Remember Kathleen Turner in Body Heat? She was 26. There is no 26-year-old actress you could cast in that part today. Whatever happened to the idea of actresses under 30 who didn't seem like jailbait?
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What you're holding in your hands is actually a magazine about sex. And not just because Movieline has the general editorial disposition of an oyster-eating sailor on shore leave, which it may be said to have. It's because movies themselves are about sex, all movies, even those starring Whoopi Goldberg. Sitting quietly in the dark, gazing up worshipfully at massive but ostensibly private images of human beauty and excitement is an act saturated with sexual thrill. Watching movies is voyeuristic, scopophilic and perverse. That's a Freudian fact, and countless academicians have the tenure and the forest-leveling reams of film theory to prove it. But who needs them?
Check out James Stewart in Rear Window: he's not just a Peeping Tom looking in those windows, he's us, the audience, watching several movies at once, immobilized by a big plaster-cast erection. Movies are, and have been for a century now, about as much fun as we're allowed to have without having to rinse off later.
So sexual appetite has a lot to do with one's yen for cinema, which goes a long way to explaining Keanu Reeves's career. Or anyone else's, for that matter. From Hedy Lamarr to Robert Taylor to Steve McQueen to Sharon Stone, movie stars can and do coast on sex appeal for decades. We don't mind--in fact, we like it that way. If we wanted to improve ourselves, we'd all be reading Joyce Carol Oates's 83rd 1000-page novel, or paying to see the latest pack of NEA-funded dimblefucks make performance art out of the first time they were cracked across the teeth by their mothers for being obnoxious brats, or watching Bill Moyers snuffle right up some aging, sweater-wearing poet's butt on PBS. But we don't want to improve ourselves. What we want is rapture in the Church of Disreputable Daydreams. We want our lusts glorified on 20-foot screens in Dolby-Surround Sound.
Hollywood has always specialized in locating and/or manufacturing not-at-all-obscure objects of desire; sex is the tungsten in the system's undying night-light. But in the last few years I've become very concerned for the state of movies as an asylum for wayward desires. Which of the current twentysomethings is even remotely believable as anything but a spoiled, overpaid, overhyped, post-teenage Kewpie doll? Last time I checked, women were women at 21. And women are why 49 percent of the moviegoing population buys tickets. Not girls--let's make that vodka-clear--but women, females with histories, depth, style. What we need, and what we haven't got, are a generation of young movie women who are, in the fullest sense of the word, desirable. There's plenty of jailbait out there, and plenty of thirty- and forty somethings, but few twentysomething actresses who don't look like they feel they'd have to call me "Mr. Atkinson."
Sophistication and flawless beauty weren't always mutually exclusive, not even as recently as Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (she was 26). We used to be able to find sexual interest in young actresses with-out feeling unsavory. Look at the landscape today: so few women, so many girls--scores of sorority babes. Girl Scouts, slut cheerleaders and grunge strumpets, but so few believable adults, I spend much of my movie time wishing I could tell the whole gaggle of pajama partyers to put the Barbies away, turn out the light, go to sleep and wake up a few life lessons later.
Because, frankly, it's boring. After the initial hilarity of, say, Penelope Ann Miller throwing her back out trying to convince us she's a sophisticated lady in Carlito's Way and The Shadow, we're crushed by the torpid, snoring, criminally trivial girliness her whole tribe brings to nearly every movie. It's like the tedium of a school play when someone else's kids are doing the acting.
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.)
What's going on? Is it a conspiracy? The work of some powerful cabal of molesters led by Roman Polanski and Joey Buttafuoco, with the sole purpose of crowding our media lives with Lolitas? Sandra Bullock's career supports this hypothesis: after warming the cockles of filmgoers' hearts in Demolition Man and Speed, Bullock, only 27, has reportedly reaped about $2 million a pop for her next four films, and she's associate producer on the last. In an unprecedented lovesick swoon, Hollywood has made Bullock (who is, yes, cuddly as all hell) a major player on the basis of how crinkly her eyes get when she smiles. You'd think she'd invented the wheel.
