When Great Beginnings End

It is still too early to say where Vince Vaughn's career is going to take him, but based on his dreary turns in Clay Pigeons, The Cell, Domestic Disturbance and Gus Van Sant's ill-advised remake of Psycho, I think it's safe to say that his pays as a leading man are over. The versatile Vaughn seems to have landed on his feet after his brief, unrewarding foray into the spotlight, veering back into his natural environment of oddball comedy. As hilarious in Made as he was in Swingers, and the only observable virtue in Old School, Vaughn is the closest thing we have to a Gen-X Bill Murray, which is high praise indeed. He may end up a star yet, but not as a leading man.

Of those to whom much is given, much is expected, and few actresses raised higher expectations than the young Sean Young. When she starred opposite Harrison Ford in the legendary Blade Runner and was paired with Kevin Costner in the spellbinding No Way Out, she seemed to be the next big thing. The first and most beautiful movie star I ever interviewed, Young had both the looks and the talent to go a long, long way. But plagued by a bad reputation, Young found herself purged from the A-list and has spent most of her career languishing in drivel. In my mind she is the cinematic equivalent of Darryl Strawberry, the fabulously gifted New York Mets slugger who, once upon a time, could have done anything he wanted. It's just that, like Sean Young, he never got around to doing it.

When Madeleine Stowe made The Last of the Mohicans, an absolutely perfect motion picture that ranks with the best films made in this country in the past 30 years, I hoped that she and Daniel Day-Lewis would make a dozen films together. It was not to be. Stowe never clicked with the male moviegoing public and vanished into the purgatory of Bad Girls, Blink and China Moon.

Having made the fatal mistake of living beyond her thirties, Stowe found herself dispatched to the sidelines like so many other young actresses with so much unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable promise. Today she finds herself in possession of a self-written script that everyone in Hollywood wants to produce, but that no one in Hollywood wants to cast her in. This is not the way I would have liked things to turn out. I say this because I do not believe that all fine wines get better as they get older, but I do believe that most fine actresses do.

In the end, this is all a case of what might have been. In the parallel mental universe that I have constructed as a respite from this one, Vince Vaughn takes a pass on Psycho, Madeleine Stowe gets to be in pictures like The English Patient and The Piano (preferably wearing that girdle she donned in The Two Jakes), and Andy Garcia takes over the Corleone Family in the exquisite The Godfather IV: La Famiglia Strikes Back. In this same parallel universe, Sean Young is forgiven for her indiscretions on the set of Wall Street and off the set of The Boost and gets to play in a string of brilliant thrillers and sci-fi epics. There is ample room in this parallel universe for Kathleen Quinlan, Emily Lloyd, Linda Fiorentino, Forest Whitaker and a host of others. There's just no room for Kurt Russell.

In talking about young stars whose careers have not turned out as well as we--or they--would have liked, I am not talking about those who seemed to have deliberately walked away (Debra Winger), those who overstayed their welcome (Daryl Hannah), those who made truly catastrophic career decisions (Michael Keaton nixing the Batman franchise) or those who seemed to be pure hype jobs in the first place (William Baldwin, Matthew Modine, Julia Ormond.) Nor am I talking about thoroughbreds like Christopher Walken, Scott Glenn and Treat Williams, who once had a shot at superstardom, didn't quite get there, but seem to be doing just fine as solid character actors, often villains, sometimes psychopaths, But I am talking about Jeff Goldblum (upstaged by a haughty Persian tabby in Cats & Dogs) and Geena Davis (the Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner for The Accidental Tourist) who both once graced the cover of GQ as the Industry's hottest couple and who now seem to have individually fallen off the face of the earth. In my parallel universe, where Prince never gets old and Brian Jones never dies, there is always plenty of work for both of them. But I don't run things.

In setting down these thoughts, I am not suggesting that bad things always happen to good actors, or vice versa. I am grateful to live in a society where Chris O'Donnell does not get to be the star of The Matrix, where nobody pays to see a movie starring Minnie Driver as a finalist in a beauty contest, where Bridget Fonda eventually goes away. I am happy to live in a society where Antonio Banderas, no matter how many movies he makes, never becomes a box-office legend, and where Mary Stuart Masterson and her annoying tics ultimately ride off into the sunset. Just the same, I wish that I lived in a society where, if Kevin Costner positively, absolutely has to gun down Christian Slater in the first 40 minutes of a movie about homicidal Elvis impersonators, he at least has the good taste to kill Kurt Russell, too.

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