No matter how sexy actors may be on their own, something magical has to happen between them in a love scene or you end up with just another boring Richard Gere/Kim Basinger grope. Once again, we investigate the mystery of sexual chemistry on the big screen.
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Sexual chemistry is one of the invisible physical forces that make the movie world go round Without it, we'd go to movies about as often as we vote. Real, jaw-slackening, fuse-blowing sexual electricity is what movies are, and always have been, all about--if movies were layer cakes, sexual chemistry would be the mousse filling that's secretly holding the whole mess together. Often, we're not even conscious of magnetic attraction in movies. We just know something is working--as in, I believe those two stars would hump like drunken poodles if the director and crew would just turn their backs for 20 seconds. As with good breast surgery, you can't always say exactly why you know it when you see it, but you do.
Few movie principles are as fascinating or mysterious, and none is as slippery as those governing sexual chemistry. All the federally-funded think tanks in the world couldn't rationalize or codify them. Filmmakers can only throw actors together like pandas and hope they'll mate. Most often they don't, and there's no accounting for why.
Take a broad survey, and only a few marginally helpful guidelines appear: Don't ever pair up real-life couples. (Yeah, yeah, Bogart and Bacall, but look at the evidence on the downside: Burton and Taylor, McQueen and MacGraw, Ryan and Quaid, Cruise and Kidman, Baldwin and Basinger, Griffith and Johnson, etc., etc.). Watch out for actors who are prettier than almost any female co-star you can find (this means Keanu Reeves, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp. etc.). Don't expect Nick Nolte or Willem Dafoe or Lolita Davidovich or Juliette Lewis, for Chrissake, to spark it up with anyone. Don't strand your lucky twosome in a hotel room or on a boat or on a stupid island resort for sadomasochists for the whole goddamn movie. And don't ever, even in jest, say the words "Dustin Hoffman." Beyond that, you're on your own.
Movie history is a toxic dump site of fizzled chemistry experiments, many of which we have no empirical explanation for. All the same, there are crash-and-burn examples that could've been averted had a scintilla of common sense been exercised: if you were a producer, would you have missed the neon HAZARDOUS WASTE sign blinking over Julia Roberts's and Nick Nolte's heads in I Love Trouble? Would you have supposed Richard Gere and Julia Ormond in First Knight could keep even an audience of subway rats awake? Would you have allowed Robert Altman to lock Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts together in a hotel room for the entirety of Ready to Wear? (Maybe it's Julia's fault-- think about it: Dying Young, The Pelican Brief, Something to Talk About...) A romantic subplot in Waterworld was a bad idea with horns, but once you went with it, would you have called in Jeanne Tripplehorn? Who thought that Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo in Outbreak would ever, on any planet, be caught dead married to each other? You'd think that most movies were made by people who have never had sex. Maybe it's time we took over the factory; we can't do any worse than The Specialist or Nine Months.
When chemistry does occur on the big screen, it can take both you and your glands by complete surprise and make an ordinary or even crummy movie light up like a dry Christmas tree with faulty wiring. A sex scene is not required; a serious flirt can be worth a hundred slurp-and-roll, body-doubled bouts of intercourse. Few things are as entertaining as watching two people lock hormonal auras and forget there's anyone else in the room.
Movies used to supply this kind of wattage all the time--just check out practically any old Cary Grant or Myrna Loy or Clark Gable or Ingrid Bergman classic. Chemistry was all they had before tits and butt were R-rated de rigueur. Humphrey Bogart, the ugliest man ever to be an American movie star (and his name was Humphrey), was so charismatic he could establish sexual rapport with a desk. Carole Lombard had so much juice running through her you'd think maybe each of her co-stars should've worn a lead suit.
