All The Right Moves

Forget whatever these 10 young actors have announced as their next projects. We've got the ideal roles for them all figured out.

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WINONA RYDER

The interesting thing about Winona Ryder is that she is beautiful and she is a movie star and she can act. Those are three very different qualities, and it's tough for a young actress to find roles that accommodate all of them at the same time--Winona's big competition on the big screen, Julia Roberts, has only two of those attributes. When she was still a teenager, Ryder found two ideal roles for herself, in Heathers and in Beetlejuice. Since then, she's tried various things with varying results, never embarrassing herself (though she came close at points in Bram Stoker's Dracula). The news that she's about to play yet another period character--Jo in Little Women, a role she should be able to nail with her eyes closed--makes one really long to see her in a part that exploits, first, her extremely modern spirit, and, second, her dark side, both of which we saw to comic effect in Heathers and Beetlejuice. Ryder is older now and ready, one hopes, to leave the eye-rolling completely behind and play bad bad, not adolescent bad. Her ideal role right now would be a riveting recession-era femme fatale. She could elect to hip up the role of the dark-haired, ivory-skinned knockout in 1945's Leave Her to Heaven, for example. Originally played by Gene Tierney (whose camera-kissing closeups, essential fuel for the story, Ryder would have her work cut out to approximate), this is a femme fatale who loves her man with such dysfunctional possessiveness that she destroys every unwitting challenge to his affection--including his unborn baby, which she was carrying. It's a role blessed with a dose of narcissistic dementia so pure you'd love any actress who brought it off (which Loni Anderson did not do in the lame TV remake). Ryder could give this part a sensational nihilistic '90s spin that would keep the film from harking back to "women's pictures" of the '40s and '50s. But as long as we're talking '90s, a more interesting alternative ideal role could be found in Scott Smith's A Simple Plan, a 1993 novel that Mike Nichols has already optioned the film rights to. This story will require some crucial changes if it's ever to be adapted to the screen, so one of them might as well be to make room for a starring role for Ryder as the Lady Macbeth-type young wife of the lead character, a rural schlemiel who, with his fucked up brother and the brother's sociopathic friend, finds four million dollars in a plane that has crashed in an empty field. The story follows him as he proceeds to make all the wrong moves. As is, A Simple Plan is the guys' story, a brother-brother deal with the wife playing a crucial supporting role; on-screen it should be the couple's story, and the wife would assume cinematic dimension by being rewritten as a young beauty who, having married the best her crummy town had to offer--a stable, hard-working, nice guy--shows her true depth of ambition and lack of principle when the young hubby happens on Temptation. Ryder could bring this off with cold-blooded panache, and with the right co-star (Christian Slater?), turn it into a classic edge-of-your-seat thriller for our make-up-your-own-morality times.

LAURA DERN

While we'll concede, if we must, the strides that Laura Dern has made in turning around our perception of her--she went from playing boring nice girls (_Blue Velvet_, Mask) to playing hot stuff (_Wild at Heart_, Rambling Rose)--she perhaps ought to have quit while she was ahead, before becoming one of those interchangeable, all-but-faceless female "name" players in films that are jerry-built solely to show off the brawn of heftier co-stars (Clint and Kevin in A Perfect World, the T. rex and raptors in Jurassic Park). If she continues apace in this direction, Dern will doubtless soon carve out a niche like the ones Anne Archer and Bonnie Bedelia occupy in their tent-pole film series--the Jack Ryan and Die Hard franchises, respectively--and thus, like them, be forgotten altogether. We have a suggestion for Dern that may turn things around for her yet again, before it's too late: she should look to her parents for inspiration. She is, after all, the spawn of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, two scenery-chomping co-stars from a vintage Roger Corman biker cheapie called The Wild Angels. Having fought her way to the top of what passes for grade A product in these sorry days, Dern could reinvent herself by diving back into the Corman gene pool. We see her not in a biker-chick movie, but in another genre just aching to return to the spotlight: the women-in-prison flick. No, we don't mean the latter-day bores with the likes of Linda Blair and Sybil Danning showing their stuff in the showers; we're thinking of the hard-hitting, not hard-core, life-behind-bars movies of the '50s and '60s, starring tough dames like Ida Lupino, or co-starring even tougher dames like Hope Emerson. Movies like Caged, surefire stories that pit innocent inmates against hardened cons under the watchful eye--and roaming hands--of snarling, butch prison matrons. Playing a slammer matron would give Dern the kind of over-the-top, take-no-prisoners showcase she needs to demonstrate she can still surprise. What's more, this type of star-turn is proven Oscar bait--Emerson got a nomination for Caged. C'mon, admit it: wouldn't you love to see a decidedly unladylike Dern come roaring on-screen like a T. rex instead of playing a lady-in-distress running away from one? If, at heart, this sounds like just a B movie, what of it? There used to be intelligent, provocative films made under that label. Anyway, don't Dern's own folks amply demonstrate what long and varied careers are to be had by hammily embracing B material every now and then? If we could get her ear, here's what we'd tell Dern: "Laura, honey, we're thinking an uninhibited, unfettered romp like Caged could do for your career what Corman's Big Bad Mama did for Angie Dickinson's--juice it up, turn a few heads, keep things fresh. If you don't believe us, just ask Angie."

