Woody Allen's "serious" pictures, as an exercise in extreme and penitent earnestness that is devoid of even passing humor or charm.

At this point, it is clear that Pfeiffer's special strength is that her persona is rooted in qualities that evoke the great movie heroines of the '20s, '30s and '40s. Her similarity to '40s stars has often been noted, and stems, obviously enough, from a sleekness and glamour that evokes the young Lauren Bacall. More interesting is her psychological resemblance to '20s stars like Clara Bow, Louise Brooks and Colleen Moore, who portrayed lower-class women possessed of a moral refinement that made them worthy of the princes they would marry. These characters have a pride that transcends mere virtue, a more common and far less interesting commodity. And so, smoking incessantly in Baker Boys, Pfeiffer searches her purse for a Paris Opal, a brand of cigarettes costing $3.50 a pack. "I figure if you're going to stick something in your mouth," she tells Jeff Bridges, "it may as well be the best."

But at its most powerful, Pfeiffer's work evokes the great stars of the '30s, particularly Barbara Stanwyck, whose Kay in Ladies of Leisure faced the same life lesson as most of Pfeiffer's characters: that the only reasonable expectation is to not expect much. An audience finds it easy to root for a character whose expectations are so diminished, who has, in other words, allowed herself to be truly vulnerable.

The most touching element of vulnerability in Pfeiffer's characters is that it's not just the audience who recognizes it--they do too. And so the audience witnesses the familiar pain of a woman who must battle to keep her emotions from showing (the precise sort of battle Pfeiffer herself was engaged in when she began shooting Baker Boys, when she was, by her own account, emotionally shell-shocked, presumably at the end of her affair with Malkovich). After Susie auditions for the Baker brothers, she tries to hide her nervousness by sticking her gum back in her mouth. "So," she says, dead-pan. It is this behavior that makes Susie's audition song, "More Than You Know," seem like an anthem for all of Pfeiffer's characters.

And, perhaps, for Pfeiffer herself. For there is no question that this onscreen effort to mask vulnerability--the behavior of one who has been hurt too much--resonates with Pfeiffer even now. "I've always been the kind of person," she recently said, "who would walk into a room, find the nearest corner, and hope that no one notices me, then just wait it out until it's time to go home." But in a sense, what matters most is her continued willingness to enter the room at all. It is that quality that she and her onscreen characters share, for though they cannot bear being hurt again, they also understand that human beings must eventually choose between being safe and being alive.

It was this person that Steve Kloves captured so elegantly in Baker Boys, a script he wrote specifically for Pfeiffer, one that capitalized on her many strengths and also defined them. Pfeiffer's real hope is that other writers of Kloves's distinction will have his savvy and provide for her the kind of material that can give her the dazzling career she would have had if her first picture had been released in 1937, when the studio system made stars miserable but gave them lasting careers. For actors are rarely the best custodians of their talent. They are too well-paid and treated too much like gods to curb what is viewed in Hollywood as ego, and elsewhere as narcissism. In the history of Hollywood, it is only the studio that managed to stand between actors and their narcissistic tendencies, and with that system gone, Pfeiffer may go the route of every other contemporary actress who tries to bury her beauty and charisma in order to prove she can act.

But perhaps Pfeiffer is canny enough to be the first contemporary actress to accept that it is the strength of persona that distinguishes stars from everyone else, and that a woman "cursed" with being a charming and enchanting blonde may as well roll with that rather than going to lengths to turn herself into an earnest brunette.

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Elizabeth Kaye has written for Smart, Esquire, The Village Voice, California, and The Los Angeles Times.

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