Girls! Girls! Girls!

And keep your hot-headed feminist j'accuse to yourself: of course the same is true of under-30 actors, and that's half the point. People have been complaining about the eternal boyishness of Tom Cruise and Co. for so long that no one has bothered to notice the same has been happening to actresses. The boys aren't my problem. I'm only concerned about why the only interesting movie women I can find anymore make me feel like Hermie in Summer of 42.

Does anyone ever really have hearty, serious sexual fantasies about Marisa Tomei, Bridget Fonda or Kristy Swanson? Lara Flynn Boyle? Juliette Lewis? It's creepy--they look and act like high school sophomores. I'd just as soon give them a driving lesson. Are Sarah Jessica Parker (three little words, yet oh how they chill the blood), Mary Stuart Master-son or Mary-Louise Parker supposed to be our idea of brilliant, beautiful stars? (They could exchange middle names and I'd bet no one would notice.) How could Hollywood look us straight in the eye and ask us, in the span of one year, to believe Laura Dem as both a top-of-her-field paleo-botanist and an expert criminologist? She seems like she'd still be struggling with her GREs. Even worse, who could believe Julia Roberts as a crack reporter in I Love Trouble, or, in The Pelican Brief, as a law student so brilliant she solved two Supreme Court justice murders the entire FBI was stumped by? How could we believe Roberts as anything except a skittish media princess who looks like she never cracked a book in her life? It takes a ferociously talented actor to convince us he or she has an IQ when in fact they have none, and Roberts is several banana curls away from being ferociously talented. Perhaps the clearest sign of how things may be heading--back to the cradle--is cute-as-a-button Winona Ryder in Reality Bites. She plays a genius-level college grad, and yet when fast-food manager David Spade asks her to perform simple addition in her head, she fails. That must have been one helluva college she went to, we should be thinking. But we're not: her vapidity makes perfect sense since no one could believe her doing higher math any-way. I can hardly imagine Ryder being admitted into an R-rated movie.

What will we be left with a few years hence, when Meryl Streep becomes Shirley MacLaine and people like Moira Kelly and Gabrielle Anwar get cast as lawyers, detectives, reporters and other typically adult characters because there's no one else around? The whole moviescape will start to resemble Bugsy Malone, or a Michael J. Fox movie. The simple task of finding an under-36 actress to play a responsible young mother could drive the best casting director in the business to drink lye. I'd trust Lara Flynn Boyle with a toddler for no longer than it takes me to eat out and catch a movie--and I'd still call home at least once.

Picture this: in a few years, some studio decides to remake, oh, I don't know, Anna Karenina. I'm not advocating this by any means, what do you take me for? Simply speculating: the last version was a 1985 TV movie (starring, of all people. Jacqueline Bisset), and some jackass may think it would be due time for another. Meryl, Glenn, Geena, Sigourney et al. will be out of the running. Who are they going to get? Ashley Judd? Sherilyn Fenn? Please. Then again, the prospect of watching Fenn throw herself under a train may be tempting.

What's happening? Are actresses simply refusing to reach adulthood, like Shari Lewis, or is something larger and more insidious at work? You can't blame it all on an industry run by middle-aged men. True, decent roles for women are as precious as two-pound pearls, but the talent pool is so shallow that a freak deluge of meaty parts would be wasted on the lingering prom days of Robin Wright, Julie Warner and Madchen Amick. This is one of those rare cases when "the good old days" actually were a lot better than the present. Being 20 or over used to mean being a movie grownup, sexually and otherwise. Let's put it all into perspective. Garbo--talk about someone who seemed to have done and seen it all right from the start--was 28 when she played Queen Christina, and 29 when she played Anna Karenina for the second time. Grace Kelly was 22 when she made High Noon, the same age as Winona in Reality Bites. Lauren Bacall was 19 in To Have and Have Not, the same age as Juliette Lewis in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. Myrna Loy was only 28 when she played the coolest, most sophisticated wife in movie history in The Thin Man, as was the weary, wonderful Gloria Grahame when Lee Marvin tossed hot coffee in her face in The Big Heat. Vivien Leigh shouldered Gone With the Wind at 25. Joan Fontaine was 22 in Rebecca; Elizabeth Taylor was 23 in Giant and 30 in Cleopatra. Marisa Tomei is 30 now.

Believe me, I'm not one of those pathetic dipshits who natter on blindly about the Golden Age of Movies. Most of the movies made between the '30s and '50s sucked; we only see the good ones. All the same, and relatively speaking, actresses used to seem richer, wiser, riper than they do now. These were women you believed had lives. Even talentless duds like Luna Turner (25 in The Postman Always Rings Twice) could radiate experience with-out trying. Take the generally respected Uma Thurman, who's 24 now, and compare her to, say, Veronica Lake, who at 22 had done This Gun for Hire, Sullivan's Travels and I Married a Witch. What about Winona Ryder, you say? Look, I agree, Winona's delicious, but is this the best we've got? When is she going to play a woman? The kind I could imagine rubbing virgin olive oil on without feeling like Humbert Humbert? (If I were Christian Bale in Little Women, I'd have skipped over the kids and gone straight for Susan Sarandon's Marmee.)

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