Young Gums

JULIA ROBERTS

Julia Roberts is the distaff Tom Cruise, a competent actress who, if she plays her cards correctly, should be able to parlay her remarkable good looks into a major career. If you're one of those people who think that she only has the lips, the figure, the hair (which she foolishly decided to chop off last summer), take a look at Satisfaction, the 1988 Justine Bateman vehicle that Justine successfully drove right over the cliff. Hemmed in by three horrible actresses and one man named Liam, Roberts makes the best of a bad situation, as she does in Steel Magnolias, acting in a perfectly professional fashion while Daryl Hannah, Olympia Dukakis, and Shirley MacLaine hang from the chandeliers. This girl is no dummy--though she shouldn't have cut off her hair.

Of the five Julia Roberts films in captivity, three deal with girls from the wrong side of the tracks. In addition to Satisfaction, where she plays a white trash bassist in a girl group so bad they would embarrass Wilson Phillips, Roberts plays Portuguese white trash in the romantic comedy Mystic Pizza. She is not especially convincing as a poor kid from a Connecticut fishing village, but she is a lot more convincing than Annabeth Gish, who looks like she was part of Yale's prenatal registration program. Mystic Pizza, for those who have not seen it, is one of those small, tough, honest movies that deal with ordinary people in ordinary settings in an ordinary way. You know, horseshit. Pretty Woman is the film that made Roberts a star, in part because only someone as vivacious as she could breathe life into the cadaverous Richard Gere. Again, Roberts is not terribly convincing as a prostitute with a heart of gold--prostitutes find it very difficult to keep their teeth that white--but she's a hell of a lot more convincing than Gere, as a corporate raider with a heart of gold. Personally, I can't decide whether Pretty Woman is the last really stupid film of the 1980s or the first really stupid film of the 1990s--but none of it is Roberts's fault. The film is a fairy tale and she is perfectly cast as a damsel in distress.

More recently, Roberts appeared in Flatliners, a so-so thriller about Young Doctors in Love & Death. As always, Roberts did her number with those lips, lips so big they make Mick Jagger's seem unobtrusive. It remains to be seen whether her lips will remain bankable as long as Jagger's have. She's putting them to the test in Sleeping With the Enemy, Dying Young, and then she's playing (no! yes!) Tinkerbell in Hook. She shouldn't have cut off her hair.

RIVER PHOENIX

As one would expect of a person named River Phoenix, this fellow does not look like he grew up on the north side of Chicago, the west side of Philadelphia, or the south side of anywhere. Starting out as a rapscallion (_Stand by Me_), progressing to a heartthrob (A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon), Phoenix has lately been cast as a mildly dweebish teen in a series of relatively decent films (The Mosquito Coast, Running on Empty, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). The problem is, unless you're looking for him, you hardly notice that he's there. He's a moody little guy who frets and frowns, and though he seems to choose his roles with some care, he's basically like wallpaper: pretty, expensive wallpaper. In both The Mosquito Coast and Running on Empty, he is completely overshadowed by overbearing dads (Harrison Ford, Judd Hirsch), and in both films he is completely overshadowed by Martha Plimpton, a real corker. In the more recent I Love You to Death, he plays a goofy zit, no better or worse than the rest of the cast, with the exception of Kevin Kline, who's both better and worse. River Phoenix is a mildly talented young actor whose name has written a check that his body can never cash.

EMILY LLOYD

One minute she was hot; the next minute she was making Kiefer Sutherland movies. What happened? Back in 1987, then 16-year-old Lloyd got lots of attention when she debuted in Wish You Were Here, David Leland's tawdry tale of a girl who uses sex as a weapon in the dreary England of the 1950s. But she immediately misfired by appearing opposite Peter Falk in Cookie, a bad Married to the Mob, and got involved in another crime against nature when she teamed with veteran bomb detonator Kiefer in Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, a tale of sex and crime in the dreary England of the 1940s. In addition to the radioactively hammy Falk and the catatonic Sutherland, Lloyd also worked with the useless Bruce Willis in In Country. This dull, obvious film, which faithfully captured the nuances of Bobbie Ann Mason's dull, obvious novel, afforded Lloyd numerous chances to shimmy in jogging shorts while trying to come to terms with her father's death in Vietnam, but other than that I can't imagine what the point was. Of course, I can't imagine what the point of Vietnam was, either.

It's ironic that Lloyd, who is English, handles a Dixie accent better than Willis and a mob accent better than Falk. Of course, she can act. But handling accents isn't enough to ensure success, and a couple more films with the likes of Falk and Sutherland, and Lloyd could find herself on the next plane to Stonehenge.

TOM CRUISE

Tom Cruise is the male Julia Roberts, only more so. He has a big, huge, sparkly smile, expressive eyes, an appealing swagger, and can read his lines. Half of the movies he makes are idiotic, and half of the movies he makes are not, which seems like a very high ratio when compared with his peers (Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson). In this sense he resembles Michael Douglas: He is not the world's greatest actor, but he does manage to occasionally involve himself in a halfway-decent project when he could have just gone out and made 15 consecutive Days of Thunder.

