When I started writing this story, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Laura Dern, River Phoenix, Emily Lloyd, and Christian Slater were all young movie stars who seemed to have a reasonable chance of being around for a while. By the time I finished writing this story, at least one of them seemed to have hit the skits, and by the time you finish reading it, several of them may have been superseded by a new generation of Kiefers and Phoenixes. It depends on how fast you read.
This is not necessarily a reflection on the seven actors and actresses, for, with the notable exception of young Kiefer, they all seem to be reasonably gifted performers with fine teeth. But with no studio system to nurture their talents, to develop sturdy starring vehicles on which they can cut their baby teeth, there seems to be little logic to their careers as they carom from one dubious project to the next, hoping that a Rain Man will obscure the memories of cocktail and legend, that a Heathers will rescue one from a lifetime of penal servitude in films like Gleaming the Cube and Young Guns II, that a Blue Velvet will win one widespread critical acclaim while Fat Man and Little Boy pays the bills. Building a career like this is building a career on quicksand: you could end up like Brandon de Wilde or Sandra Dee - '60's versions of Christian Slater and Julia Roberts.
Ever since Hollywood started making movies, young stars have faced a number of serious problems. For one, they are locked into an auto-cannibalistic system that will eventually consume them. By and large, the Christian River Cruisers are young people being asked to play even younger people in movies aimed at even younger people. They are regularly cast as characters from a strange netherworld--not quite old enough to be adults, but not quite teenagers, either. They are basically People Who Are Too Old to Be Sent to Their Rooms. Unfortunately, the kids who pay to see their movies do eventually grow up, and part of growing up is turning against the things you enjoyed when you were a kid. Queen. David Lee Roth. Quaaludes. Once teens grow up, they're ready for serious actors--like Kevin Costner or Danny DeVito. The teens who have replaced them are ready for new Toms, new Julias. Bye-bye, Kiefer.
All of these actors--with the notable exception of Kiefer Sutherland--have made at least one decent movie, some two. But the good films they have made are not the films the public associates them with. Emily Lloyd had a full-blooded role in Wish You Were Here, but if the public knows her at all it is for her mugging in Cookie and bouncing around in a tank top in In Country. Tom Cruise's best movies are Rain Man, The Color of Money, and Born on the Fourth of July, but those aren't the movies that made him rich and famous. They're the movies he made to show that there's more to him than we saw in Top Gun, Cocktail, and Legend. But Hollywood didn't create Tom Cruise so that he could do Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July, Hollywood created him to make 12 Top Guns, and will replace him if he doesn't.
Repackaging of the same product over and over again is what this industry is all about. With few exceptions (The Mosquito Coast, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet), the 50 or so films these stars have made are interchangeable, life-affirming, rah-rah pulp dealing with one of the following themes:
1) You Can Make It If You Try
2) You Can Make It If You Try, Even If You're From the Wrong Side of the Tracks
3) You Can Make It If You Try, but You Might Need Help From Some Blind or Deaf Person or Somebody With a Horribly Disfigured Face
4) Sooner or Later, Love Is Gonna Get Ya
Over and over again, the same theme emerges: I May Be an Outsider or an Underdog, but I Will Triumph Over Adversity Because I Have a Will of Steel and Incredible Teeth. Tom Cruise has done the wrong-side-of-the-tracks routine in All the Right Moves, The Outsiders, The Color of Money, and Cocktail. Julia Roberts did it in Mystic Pizza, Satisfaction, and Pretty Woman. Emily Lloyd did it in Wish You Were Here, Cookie, and Chicago Joe and The Showgirl. Kiefer Sutherland did it in Young Guns, Promised Land, and The Lost Boys. Christian Slater did it in Tucker: The Man and His Dreams, Heathers, and Gleaming the Cube. Laura Dern did it in Mask. River Phoenix did it in Stand by Me, Running on Empty, and A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. It is amazing to think that in a society this wealthy, there could still be this much adversity for teens to overcome. It's not like they're black or something.
Bear in mind that, although the seven actors being discussed here have appeared in many, many bad films, they are by no means the worst films being made today. By and large, the Phoenix Tom Christians stay away from slasher movies, cop movies, and movies that require peering through a keyhole to watch cheerleaders in their underwear. If you appear in movies like that, you get nowhere fast. But if you make a habit of appearing in movies like Cocktail, Cookie, Young Guns, 1969, A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, Satisfaction, Gleaming the Cube, Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, Legend, and Crazy Moon, you'll probably get nowhere slow. But, chances are, you'll still get nowhere.
