Pretty Gone Plain

When sexpots want Tinseltown to take them seriously, they get gruesome for the big screen. Sometimes this results in nausea for the viewing public. Other times, it results in Hollywood gold for the stars.

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Moviegoers examining posters advertising the new film The Hours can be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the lovely, glamorous Nicole Kidman. Concealed beneath a schnozzle that could give both Barbra Streisand and Karl Maiden a run for their money, Kidman is also encumbered by a pile of bland, non-highlighted Edwardian hair. As a beautiful woman impersonating a plain woman--the brilliant but suicidal early 20th-century English novelist Virginia Woolf--in this adaptation of Michael Cunningham's clever novel, Kidman has gone out of her way to play down her own abundant physical charms and accentuate the Arctic grayness that was Woolf. In this she has succeeded admirably.

Were Nicole Kidman the only beautiful actress who had moved heaven and earth to make herself look fiercely ordinary on-screen in recent times, we could dismiss her appearance in The Hours as a clear case of a performer's tailoring her looks to the demands of the role. Alas, it is not. In the past few years, almost as if on cue, some of our most stunning actresses have appeared in films requiring them to physically demean themselves by participating in a process known as instant uglification. A partial list of these films would include Michelle Pfeiffer as a downscale waitress in Frankie and Johnny, Sharon Stone as a doomed, poorly groomed redneck in Last Dance; Sandra Bullock as a slob in Miss Congeniality, Helena Bonham Carter as a dainty simian in Planet of the Apes; Renee Zellweger as a chunky airhead in Bridget Jones's Diary, Angelina Jolie as a dysfunctional Medusa in Girl, Interrupted; Cameron Diaz as a dorklette in Being John Malkovich; and Kim Basinger as a white-trash mom in 8 Mile.

In citing these movies, let me make it clear that I am not referring to films in which comely young women are briefly seen with bruises, scars, lesions, tumors, or with their hair all over the place, like Anne Heche as a marooned bitch in Six Days Seven Nights, Geena Davis as a hired assassin turned soccer mom in The Long Kiss Goodnight or Meg Ryan as a perky boozehound in When a Man Loves a Woman. No, I am talking about movies in which actresses make a conscious effort to look unattractive for a significant portion of the proceedings. Her appearance is not an accident. It is not an oversight. It is not a fluke. She gave that hair some thought.

Several years ago, I wrote a story for this magazine entitled "The 400 Blows," in which I argued that good-looking leading men are required by some inexplicable code of cinematic honor to get the shit beaten out of them on-screen at some point in their careers. Partially, this is the result of a peculiar male-bonding process, whereby glamour boys intuitively understand that the male viewing public has a secret aversion to good-looking guys and wants to see them get jacked up at least once. Whether it is Clint Eastwood getting stomped within an inch of his life in Fistful of Dollars, Mel Gibson getting his entrails ripped out in Braveheart or Brad Pitt getting worked over in Fight Club and Spy Game, the male-viewing public harbors a deep-seated desire to see great-looking guys get bull-whipped, disemboweled, bludgeoned and just generally fucked over. The male viewing public is really sick.

But it is not only male audiences that place onerous demands on those they worship from afar. For just as Joe Average loves to see studly Adonises get their heads jammed into the cement mixer and their ears nibbled off, female moviegoers demand from time to time that the world's most beautiful women make themselves look like something the cat dragged in.

By and large, gorgeous actresses are willing to de-prettify themselves at least once in their careers, not only because it makes them appear more simpatica, but because it can result in Academy Awards, or at the very least Academy Award nominations--think Meryl Streep in Ironweed or Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted. Finally, even where no Academy Awards are in sight, the process at least gives a star a certain gravitas. Short of playing a whore with a heart of gold (Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite, Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential), nothing gives an actress credibility faster than making herself look ugly. If necessary, really ugly.

Those who foolishly question the intellectual underpinnings of my argument would do well to review the mounting body of evidence. In Girl, Interrupted, Winona Ryder plays a suicidal teen who gets locked up in a mental hospital with Angelina Jolie. While Ryder spends the entire movie looking the way she always does--like a spoiled brat who needs to be sent to her room--Jolie looks like one of the Three Witches in Macbeth. With her stringy hair, cataleptic carriage, hollow eye sockets and alabaster skin, she looks like death warmed over. The premise of the movie seems to be that the more time Ryder spends hanging out with her Blair Witch sidekick, the sooner she will return to full mental health. This is aversion therapy at its most barbaric, the sort of unethical activity that gives loony bins a bad name. On the other hand, it seems to work.

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