But where are we today, hot-currency-wise? Movieline and I first scanned this mucky terrain two years ago, asking friends, family members, bartenders and perfect strangers what their recent A-list choices were, and all of the most notorious examples turned up: Bull Durham, Witness, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Big Easy, Body Heat, The Last of the Mohicans, etc. Now, a few dozen dull moons later, it's time to readdress the issue, and because everybody treated me like a perv last time, this time I'm relying on my own acumen and insatiable yen for cinematic smut. Though I do slouch back to the mid-'80s occasionally, we're mostly talking about the '90s here--the state-of-the-art of getting down and staying down, as an old girlfriend of mine used to say. In an otherwise sorry movie world of plastic plug-in fireplace logs, these are the real heat.
Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in Out of Africa
I've had it with the commonly held tenet that Meryl Streep is immune to sexual electrostatics. I think she leaks sexy warmth like a dam made of Peg-Board. When everyone else is thinking, What an accent, I'm thinking, I'd give a toe just to smell her. Granted, she has had bad luck with co-stars, but what about Kurt Russell in Silkwood? Kevin Kline in Sophie's Choice? And when she's standing next to an impossibly young and golden Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter, they're so perfect for each other you don't even need to see the sex scene, it's right there in their rumpled grins. But most of all, I'd cite Out of Africa, an eruption of old-fashioned, hyper-romantic fireworks, complete with exotic locale, Big Blond Hunter and a late-night rut in a safari tent that sticks to you like mosquito netting. Who would've guessed that Streep and Robert Redford, of all people, would mesh so beautifully?
The movie's packed like a Tokyo subway with poetic foreplay scenes mat are all like that galvanizing moment during a date when you know you're on for the whole night. Redford languorously washes Streep's hair by a river while reciting Coleridge; they shoot matching lions together, he slowly wipes a drop of blood from her bitten lip: they waltz around the campfire, all alone on the savanna...She'd have to be a year-old corpse not to screw his blue eyes brown. Later, they're undressing in the tent. "If you said anything now," she pants after a kiss she seems to have had a dream in the middle of, "I'll believe it." In bed following an orgasmic plane ride above the clouds, he whispers, "Don't move," and she says, "I want to move,' and he says, "Don't move," Zoiks.
Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek in Desperado
A berserk, guacamole-soaked taco salad of a movie, true, but check out Antonio, all leopard-like body and sexy glower, bouncing waves of humidity off Salma, the most scrumptious señorita ever to run a border-town bookstore. It's clear that these two would sniff each other out in a perfume factory, and it helps that they're easily the two most god-awful gorgeous people in Mexico. They're so beautiful it seems like they hardly have a choice--they're like captain of the football team and head cheerleader of Chihuahua High. Neither would settle for less.
The movie's so literally hot and sweaty all you can think about is messy afternoon sex with a Corona on the windowsill. But sexual chemistry often has little to do with the horizontal hula per se; for us, because we're not having the sex in question, the stretch of highway between banter and foreplay throws off a lot more sparks. Eventually Banderas and Hayek do get down to the dirty work at the crossroads, but not before she chirps sarcasms at his desperate action-hero shtick and picks bullets out of his shoulder with a grin on her face. When the sex does come along, though, they're really sweating. You never see sex sweat in movies. As far as I'm concerned, if you don't work up a sweat, you suck in bed. Still, you'd think that once they'd found each other, they'd leave this toothless, roachy no-man's land behind in a cloud of dust. To hell with the pointless vendetta, let's go to California, find a clean hotel room and play some night baseball.
John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction
John Travolta and Uma Thurman only occupy a quarter of this movie together, but it's such dreamy, cool shit they do with each other that it must be mentioned. They speak fluent Quentinese, of course, and you can see their synapses start to sizzle when they realize they're getting each other's jokes and understanding each other's retro-hip lingo. They do nothing but chat, but lucky for them it's the best written chat anyone's heard for eons.
From their note-it-and-use-it-later-at-a-party diner patter ("Don't you hate that?" "Hate what?" "Uncomfortable silences") to the triumphant Twist Contest boogie and later dalliances (Thurman's pie-eyed dance to that Urge Overkill cover of the old Neil Diamond song is a killer), these two get off on each other so well you know that if Thurman hadn't OD'd on Travolta's smack, they probably would've had sex, Travolta would've been whacked by monster hubby Ving Rhames and the movie would've been a lot shorter. Come to think of it, it would've been The Nicole Simpson Story.
