A Star is Born

Julia Roberts in PRETTY WOMAN

In the entire history of Hollywood few breakthroughs have ever registered as high on the star-maker Richter scale as Julia Roberts's grand entrance in Pretty Woman. Even Sharon Stone's blast-off with Basic Instinct pales slightly by comparison. Stone's turn as a provocative psycho went so directly for the groin that the intensity of her screen presence was not matched by the range of response it generated. Stone herself backed up that performance with calculated aftershocks off-screen--and gave her breakthrough staying power. Roberts's Pretty Woman coup, on the other hand, was so broadly powerful by itself that none of the ludicrous, off-putting stuff she did afterward dented her following.

Hollywood lives for the special moments when an actor's strengths collide so head-on with a role's opportunities that a megaton explosion like, Roberts's lights up the sky--and the marquee--in near-perpetuity. Insiders can claim they saw it coming as early as 1988's Mystic Pizza, but if you watch Pizza, you'll see that Roberts's presence hadn't blossomed yet. She was interestingly beautiful and had attitude, yes, but she was a diamond in the rough--a diamond so rough you couldn't be sure it was really a diamond. The silly but apt phrase "star power" was appropriately in operation by the time people got a look at the new. sleeked-down, studio-improved Roberts in Steel Magnolias (it helped, of course, that she was surrounded by drawling harpies), and Hollywood recognized her the way an arctic seal can smell its own pup a hundred yards away on a crowded iceberg. She nabbed an Oscar nomination for that performance, not because it was great, but because it was magic.

That magic got her cast opposite Richard Gere in the role that let her assets shine with absolute dazzle. Those assets were: a charisma that defeated resistance to suspending disbelief; an emotional vulnerability that extorted sympathy; and a radiating self-possession that inspired admiration. On top of all that, Roberts's smile, soon to be as beloved and maligned as Tom Cruise's, showed itself to be more powerful than the most potent dose of Method acting--it took on the iconic wattage of the Golden Arches. The gaiety and naturalness of her God-given trademark struck a chord in audiences that audiences will always, justifiably, want struck.

And so Pretty Woman made hundreds of millions of dollars, and made Julia Roberts. It is one of the interesting things about breakthroughs, though, that the world is often more ready for them than the actor. Sharon Stone was ready. Roberts, perhaps, was not. Both women have made a number of bad movies since grabbing the gold ring, but Roberts has been the more offensive wielder and more flagrant squanderer of acquired clout (this is a little like comparing Stalin to Hitler, but you see the point). It's a testament to the power of the Pretty Woman breakthrough that audiences are still eager to see whatever glimpse they can of the Roberts they fell in love with at first sight. In fact, Roberts's career since Pretty Woman can best be viewed as a test of that love.

Brad Pitt in LEGENDS OF THE FALL

Brad Pitt's first wake-up call to Hollywood--his larcenous lover-boy hitchhiker cameo in Thelma & Louise--was so loud and definitive that Tinseltown citizens wondered why it took Pitt so long (three fast years) to finally hit. Thanks to a combination of his own conscious strategy and gut instinct, plus the luck of the draw, Pitt's screen life between Thelma and his true breakthrough, Legends of the Fall, unfolded in a way that built remarkable flexibility into his image, so that unlike many other stars (like Marilyn Monroe), his success raised him to the relative heaven of true career choice instead of bogging him down in the confines of audience expectation.

Pitt is a Millennium guy, dispositionally so far beyond the conventional glamour of his Dean-like looks that you can imagine him spinning out with frustration if he had to devastate us too often. Had his breakthrough film been the one it would have been if a few more things had gone right with the picture--Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It--he wouldn't have had time to hit us with the grungily derivative psycho in the misguided Kalifornia, or the hilariously detached doper in the not-at-all-misguided True Romance.

Though it looked like (and may well have been) a self-destructive impulse busily trying to trash a career rather than an artistic drive to broaden one, Pitt's insistence on playing strange and/or ugly characters turned out to be in perfect keeping with the late '90s emerging Zeitgeist--heroically cranky disaffection. Hence, none of his bombs was a big enough mushroom cloud to contaminate his career. Instead, each one managed to add a little edge and scruff to the indelible, ravishing movie star presence that had beamed out of A River Runs Through It. As it happened, River was a little too classy (that is, slow) for its own good, so by the time Pitt played almost the exact same character all over again in Legends of the Fall, and his tragic visage once more took on the Montana mountain ranges in a head-to-head competition for sheer natural beauty, his audience had acquired at least a dim notion that the nastier aspects of heartbreaker Tristan were just as vital a part of the Brad Pitt picture as the killer charm.

Legends had an impact far beyond its ticket sales. It showed Pitt in his most broadly appealing incarnation in a full-tilt romantic tragedy that hit audiences in the hearts, and other regions south, and had them practically paying in advance for his next movies. That's what breakthroughs must do. A movie like Interview With the Vampire, which gave Pitt's good looks and florid sexuality a bravely creepy, perverse spin, works much better in the aftermath of a Legends, when we know the envelope is being pushed, not invented. A Seven absolutely has to come afterward-- a savvy, gripping, meaningless exercise in style is no way to win immortality, but it's an excellent way to state your sensibility once you've got everybody looking.

A blatantly movie-stealing, Oscar-bait supporting role like the lunatic in 12 Monkeys is how you get people to look at you in a new way. But Legends of the Fall is the film that got everybody looking at Brad Pitt in the first place, and while this actor's ambitious efforts to play against and away from what people saw in Legends can be viewed as commendable, they would very probably be unnecessary if Legends hadn't done its work.

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