Cruise started out as a generic heartthrob in All the Right Moves, Risky Business, and Top Gun, but has since profitted from the widely held notion that appearing in Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July demonstrated a willingness to stretch. It is a measure of how spectacularly infantile the movie industry has become to suggest that making a film with either Oliver Stone or Barry Levinson constitutes a stretch, since all we are talking about is Of Mice and Men Goes to Vegas and a wheelchair Platoon. Still, it's a start.

Cruise has the teeth, the smile, the bod, the attitude to carry a whole picture, as he has done again and again in Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and the cheerfully moronic Cocktail. Still, years from now, when people look back on the 1980s, they will puzzle at films about superstar bartenders, peacetime pilots, and boys who wreck their dad's Porsches. And while it was a nice idea for Cruise to do some heavy lifting in Born on the Fourth of July, if you're looking for an actor who makes a real impression, it's Willem Dafoe, who beats Cruise hands-down, in or out of a wheelchair. The same is true of Rain Man, where Cruise delivers a good badass performance, but clearly plays second fiddle to full-time actor Dustin Hoffman. Even in Risky Business, Cruise is outgunned by Rebecca DeMornay, who, at that time, looked like she might have a career. Tragically, God, who created woman, can also destroy her--though Roger Vadim and movies like Feds will do it faster.

Tom Cruise has perfected a persona that the American people will pay to see again and again and again. Sometimes the character is a bit smarmy (Cocktail), sometimes a bit shady (Rain Man), but in the end he's a true-blue, wave-the-flag, let's-go-for-it-on-fourth-and-inches, clean-cut, American kid. In short, not Nicolas Cage. But Cruise's meal ticket is still films like Top Gun and Days of Thunder, and those kinds of movies don't make you the next John Wayne or Gary Cooper. They make you the next Burt Reynolds.

KIEFER SUTHERLAND

There is a wonderful moment in the film Young Guns when Brian Keith, a grizzled bounty hunter, disappears into an outhouse in the middle of a gunfight with Charlie Sheen, Lou Diamond Phillips, Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, and several other very young, very bad guns. Though Keith is no longer visible, he continues to dominate the action while relieving himself, eventually killing Sheen. But it is not merely as a bounty hunter that Keith dominates the action; he also dominates it as an actor. Let's be clear about this now: Brian Keith--never mistaken for Laurence Olivier--packs more of a dramatic wallop while invisible in a shithouse than Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, and Kiefer Sutherland when they are fully visible on the screen.

This is really embarrassing.

Sutherland's entire career is embarrassing. Of all the actors treated in this survey, Sutherland is the only one whose sustained ability to find work is a source of amazement. Sutherland, who has been churning out one bad film after another since his debut in 1984, has probably made more bad movies at a younger age than any actor in history. These include the sappy Bay Boy, a 1984 Canadian-French production showcasing all-purpose victim Liv Ullmann, a second Canadian disaster entitled Crazy Moon, the horrendous Promised Land, the imbecilic Bright Lights, Big City, assorted Young Guns, the brain-dead Flatliners, and the lethal 1969. Sutherland, in his brief career, has appeared in a movie whose best performance was supplied by Mariette Hartley [1969], a movie whose best performance was supplied by Joe Don Baker (The Killing Time), and a movie whose best performance was supplied by one guy named Corey, and whose second-best performance was supplied by another guy named Corey (The Lost Boys). This is really embarrassing.

Kiefer's big problem--aside from the fact that he isn't very good--is that he can't decide what sort of roles not to be very good in. He's passable as a teen vampire in The Lost Boys, mostly because of his Billy Idol Goes to Montreal Smile, and he's okay as Michael J. Fox's drug-snorting sidekick in Bright Lights, Big City, which should have been called Young Fact-Checkers in Love. But young Kiefer wants to be loved, and so we get such abortions as Young Guns, where he plays a poetic gunslinger, Promised Land, where he plays a pussy-whipped geek, Crazy Moon, where he plays a dweeb with a mannequin companion who is rescued from ennui by a cute mute (does this remind you of any other film?) and Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, where he plays a malleable Yank soldier lured into a brief life of crime by a British tart. The schizophrenia in Sutherland's career-- Should I be a leading man with a goofy smile or a villain with a goofy snarl?--is typified by his work in Flashback, where he is believable as a bland FBI agent for the first half of the film, but then makes a fool of himself when he lapses into his child-of-nature role as the hippie Free. "Free" should be the price of admission to his films. This is really embarrassing.

That's not all. At a select group of video stores across the nation, aficionados of the cinema can rent a film called 1969. This mesmerizingly awful anti-war movie showcases the limited talents of Sutherland, whose father is a talented actor and made one of the great countercultural movies of the 1970s (M*A*S*H), Bruce Dern, who used to make countercultural movies in the 1960s and 1970s, and Robert Downey, Jr., whose talented father once made the kinds of innovative, risk-taking non-idiotic movies that 1969 is not. The film, nightmarishly stupid as it is, perfectly summarizes the state of the art today: terrible movies with retro '60s era soundtracks relying on blockheaded scripts acted out by third-rate actors who are the children of first-and second-rate actors which deal with rebellious teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks fighting against the Establishment, rich kids, Society, blah, blah, blah. Luckily, Bruce Dern has Laura to carry on for him. Donald's only got Kiefer.

This is really embarrassing.

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Joe Queenan is a frequent contributor to these pages. He wrote about Bad Accents for our December issue.

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