Winona Ryder and Christian Bale in Little Women
We all know there's no sex in Alcott. But this movie gets so much right it can't help producing, like a red ripe cherry on top of a charlotte russe, the should a-been sexual reality between Winona Ryder's earnest Jo and Christian Bale's gracious, lovable, eminently trustworthy Laurie. From the first moment they meet it's clear even to Aunt March that the two of them belong wrapped up in each other's bear's paw quilts. They may have been too well cast. Everyone has always griped affectionately about Alcott having Jo refuse Laurie and eventually mate with the slightly seedy Mr. Bhaer; here the flummox is compounded, because Ryder's rejection of Bale and union with Gabriel Byrne, who looks as if he reeks of stale tobacco and whiskey, feels like sabotage. We got to see Hester Prynne and Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale hump like pagans. Why not Jo and Laurie feverishly coupling in the attic? Ah, well. Maybe that was Alcott's point: sex isn't always destiny.
Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman in While You Were Sleeping
This movie was so aggressively adorable I kept looking for Jim Henson's name in the ending credits. Everybody in it was as cute as a bug--no one is cuter than Sandra Bullock, and Bill Pullman has matured into such a modest, rugged cuteness that you want to put him in your pocket. So, you don't think cute people have sex, too? Sure they do: it is, we can presume, cute sex, and though I can't vouch for it personally, I'm sure it's close to or just as good as regular sex. When Bullock and Pullman crinkle their eyes at each other and start slipping around in the snow, they both seem so happy that they found someone just as cute as they are. You can almost picture them naked in bed wearing match-ing giant Tasmanian devil slippers while "Daydream Believer" plays in the background and a puppy chases his own tail nearby.
Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands in A Room with a View
My wife still gets all hot under the hell over the way Julian Sands kisses Helena Bonham Carter's neck and chest in the last shot of this masterpiece, which comes as close to a million-dollar weekend getaway as any movie ever made. It's true, that last scene at the window is a hair-raiser; if the movie had lasted for a few more moments, we would've seen Edwardian lace fly like confetti at homecoming. (What I wouldn't do to see Bonham Carter, that apple-cheeked angel, on her back, ruffles in the air, her eyes glazed with lust...) The whole movie revolves around the instinctive goona-goonas Sands and Bonham Carter have for each other but can't consummate. They say nothing to each other, and yet he knows, and she knows but can't admit it.
The key moment is their first kiss: he strides up to her in the middle of an Italian barley field, grabs her and starts eating her alive like this is Emmanuelle in Tuscany. She bites back, and for a brief instant, memories you have of Bonham Carter in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Sands in Boxing Helena evaporate completely. That one moment of passion punches a hole in this movie the size of Reverend Beebe's balls (watch the film). From then on, we're wondering how many petticoats Sands is going to have to unpeel before he gets his eyes on the prize.
Meg Ryan and Andy Garcia in When a Man Loves a Woman
How sexy can a movie be when it deals with alcoholism, co-dependency, kids and recovery culture? (Why didn't they throw in a few Republican congressmen and finish us off?) But as a matter of fact, we have Andy Garcia as the Solid Bronze überhusband and Meg Ryan as the snarky, swivel-hipped substance abuser; they could be playing George and Barbara Bush and the amps would still flow. If you can bite the bullet through the acres of suffering and co-dependency BS, this is one seriously romantic movie. Ryan cuts her natural perkiness with an air of self-destructive crisis, and Garcia's charms curl into everyone's hair, even little Tina Majorino's. Honestly, would you tope like an Irish sailor if you went to bed with this man every night? Wouldn't you want to remember everything the next day? When Garcia confronts Ryan at an AA meeting and says to an oblivious group of ex-rummies that his wife has "600 different kinds of smiles ... they can make you laugh out loud, just like that," the two lock lips, and mean it--these two aren't married in real life? Why haven't I ever seen Ryan kiss hubby Dennis Quaid with this much conviction?
Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in Emily Brönte's Wuthering Heights
However devoted I am to the 1939 Laurence Olivier-Merle Oberon version, this English corker (seen here last year on TNT) was raw, spellbinding stuff. Fiennes's Heathcliff is a fire-breathing psycho-hunk, Binoche's Cathy is a carefree little slip of a material girl, and they're radiant together, at least until their paths arc separated by fate and madness and all hell breaks loose. Any nagging unpleasant memories you have of Fiennes as the Nazi from Schindler's List or Binoche as the ruinous fiennes in Damage will finally dissipate in favor of the primal bonding going on here. Life on the moors is one long, lusty look in this movie--when Fiennes helps a reluctantly blue-blooded Binoche onto her horse for a ride, their secret smiles speak volumes about the hot, horsey sex in the hayloft they'd rather be having, right now.
Even later, after she's married to dweeb Edgar Linton and Heathcliff has come back to avenge his broken heart, you can still hear their engines revving. "Let us kiss goodbye as Cathy and Heathcliff of long ago," Binoche pleads, and when they do, with their eyes closed and their bodies shuddering, you think they might not make it out alive. When they break (if there had been a ref around, he would've had to pry them apart), Binoche looks like someone slipped her a mickey.
Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette in True Romance
I had sex in a phone booth once, though it wasn't on a Midwestern highway in broad daylight, as it is here. And she didn't look, or weigh, anything like Patricia Arquette, but that's OK, because I'm not Christian Slater, our dialogue wasn't written by Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Walken wasn't trying to kill me. In fact, I don't remember much about it at all. Certainly not whether or not she tasted "like a peach," as Slater says of Arquette, awestruck by his luck at having such a pert and vivacious young thing sitting on his pecker all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Playing low-class losers on the road with no prospects and a trunkload of trouble, Slater and Arquette rhyme in this movie like ketchup and fries. They don't care about condoms or pimps or hit men or anything at all except slopping it up like a pair of hillbillies. This is Tarantinoland, of course, so there are plenty of trials by buckshot, but you believe these two are wading through the gore and mayhem just to see each other on the other side.
Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise
Not enough people saw this little beauty, in which Delpy and Hawke stoke each other's furnaces for an entire night's slow walk through Vienna. Perfect strangers, they helplessly link up and spend the rest of the movie trying to overcome whatever sense of courtesy and correctness it was that prevented them from having sex right there on the train. Their climactic sex scenario--on an Austrian lawn with a bottle of wine in the dead of night--is a lonely vacation wet dream, pure and simple. Again, the chemistry is mostly talk--from real, modest, uncertain people, not movie gods--but it's a perfect fit: I Fell in love with Delpy, my wife wanted to take Hawke home and leave me in the parking lot. What more could you ask?
Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns
"The thought of busting Batman makes me feel all... dirty," she says with a smirk. Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is a hell-bent, leather-bound supervixen just a few steps away from a total psychosexual meltdown. She's also a tramp and a half if you've got the stomach for it, and Michael Keaton's Batman, a dysfunctional weirdo in his own right, does. Take your pick between Catwoman/Batman scenes or Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne scenes (you can tell your therapist why. I don't want to hear it), because both crackle. Dancing at a costume ball where they are the only unmasked guests, Keaton and Pfeiffer are effortlessly simpatico--"No hard feelings, then," he says about an aborted date; "Actually, semi-hard, I'd say," she coos. Their kiss-- preceded by the mutual realization that they'd earlier kicked the crap out of each other dressed in leather, vinyl and hard rubber--is a desperate and crazy love-clutch from two hopeless, costumed alter egos.
