In Defense of Julia Roberts

If only, somehow, Julia Roberts could be as complicated on-screen as the feelings she prompts in one who looks carefully at her career. If that were possible, she might become a real actress, instead of remaining just a great beauty who gives off an uncanny sense of being flawed or damaged, and needing to be rescued. The flirt's secret message to her viewers is, after all, exactly that: Rescue me. But the serious actress must learn that that task is hers alone. And as a start, she has to take charge of her own smile.

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Roberts's landslide grin may be the most seductive signal on-screen today. The hurt or wariness in her eyes vanishes when the chasmlike mouth opens beneath them. It is hugely appealing, very sexy, wicked, sly, yet vulnerable and spontaneous, with every promise of an authentic, dark sense of humor. You can't smile as fast as she does without getting the joke and being spiked by it. She likes to smile, and she has a honking, helpless laugh that's louder than her leanness seems to deserve. You know she could make you laugh, even as you collapsed and fell into her mouth.

But so few of Roberts's films get into the undergrowth--you have to wonder whether she is fully aware of it herself. Does she analyze herself? Or does she find that much gravity alien to being "natural" and "nice" and "candid"? These adjectives have to be set in quotes--she is an actress, not a kid actually offering herself to us. Indeed, in her interviews she is always fierce about hiding her private self away from public gaze. In which case, I think, she needs to study her own face more and acknowledge the helpless flirtation that has pushed her up to $12 million a picture, without making her an actress yet.

Or is she content just to be attractive? Does she want nothing more than to seduce, to be a free spirit, roaming over the world and among its men? But flirts are always the prisoners of whether or not they are noticed. If Roberts smothered her mouth, we might begin to think more about her eyes, in which there is some deep, nearly confident sense of being wronged, hounded or abused. We are ready for her eyes, and ready for her to trust them more.

If I had to give one reason for patience with Julia Roberts, it wouldn't be Pretty Woman--by far her most complete and accomplished movie. It would be... Mary Reilly. You're saying I'm crazy, I know. But have you actually seen the film? There were so many decisive warnings against it. Long before it was released (and there was a question as to whether it ever would be), there were reports of trouble on the set, of reshooting, and of several endings to choose from. The director--the shrewd and candid Stephen Frears--was heard to say it was all more than he could fathom. I myself only caught up with Mary Reilly on video.

Now, I don't mean to be discovering a lost masterpiece. I'm not suggesting that it is anything other than a mess. But it has an atmosphere, a nightmarish sense of place and decor, and in Julia Roberts it finds (or digs up from the grave) a real actress, someone who has willed herself into a quite alien creation: a downtrodden, fearful, unattractive Irish servant girl who may be London's best chance for keeping the peace between Jekyll and Hyde. This character moves through the story towards an intelligence and a level of class she's beguiled by, while getting closer to the sexuality she dreads--that is what makes Mary Reilly worth watching.

My unexpected appreciation of this film took me back to a feeling I have had over the years--that if Julia Roberts would stop flirting with me, would stop giving me the sly eye for one moment, I might begin to like her.

On October 28, 1997, Roberts will be 30. She has more or less given over her twenties to being a phenomenon, a bold-type name in too many gossip sheets and a fairly reckless experimenter with success, celebrity and her own appeal. Why not? America is the land where gorgeous 20-year-olds are supposed to be able to live like that. She has made 20 movies, several of which have been built around her--and some of which seemed flimsy because of it. She is more arresting than ever, because her beauty is so structural that it may not reach its peak until she is 40 or so. Hers is the gravest face to arrive in movies in the last 10 years. No one as beautiful can look so sad. Those actresses who have been briefly hailed as her replacement--Julia Ormond or Sandra Bullock, say--will fade while Roberts merely hesitates. There is a firepower in Roberts that might have saved Sabrina or In Love and War. She fascinates enough people to command the highest salaries that actresses get today.

Yet most of Roberts's recent films have flopped, or at least disappointed. On several occasions, she has avoided full commercial challenge by choosing not to dominate the films she's appeared in. So turning 30 is not necessarily a serene passage for her. As I write, she has two films, My Best Friend's Wedding and Conspiracy Theory (with Mel Gibson), scheduled to come out this summer. If at least one of them doesn't do very well, there will be doubts beyond the doubts already there. More than anyone around now, Julia Roberts trained us to see just how much lovely fresh meat there is waiting that is only twentysomething and ready to smile forever.

Roberts made five pictures before she did Pretty Woman. She had bagged Liam Neeson romantically on Satisfaction; she had caught everyone's eye in Mystic Pizza; and she had won a Best Supporting Actress nomination, as well as the affections of costar Dylan McDermott, with Steel Magnolias. It's not uncommon for young actresses to get sexually involved with fellow actors--indeed, there are much older people who live lives of steady promiscuity "on location." But just as audiences already wanted to touch and dream of Julia, so her volatile neediness-- the flirt's way--was evident. That early notoriety may have helped get her the role of Vivian in Pretty Woman.

It was surely aggravated by the film. The precarious way in which Vivian was both "nice" and "wild" at the same time seemed true of Julia, too. Of course, we shouldn't always blame actresses as they struggle to become the characters who fulfill our dreams, which are sheer baloney.

Like most American romances, Pretty Woman plays with absurdity and a grotesque abandonment of taste or believability. It allowed any man to believe that this prodigious gash of a thick-lipped mouth was going to give him head, while encouraging any girl who had ever stooped with the prospect of standing erect. Older men (in which Hollywood has a vested interest) could indulge their fantasies of getting and educating hot young things as trophy wives. Cynics could chuckle about how a society hostess was just a whore with a wardrobe makeover. Elderly, rich, conservative people (big fans of Pretty Woman) could believe in the legend of unruly youth shaping up and behaving "decently." Every man who suspects that the ideal wife is a princess advised by a hooker could feel vindicated.

Some said at the time that any one of a hundred young women would have made the daft fantasy work. I don't think so. Julia was vital to the recipe (which suggests she believed it herself--for the parable about making it in L.A. holds that sort of belief to be the crucial thing). She has never been so free since with the sheer adjacency of ravage-me mouth and apprehensive eyes. The smile then was new (we have learned since how much of a stone wall it can be). Her own zest for being transformed justified the hoariest of narrative devices. And she had real chemistry with Richard Gere (no one then pondered over her ability to interact with him--normally his chemistry is with himself).

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