Now, a case-by-case evaluation of the stars:
CHRISTIAN SLATER
Lots of people have commented upon Slater's Jack Nicholson-esque acting style, while ignoring his equal, and perhaps surpassing, debt to Leonard Nimoy. Yes, when Slater gets those hyperactive eyebrows going, it's like Vulcan Night at the Lido: All Patrons Accompanied by a Mr. Spock Impersonator Get in Free. This is the sort of tic that no normal person would notice right off the bat, because no normal person would sit and watch Gleaming the Cube, Heathers, Young Guns 11, Tucker, and Pump Up the Volume in rapid succession. But I noticed it, and once Slater starts making movies that reach a wider audience (he's got two on the way--Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, in which he plays second string to Kevin Costner, and Mobsters, which insiders are calling Young Tommy Guns), it's only a matter of time before influential critics with larger thumbs than brains start to notice it too. Better get clamps or something, Christian. And stop slapping your forehead every time you want to emote.
Slater is a good-looking, affable sort who has survived a number of bad movies to win critical acclaim in Heathers and Pump Up the Volume. He was utterly useless as a trainee monk in The Name of the Rose, where he did a lot of vacuous eye-rolling in the footsteps of the equally miscast Sean Connery, who tried to recycle an earlier performance as Robin Hood in Winter (from Robin and Marian) into the role of a medieval sage. Better luck next Inquisition, Sean. Slater had an inconsequential role in Tucker, somehow managing to avoid being blinded by Jeff Bridges's high-beam smile, and was thoroughly absurd in Gleaming the Cube, a sort of skateboard version of Valdez Is Coming. In Young Guns II, he was what you would expect: a Young Gun II.
Slater's reputation, such as it is, rests on his roles as rebellious teenagers in Heathers and Pump Up the Volume. In the former, he turns up the Jack Nicholson act full blast, providing a nice counterpoint to Winona Ryder's performance as a ditzy high school girl torn between social acceptance and mass murder. But he really came into his own in Pump Up the Volume, last year's highly entertaining saga of a repressed teenager with an illegal radio station in an Arizona high school. The only troubling element here is Slater's split personality: when he plays the Talk Hard DJ who rips into parents, police, the authorities, etc., he carves out a nifty, brash persona for himself. But then, when he reverts to being a shy geek, donning eyeglasses, hunching his shoulders, and digging his hands into his pockets, he resembles no one so much as River Phoenix. You can't build a major career by aping River Phoenix. One other thing: Pump Up the Volume got ecstatic reviews from adult critics who admired its message about twisted high school kids, but not enough twisted high school kids bought tickets to make it a hit; they were all over in the next plex, watching Young Guns II.
LAURA DERN
Until David Lynch worked his special brand of magic, Laura Dern had a dewy, Girl-Next-Door charm that posed baffling genetic questions, given that she's the daughter of veteran fruitcake Bruce Dern and scenery-chewing belle Diane Ladd. That charm first manifested itself in Smooth Talk, the fine 1985 adaptation of a surprisingly readable Joyce Carol Oates short story about a teenager crossing the line between being a child and being jailbait. Dern did a lot of frowning and wincing and lip biting in this film while trying to decide if it was a good idea to take a spin with Treat Williams (it is never a good idea for a young girl to take a spin with a man named Treat, or even a man being played by an actor named Treat), and herein defined the essential persona she would play in one film after another: the passive cupcake who does a lot of wincing and frowning and lip biting. Bear in mind that although Dern appears in David Lynch's creepy Blue Velvet, she has the only normal role in the film, as The Girl. And although she starts off at a pretty torrid pace as Nicolas Cage's slinky associate in Wild at Heart, she eventually gets burned to a crisp by the orthodontically macabre Willem Dafoe in one of the most memorable seduction scenes ever to take place in a puke-stained motel room. Ultimately, she winds up as a typical American Mom, raising a kid, waiting for that man of hers to come home. Germaine Greer, she ain't. Want more evidence? In Mask, the 1985 Peter Bogdanovich tear-jerker about a teenager who triumphs over the twin handicaps of having both a horribly disfigured face and Cher for a mom, Dern plays a blind cherub with a Sunkist smile. And in Fat Man and Little Boy, she actually plays a goddamned nurse. So this is a very problematic career: fine work in a low-budget artsy movie where she plays a troubled teen; a nothing performance as the Girl Next Door in the artsy Blue Velvet; a red hot performance as a roving sex machine in the artsy Wild at Heart. Having exhausted the possibilities of virginity, Dern seems ready for a career as a hot tramp, a la Sarah Miles or Charlotte Rampling. The USA Network is waiting.
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.