Things get kinkier: few of us will ever forget Pfeiffer's impulsive licking of Keaton's face when she's got him pinned to a rooftop. The sounds of squeaking leather are enough to make you fish that Frederick's of Hollywood catalog out of the trash and reconsider those dog collars and studded panties. This movie is really all about the loneliness of succumbing to a fetish, and it's kinda sad: however perfect they are for each other, the two must go oft alone to await their separate sequels. Batman to his cave, and Catwoman, that working girl-turned-bughouse sex outlaw, to the snowy rooftops of Gotham.
Val Kilmer and Nicole Kidman in Batman Forever
Kidman is supposed to be a brilliant psychologist here, but she's such a wild-eyed slut you have to assume she screwed her way to a doctorate. Kilmer doesn't have Michael Keaton's vulnerability--you gel the sense this guy likes being a fetishistic nut job in a hard rubber suit, thank you very much--but his glowering machismo is the perfect foil for Kidman's voracious manhandler. Once again, fetishism reigns; she has no interest in Bruce Wayne--too handsome and wealthy, I guess--but only in Batman the Giant Walking Dildo. When they meet, she's practically raving with lust, while he's wondering how he could get naked and still be Batman--a sociosexual conundrum for superheroes everywhere. Especially those whose black body armor makes women act like alley cats.
Jeff Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys
Two show-biz orphans squinting bitterly through a fog of cigarette smoke. Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Bridges dance together on a hotel veranda and think better of having the sex that any one of us could die happy having had. "Oh God." Pfeiffer sighs dizzily, staggering for a moment in the moonlight. These two really are nitro and glycerin, all the way to the post-New Year's Eve hack-rub scene, which is an indisputable landmark in back-rub scene history. Jeff is just dispensing a helpful, therapeutic hand here, remember, as he unzips her dress down to her ass, plays "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" lightly on her spine and then slips around and grabs her frontal lobes. We should've seen it coming, of course, the way Pfeiffer undulated on top of the piano singing "Makin' Whoopee" (which, as we all know, is an old euphemism for giving someone a massage). She's gazing at Bridges, crooning, surging and heaving like an otter in estrus--even Catwoman didn't go this far. If Bridges didn't take her to bed finally, he'd probably wake up to find her sitting on his alarm clock wailing for it to go off.
Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in Groundhog Day
No matter how much you may like them, it seems unlikely that either Bill Murray or Andie MacDowell would develop chemistry with anyone, much less each other. But the berserk, falling-dominoes form of this movie, which takes place on a single day repeated thousands of times, makes it not only believable but inevitable. I knew, as many unattractive, acne-tortured high school nimrods did, that being amusing was often the only way into a girl's Skivvies, and MacDowell's exactly the kind of too-pretty, warm-cider-with-a-cinnamon-stick type of girl that might dig you if you made her laugh hard enough. Murray's weaselly schmuck tries every dishonest thing he can think of to get MacDowell's legs open, but eventually he learns to just relax, be nice to everybody and keep the jokes coming. Naturally, he gets laid. I could've told him.
Now, I didn't buy MacDowell as the Laura Ashley-coordinated slut from Four Weddings and a Funeral, but I buy her here, going all trancelike and breathy whenever Murray begins to seem a little too perfect. The antique- B&B-four-poster sex they have is left up to our imaginations, and that's a good thing considering who we're talking about, and considering that movies rarely gel actual sex right.
So, do we know anything more, anything empirically useful, about sexual chemistry than we did before? Let's recap:
• It's fun to see women in petticoats get horny
• Michelle Pfeiffer can have chemistry with anyone as long as she's miserable
• Funny can be sexy, and funny is essential if the actor is ugly and/or pockmarked
• If I had to decide between belly-bumping with Julie Delpy, Helena Bonham Carter or Meryl Streep circa 1985, my head would explode
Well, we may not know much, but we know more than whoever's responsible for Exit to Eden. Real sexual chemistry is a rare beast, but we're never discouraged in our search because we know movies are a zoo, and actors are the rhesus monkeys: most of the lime nothing much is going on in the monkey house, but every now and then you catch the bastards bent over a branch, startled, but halfway to kingdom come.
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Michael Atkinson wrote about aging actors in the November 1995 Movieline.