In Defense of Julia Roberts

Roberts's role in The Pelican Brief was oddly contradictory. Darby has the intelligence to fathom the complex plot that murders two Supreme Court justices; she even guesses how her insight has been passed on to America's corrupt authorities and what peril that means for her. In a word, she's brilliant. But she's helpless, too. She needs Denzel Washington to save her, as she wanders from one kind of fairly obvious jeopardy to another. Finally, when the danger has passed and the head of the FBI asks her what she wants, this star law student never asks for a real job close to power. She just wants to get away from it all and pass into safe obscurity.

At the end of the movie, the journalist played by Washington is being interviewed. Where's Darby Shaw, the heroine of it all, he's asked. Can't say, he answers with a coy grin. Isn't she really just another Deep Throat, a convenient cover-all, too good to be true. Washington smiles demurely like the black actor who won at least a fraternal kiss and a hug from the white beauty. "She almost is," he admits. And Julia, far away on some desert isle of the mind, but watching it all on TV, gives us that flirty, wistful smile of hers as if to say, "Well, maybe I am."

The Pelican Brief was a hit again--it was, after all, John Grisham material under the expert care of director Alan J. Pakula. But the coy ending that kept Darby immature was an odd reversal of the film Pakula had made many years before with Jane Fonda. Klute, a near masterpiece, had a very grownup notion of what can happen to Pretty Woman out in the harsh world. (Moreover, times have changed, but Jane Fonda is a reasonable working model for Julia Roberts.) Even if The Pelican Brief stabilized Roberts's career it was a lost opportunity dramatically. It also showed limitations in Roberts's acting: she couldn't deliver the essential reaction shots for a woman in crisis. As Darby sees her lover (played by Sam Shepard) blown up, Roberts plays her as fussy and dithery, when the scene requires a sense of traumatic outrage, of having been pierced.

Someone seems to have persuaded Roberts that she risked sacrificing charm by playing characters who use their minds, as opposed to what the genre calls "feminine wiles." Only that would explain I Love Trouble, Ready to Wear and Something to Talk About. In the first, she and Nick Nolte were rival Chicago journalists pursuing a story that turned on the efficacy of cow hormone treatments. It would be flattery to call the picture routine, and hostile to remind anyone that it had thoughts of being a new version of His Girl Friday.

There was little rapport with Nolte (he made her seem like a teenager), and Julia was left to look goofy and give off that increasingly nostalgic smile. If the actress keeps grinning at lines and situations that aren't funny, then she begins to emerge as foolish, or deaf. Something to Talk About was a more prestigious event, backed by three powerful Hollywood women: Goldie Hawn (who surely knows about smiling), Paula Weinstein and Anthea Sylbert--and written by Callie Khouri as a follow-up to Thelma & Louise. It was directed by Lasse Hallstrom, who had worked wonders with the cast of What's Eating Gilbert Grape. With those credentials, it was an honorable failure. The story plays as an uneasy attempt to defend a wronged wife that gives up courage and novelty and settles for sentimental reunion. As for Roberts, in key scenes where she and Dennis Quaid were meant to "get loose," she was badly exposed by an actor whose great talent is for looseness. She looks so tense, so awkward that one has to assume the script once had bigger plans that included the idea that her character was sexually frigid.

Over the course of many movies, Roberts seemed to shut down on her own sensuality. Maybe Pretty Woman and its reputation embarrassed her. Or maybe this was the result of her own feeling of the gulf between how you look and how you are. She resisted nude scenes, prompting talk of body doubles being used here and there. With reason, she seemed afraid of sex in Sleeping With the Enemy. In The Pelican Brief, she seemed nervous even about being touched. More and more, her brown eyes seemed filled with foreboding, until at last someone cast her not just as a victim, but as a neurotic, haunted woman.

I long to know what happened on Mary Reilly. How did the film get its star to abandon her smile, and, for the most part, her hair? Mary looks like a ghost--the whole film feels set in a morgue. Her hair is gingerish, severe around a face that has known a life of poverty and hopelessness. Indeed, this is a face from Dachau; Rodeo Drive is not even a memory. Did Roberts and Malkovich flirt--they both have that reputation--and then did one or both of them go very cold, leaving the film frozen? Yet in the photography alone, you know that someone on that film loved Roberts and understood the risk she was taking. This is a face where only a paperlike mask of skin separates us from the skull.

Mary Reilly wants to win the understanding of Dr. Jekyll--indeed she wants to be the doctor's wife, and there is great interest in the way she gradually becomes the dominant servant in the house. Jekyll is surely interested, but Mary is so shy and injured he offers her his Hyde instead. We can never tell whether Mary knows that these two men are the same root, or whether they are her fantasy and her terror coming to life. The action is thus both outward and inward, leading to a stunning moment in the bedroom when, rejected by Mary, Hyde sniffs the air and says he was sure she was going to "stay awhile." The shock on Roberts's face at that remark may be the best thing she has ever done. If only the rest of the film deserved her better. Mary Reilly may be a shambles, but it shows that Roberts can act-- and better still, that she wants to.

Of course, what does a tender actress feel if her best work is written off in advance? There's a way of seeing what Roberts did next as resting up and taking stock. As the romantic interest in Michael Collins, she seemed much at ease with Neeson again, and content to be squabbled over by him and Aidan Quinn. She looks gorgeous in the period clothes and hats, her eyes shine in the dark and she sings a song very prettily. No matter how many carped at her Irish accent, she plunged ahead with confidence. And she is funny, wry and down-to-earth when she gets the chance. Still, her role was perched on a shelf: her Kitty Kiernan was not herself involved in the struggle. As many pointed out, what the film needed was time to cover Collins's trip to London and the negotiations that led to fatal compromise. Dull stuff, perhaps, and not as box office as Julia lying on a bed and murmuring to Liam.

After Michael Collins, Roberts turned up in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You. Working with Woody has done a lot for many actresses, from Mia Farrow to Mira Sorvino. Here Roberts had a chance to play a screwball beauty along the lines of Carole Lombard. But she didn't catch that edge, and she was overshadowed by Goldie Hawn, someone who has learned so much over the years.

What Julia Roberts needs now is the courage and the intelligence to know her own way ahead. No kind of fond reliance on men will carry her through. It is at the age of 30 or so that the great American actresses begin to face it--that they are on their own.

____________________________________

David Thomson is the author of Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, published by Knopf.

Pages: 1 2 3