Not that I'd kick Bullock--or any of the other little chippies in question-- out of bed in real life. But only slack-jawed troglodyte shut-ins with names like Mort or Roger who read Easyriders and Heavy Metal and have the unconscious habit of sniffing their fingertips can stay excited by watching them on-screen ad infinitum. No, for the rest of us, sex, real or not, involves the whole person, and what would any of these girls do in mid- or post-rut except annoy the shit out of you? Who would you want to lie around in kimonos with, eating Wheaties and philosophizing, like Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon did in Bull Durham? Jennifer Connelly? lone Skye? You'd end up explaining to them how to program their VCR, What fun.
What we need are women of substance, although what "substance" is, precisely, and where desperate young actresses might buy some, is your best guess. Let's just assume we know it when we see it. which happens occasionally. There are young actresses at work who manage to convince us they've made every one of those 26 or 27 years on earth count for something. It's just that they're a distinct minority. Lili Taylor and Patricia Arquette come to mind, but neither is terribly beautiful or has a terribly impressive filmography. Nicole Kidman may stand alone as the only fully adult, regularly working under-30 actress today, and that despite Days of Thunder, Billy Bathgate and Far and Away. In both Malice and My Life, whatever you may think of either film, Kidman seems to be. miracle of miracles, a 25-year-old adult woman. It's nearly impossible, in fact, to picture her any younger-- either spending winter afternoons stoned with her dormmates watching "General Hospital" (which is how coeds behaved when I was in school), or accusing an English professor of sexual harassment because Chaucer used the word "cum" in The Canterbury Tales (which is how I hear coeds behave today). She's no Ingrid Bergman (who was 26 when she made Casablanca), but at least Kidman doesn't seem on the verge of joining a sorority.
Now, if only Kidman could land a real role, which is a different discussion entirely. If one did come along. it'd probably go to Laura Dern--which is like giving whiskey and the car keys to a teenage boy, only much duller.
Let's take an admittedly half-assed tally of some of the latest crimes against maturity (a thorough study is sorely needed):
- Marisa Tomei in The Paper, as an ace New York City reporter with inside connections--that would mean she'd have lo write for a living.
- Wasn't being asked to buy the 90-pound Juliette Lewis kung fu-kicking three 240-pound rednecks to death at the outset of Natural Born Killers just a bit much? She couldn't kick a gar-den slug to death.
- A teenage Drew Barrymore as an expert frontier horsewoman in Bad Girls? They must think I'm as stupid as a grouper. The movie's title was bracingly honest, though.
- Bridget Fonda as a trained assassin in cocktail skirts in Point of No Return? Next it'll be Fairuza Balk as Ma Barker.
- Sarah Jessica Parker as a cop in Striking Distance; Parker couldn't approximate a serious professional demeanor if she'd been hired to drive an ice cream truck.
- Nice little Winona Horowitz, er, Ryder, dressing up like Emma Bovary in all of those cute and expensive costume productions, enunciating her lines so carefully, batting those adorable doe eyes. I wonder if she'll try acting when she grows up, or go straight to medical school.
- Julie Warner as some kind of NASA extraterrestrial expert or something in Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (there, now, that career didn't take long, did it?), in which her greatest achievement was discerning the alien parasites from humans by showing them her cleavage. Whoever yawns is human.
Now compare these coquettish little Marcia Bradys with what some other actresses their age were doing years ago. Olivia de Havilland was 22 in Gone With the Wind. Gene Tierney was 23 in Laura. Ginger Rogers was 25 in Stage Door, Liz Taylor was Rebecca in Ivanhoe when she was 19. Jean Harlow had already changed the movies' attitudes about tough whores and sexual camaraderie by the lime she died at 26, and she never played a "girl." At 27 in My Man Godfrey. Carole Lombard radiated more wit, brilliance and idealized sexiness than any whole generation of actresses since. Merle Oberon was 27 in Wuthering Heights, and so was Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront and de Havilland in To Each His Own were both 29. There's not a babysitter, ingénue or debutante in the bunch.
But today, having survived Glenn Close as an "attractive" single sexpot. Sean Young's nude scenes in Love Crimes and Madonna, period, and then stuck out our bruised chins for more, we're gonna get rewarded with the sight of Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan in a remake of The Women. If that's the way things are going, I'd just as soon quit going to movies and start attending Roller Derbys, where a woman can only pass for a fresh-faced coed at the risk of having her perfect front teeth slammed right down her windpipe. It's gratuitously brutal, and narratively it's repetitive at best, but at least there's nothing unsavory going on.
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Michael Atkinson wrote about sacred cows in the November '94 Movieline.