In Defense of Julia Roberts

On Rodeo Drive, in her whore's outfit, Julia loped and swayed like a 5'9" horse when she walked; but once she had designer clothes on her back she became a thoroughbred "finished off" with a saddle. Seen first in a coarse blonde wig (and afraid of looking like Carol Channing), she re-emerges after her first sex with Gere with that pre-Raphaelite explosion of her own hair, dark blonde going on chestnut or red even, flying in all directions and re-forming her face. And as the picture trained her to wear good clothes and understand dinner cutlery, so the connoisseur in Gere could help us see her progress, and her problem--"When you're not fidgeting, you look very beautiful--and very tall." In the brown silk dress, the one with the white polka dots, she was an icon. And she wore hats-- something not many actresses had really done since the '50s--hats with brims as broad as her smile. No one could miss the young animal not long out of Smyrna, Georgia, who had got the eye of the world.

And so Roberts was Oscar-nominated again, for Best Actress. Again she didn't win. In hindsight one has to conclude that it was only because Hollywood lost its nerve. The Academy gave the Oscar to Kathy Bates for Misery and told their fantasy-come-true to be patient. Seven years later, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman actually looks more skillful, more varied, more emotionally alive, and so exactly what the Industry wants that its discretion seems cowardly.

Pretty Woman's success came dear: some critics were in agony at the film's duplicity, and eager to feel superior. Someone was going to be blamed. It wasn't too hard to be persuaded that Julia Roberts was just lucky, pretty and a cunning-cute fidget who would always lack Audrey Hepburn's stillness and purity. It's obvious that Julia's progress could never have been as serene as Vivian's (though the rest of Vivian's life doesn't bear thinking about except as a scheme for disaster or black comedy). No wonder the young actress quickly stumbled against her lack of training, succumbed to every urging to make a killing while she could, swooned over the palpable infatuation of so many men. It takes a very strong spirit to negotiate American success--and that strength cannot smile as impulsively as Julia was famous for doing. Public cruelty relishes that rhythm of soaring rise and wipe-out. It is our way of being wise and worldly about the unfair advantages of girls like Julia Roberts.

What lamentable decisions the films that followed Pretty Woman were, though every one of them did better than it deserved because the public was still wild to see Julia. In Flatliners, she was one of the gang, willfully dowdy and nearly gaunt-looking, which showed she had many angles to offer the camera--all the more reason to regret that the film was so modest in ambition. Kiefer Sutherland was in the Flatliners gang, too, and Julia became engaged to him for a while, having a high old time, turning up balmily drunk with her fiance on a homemade videotape that one TV gossip show got hold of. Late in the day, the fancy marriage was off, and Julia had stolen away to Dublin with another guy, Jason Patric. She liked a lot of men. Some said she was predatory, susceptible to sudden, brief amours. She had a line for interviewers--feisty, mean language sometimes, yet always flirty, too-- that said it was her business. So it was, and it was her responsibility to keep the confusion out of the press.

Sleeping With the Enemy was the closest Roberts came to a sensible commercial follow-up (and it proved to be a big hit), but its story's potential went unrealized. For someone who was headstrong in her choices (she would refuse Sleepless in Seattle), Roberts was dangerously lacking in the patience and know-how it takes to develop scripts. The stories from the set of Sleeping With the Enemy had more to do with her insistence that in the scene where she is washed ashore at night, nearly naked, the crew should strip off to show solidarity with her. If only she'd battled over the script.

Playing the wife of a hugely successful financier who likes to beat her up at the slightest note of disorder in his own life, she came off as more passive than ever before, even masochistic. When she runs away, she puts on a Louise Brooks wig-- there were stories that Roberts hankered to play the young Brooks (a model of self-destructive beauty)--but with her wide, fearful eyes and jittery nervous system she resembles no one so much as the young Mia Farrow. She had grown very thin. Vivian's exuberance was gone. Roberts seemed darker, more disposed to be wounded. One could see how suited she might have been to the dainty sadism of Alfred Hitchcock.

Sleeping With the Enemy omitted things that would have made Roberts's character more interesting, and might have helped Roberts herself become a stronger actress. Her Laura overcomes a fear of water and swimming to make her escape: those scenes could have fostered her power and energy, and prepared us for the film's best moment, when she gets hold of her husband's gun, faces him down, and telephones the police and tells them to come quickly because she's just shot and killed an intruder. The film could have spent less time on Laura's new relationship with the weak, "gentle" Kevin Anderson character, and given a more realistic sense of a woman who responds to abuse by growing stronger and more in charge. But that shift in emphasis would have exploited the deepening fatalism in Roberts's face. And so the actress lost an opportunity to develop a potential that was clearly within her.

Julia Roberts in Dying Young seemed like perverse defiance of her box-office charm. And it proved a decent, dull picture in which the real interest centered on Campbell Scott, a natural and very clever actor, as opposed to someone struggling with her own personality.

By the age of 24, Roberts was rich, pampered and lauded, just as she was taxed, hounded and scolded.

When she got $2.5 million to be Tinkerbell in Steven Spielberg's Hook, some commentators said it was an outrage to sense. After that film had been shot, Spielberg let it be known that he had found her difficult. There were rumors that she had a serious drug habit, in the way that all too many Americans of that age do. She denied everything, but still she was away from work for close to two years. She was "exhausted." If drugs were part of the problem, she deserves credit for taking sensible action. But even without the rumors, that kind of absence would have been risky. In 1992, she was seen in nothing but the death-cell cameo for the movie within the movie in The Player. And by then she indeed had the look of a condemned woman. It was more than a year later, and following a sudden, inexplicable marriage to Lyle Lovett, that she came back as Darby Shaw, the Tulane law student in The Pelican Brief.

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