Caught in the Act

Now that the influx of mannequins into moviedom has reached high tide, it's high time for The Cindy Crawford Scale, our scientific system for measuring the acting skills of Elizabeth Hurley, Naomi Campbell, Vendela and other supermodels with big-screen aspirations.

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Let's talk turkey. When you boil them down to basics, supermodels are genetically blessed, suit-hanger-shaped, Sphinx-pussed, immobile projections of idiot lust who, and this is by definition, stand there silently wearing or not wearing generally unwearable clothes. "Stand there silently" is, I think, the key phrase, which is why the '90s obsession with models has got to be the closest thing I've ever heard to evidence that aliens indeed built the Pyramids. We couldn't have done it--not if we're that stupid.

Why do I live in a world where there's TopModel magazine? Why do I even know Kate Moss's name? C'mon! Models don't do anything. At least Vanna White knows the alphabet. Models don't need to know anything besides how to stand, walk, discern which of the guys in the room is holding the camera, and look in his direction. A water buffalo can do as much. Of course, no one walks into a telephone pole because they can't take their eyes off a billboard with a water buffalo on it. Therein lies the tense (if usually unexamined) relationship we have with physical beauty. Movies effortlessly prove that being hammer-blow-to-the-temple gorgeous is not the same thing as passing for a normal, interesting human being. Physical perfection is all well and good, but for the last 70 years or so they've been making talkies, folks, where one must talk the talk as well as catwalk the catwalk. It takes a little juice just to read dialogue believably. Models, on the whole, are about as effervescent and fascinating as yardsticks. Often they don't even look real.

This is, I daresay, an indisputably reasonable line of thinking, which of course means that Hollywood has other ideas--trying to transform models into movie stars is older than ex-model Lauren Bacall's first cigarette stub. While Andie MacDowell, Isabella Rossellini and Rene Russo stand as evidence that asking a career model to act might not be a flaming disaster, the collected film work of Shelley Hack, Farrah Fawcett, Twiggy, Brooke Shields and Christie Brinkley presents an open-and-shut case for the prosecution. For further evidence, check out Iman's appearance in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, as an alien who morphs into William Shatner.

Which brings us to Cindy Crawford. Forget what I said about the Pyramids--once you sit through Craw-ford's performance in Fair Game, you'll begin to think aliens built the Brooklyn Bridge, too. From the opening scene, in which a jogging Cindy is the object of a drive-by shooting she fails to notice--although she is hit by flying glass--this movie is all of our MTV House of Style nightmares come true. Crawford is a doorstop even when she's just being herself on the small screen with a microphone. Whose idea was it to put her into a Joel Silver action movie? (No cheating on that one.)

Playing a brilliant lawyer who becomes involved in an infantile Russian embezzlement plot, Crawford is merely, emotionlessly, there, just like a model. How can the viewer take this as anything but a strangely overproduced video for bad sportswear? Listening to her intone beauts like "Where are you taking me?" is like listening to someone drop an egg. She can't even cough believably, although one thing Crawford has down is the management of hair in dangerous situations. She doesn't stop fiddling with her shampoo-commercial lion's mane even when being shot at; if she has one thought roaming around behind those lifeless eyes, it's this: they can put dirt on me, but goddamn it, my hair's going to be 100 percent. Throughout the movie, mortified costar William Baldwin can't help but smirk at Crawford's line readings, and although Baldwin is no Fredric March, he has our sympathies.

And so, using Fair Game as our paradigm, we can approach the models-in-movies phenomenon scientifi-cally. Let us employ a Crawfordian Scale within which other supermodels can be judged. A 10 on this scale means that your acting, like Crawford's, makes us dream of lumber. The lower your score, the greater your chance to costar with, say, Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner, as opposed to, well, William Baldwin.

Some of the hottest supermodels of our time are smart enough to have seen the writing on the wall and resisted the temptation to act. We should applaud their resolve. Kate Moss, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, congratulations and thank you. Naomi Campbell, on the other hand, has been trying to slink her way into movies an inch at a time. First she did walk-ons in forgotten bombs like The Night We Never Met and Cool as Ice, as well as guest appearances on TV, then cameos as herself in Ready to Wear, Unzipped and Catwalk. She played a sizable supporting part in Miami Rhapsody as a married model who has an affair with Kevin Pollak. Asking us to believe that the elk-like Campbell would touch Pollak with Jerry Hall's shaky hand is indignity enough, but Campbell's thick-tongued, toneless delivery of dialogue--as in her description of modeling as "bloody hod wuk"--makes it seem as if she's speaking Esperanto and the rest of the cast is merely pretending to understand what she says. This mannequin-with-a-plan, who has also authored a novel about the "bloody hod wuk" of the modeling biz, has since appeared in Spike Lee's Girl 6, in which acting was largely inessential. On the Crawford Scale, she rates an 8.5.

As much as Campbell's syrupy English accent is a major hurdle, Elizabeth Hurley's is a blessing--rather than sounding garbled and dumb, Hurley's upper-class Masterpiece Theater lilt goes a long way toward disguising the fact that this Estee Lauder shill can't act her way out of a makeup chair. Her filmography is nevertheless extensive, including a lot of British TV, obscure Eurofilm and straight-to-tape thrillers, plus a bit as a terroristic stewardess in Passenger 57, not to mention a lead as the legendary Biblical harlot in TNT's Samson and Delilah, in which she--and everyone else, for that matter--is so rotten you expect to see a "6/84'' expiration date somewhere in the credits. In Dangerous Ground, Hurley plays a stripper and a junkie, which, as Melanie Griffith can tell you, is not the way to prove you can act. In Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Hurley is Mike Myers's fellow spy-sidekick. Enough said. The jury is still partially out, but a Crawfordian rating of something like 8 seems about right.

Gorgeous swimsuit gorgon Angie Everhart (where do they get these names?) is no less unreal, although after doing a bit in Last Action Hero she was not at all bad as the prostitute who gets run over by a car in Jade. Of course, standing out in a Joe Eszterhas-scripted David Caruso vehicle is not the way to make your way down the Crawford Scale anyway, but whatever Everhart gained with Jade, she immediately lost by starring in Tales From the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood. Gamely baring vampire fangs, she manages to look like she's having fun ripping out other actors' hearts and biting into them as if they were Bartlett pears, but the boneheaded dialogue is beyond her.

"Another vegetarian! I hate vegetarians," she growls inflectionlessly. Everhart's not ashamed to admit she's got room to grow--she's been quoted as saying that working with Oscar-winner Richard Dreyfuss in the roundly unseen Mad Dog Time "would have been intimidating, but I made my mark on the world as one of the first redheaded models, which gave me a certain confidence." We'll see where the confidence has led when 9 1/2 Weeks: Love in Paris is released. If it's released. Mitigated a smidgen by her Jade scene-stealing, Everhart still pulls an awesome 7.5.

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