CHRIS O'DONNELL

This guy has the most angelic puss on the big screen right now. It's as if he's been eating an apple a day since his baby teeth came in and has never so much as flown over the "inner city" at 30,000 feet. The much younger Leonardo DiCaprio and even Edward Furlong look like confirmed decadents by comparison. That's why the ideal role for O'Donnell right now would be something that played with and against his looks, something decidedly post-coming-of-age. The John Singleton movie, with which he may follow up The Three Musketeers, could help bring him into this realm since it's about interracial college sex--but Singleton deals in screen fairy tales, not gritty detail (after all, he did Boyz N the Hood, not Menace II Society), so this is unlikely to be the most revealing challenge. The thing for O'Donnell to do, since he has already demonstrated that he can command the screen and seduce the camera, is to prove that he has range. For this task he would ideally take a role that allowed him to begin with the persona we've come to identify with him, and then rip it off like a mask and show us what's underneath. One film currently being written that would certainly do that is James Toback's pet project about the '90s acid renaissance on college campuses. Director/writer Toback, who penned Bugsy, centers his story on a Harvard basketball star who looks clean-cut enough on the surface, but is actually dumping games. As the kid finds himself in danger of getting busted for this trifle of amorality, his real troubles begin: he decides, being hip to the new wave of psychedelic excess at his elite school, to get away from his troubles by taking a heroic dose of LSD--and goes straight to hell in a disastrously long trip that he returns from only after drastic measures have been taken. Toback is terrific at fast dialogue, so O'Donnell would have a wide playing field to show off his stuff, and while the issues of the film are existential, it's a story that's basically plot-propelled. Hollywood is high on O'Donnell right now--unlike critics, the industry took note that The Three Musketeers was his movie and, even though that was a dubious honor, he gave exactly the ultra-lightweight performance the dodo-brained romp deserved. Now he needs to take a risk and show that he can do more than just be a natural. Playing a bad boy on a bad trip would be a good start.

PATRICIA ARQUETTE

Okay. Here comes some heresy. If ever there was a film so perfect and so perfectly of its time that it would be a sin to remake it, it's 1936's My Man Godfrey. On the face of it, this fabulous screwball comedy starring the brilliant Carole Lombard and the brilliant William Powell--brilliantly paired--cannot be remade! But inasmuch as Hollywood frequently talks about committing this sin, why not, just for fun, imagine a version we'd like (not, in other words, one resembling what happened when June Allyson and David Niven were paired up in the flatfooted 1957 redo). In the Lombard role of the glamorously daft younger sister of the rich Manhattan Bullock family, a casting director these days would probably think of Meg Ryan first. Not fresh enough. No, this would be the ideal role for just-emerging Patricia Arquette, whose terrific turn as the sweet, unconventional, sexy Alabama in True Romance is, down to the blonde hair in her eyes, just a '90s white-trash variation of Lombard's spoiled ditz Irene Bullock. Redoing My Man Godfrey '90s-style is--on paper, anyway--well within the realm of possibility because Godfrey is, after all, that timely phenomenon, a homeless man. Irene finds him in a dump when she's competing in a scavenger hunt, and she takes such a shine to him, she hires him as a butler to replace the latest in a long series of butlers the family has run through. The out-of-their-minds Bullocks--who, with the exception of the long-suffering father, seldom remember much about the escapades of the night before (throw in a few 12-step jokes to update)--are too nuts to work for, but our man Godfrey, being a reformed-rich-man-in-disguise (an ex-yuppie investment banker who got jilted when merger mania went bust and he lost his job?), effects his magic on the household, saves Mr. Bullock from bankruptcy (by playing foreign mutual funds?) and succumbs to the benevolently air-headed daughter's affections (and gets her to stop throwing up after every meal?). If directed well, Arquette should have no trouble with pepped-up screwball timing. (Of course, what director these days can do screwball--Rob Reiner, maybe?) The real question isn't about Arquette, or even the director, it's who could bring the necessary precision and dignity to Godfrey. Here's one suggestion: William Hurt.

WHITNEY HOUSTON

If there's one thing that Whitney Houston, who's in the position after the box-office success of The Bodyguard to become Hollywood's first female black superstar, ought to learn from the mistakes of the previous contender, Diana Ross, it's this: Do not fail to give the people what they want. Ross's big-screen career crashed and burned when she followed up the formulaic, and popular, one-two punch of doing a woman-singer-bio-pic (Lady Sings the Blues) and a standard-issue-soapy-romance (Mahogany) with, of all things, a musical classic she had retooled into a find-your-inner-child bomb (The Wiz). Ross might have saved her cinema status had she elected to then make another standard-issue-soapy-romance called, that's right, The Bodyguard, but she passed--as did her moment; she never made another feature. What audiences want, as Houston ought to already know from the grosses of The Bodyguard, is unadorned romantic schmaltz, the same old-fashioned cornball claptrap that's been successful since time began. Houston would now be wise to tackle a can't-miss tearjerker, so we're proposing she remake the oldest standard-issue-soapy-romance of them all, Madame X, already filmed in 1906, 1916, 1920, 1929, 1937 and 1966 for the big screen, and in 1981 as a TV movie. This story's durable, if unlikely, plot always reduces audiences to tears. It's the saga of a young bride who feigns her death in order to save her husband and infant son from scandal, then travels the globe drinking unhappily till, many years later, she kills a man (to save her family's good name, of course), only to wind up being tried for murder--unaware that her lawyer is, yes, her grown son who's unaware that his client is, yes, his own mother. Since every version of Madame X tinkers with the details, we'd recommend making Houston a former nightclub chanteuse so she can warble the occasional tune while boozin' and bar-hoppin' across the planet--and we'd also borrow, from the 1981 Tuesday Weld TV flick, the updated PC ending in which the lawyer turns out to be the title character's grown daughter. Now, if Houston follows our advice and plans after Madame X to make more standard-issue-soapy-romances, she could do worse than to remake Mahogany. And if she feels she must also enter the woman-singer-bio-pic sweepstakes, how about Houston playing Diana Ross?

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