The Screengrab : the age of innocence

The Hype Report: The X File on Winona Ryder

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

[Being the latest in an infrequent series devoted to movie-related puff pieces so over the top that they're a show all by themselves..]

So it turns out that Winona Ryder is in the new Star Trek movie, where she plays the Vulcan ambassador Sarek's baby mama, and Vanessa Thorpe's profile of Ryder and the current state of her career has kind of science-fiction vibe to it itself. Did you know that Ryder was once "acclaimed as the most promising, most beautiful and most fashionable star of her generation - the generation, that is, that had become known as 'X'?" It's news to me, and I think I'm of the generation that had become known as 'X' myself, so long as we're all committed to writing in the style that has become known as "funny-looking'." Thorpe must have worried that we'd think it was just her, so she cites a back-up source: Ryder's father, who says that twenty or so years ago, his daughter and Johnny Depp were "the hottest couple in the United States." All together now--ewwwwww!! Is it possible that when all those folks at the red carpet premieres leaned across the police barricades and screamed, "You're the most promising, most beautiful, and most fashionable star of your generation," they were talking to Johnny? Thorpe herself undercuts her argument by describing Ryder's features as "elfin", a term I've always associated more with the likes of Michael J. Pollard or the guy on Two and a Half Men who isn't Charlie Sheen than anyone who might qualify as the most beautiful anything. It's possible that Cate Blanchett and Orlando Bloom in The Lord of the Rings have forever rewritten the rule book on this one, but not in my apartment.

The thing is, I've always thought that Ryder was beautiful, and that's why I never tortured myself a lot--a little, but not a lot--wondering why she had a career. It was easy for men, including men as smart and weird as Depp and Tim Burton, to have high hopes for her in her Beetlejuice days: she was, one more time, a very beautiful, very young girl who liked to tell interviewers that was reading Ian McEwan and do guest spots in Mojo Nixon videos. You could probably hear the puddles forming from all those geeks' hearts melting across the country. Thorpe seems to take it on faith that there's a general agreement that she was just dazzling in Scorsese's The Age of Innocence--where, to show her commitment to her craft, she allowed the makeup people to do her best to homely her up--and in the Gillian Armstrong production of Little Woman, which is indeed probably the best movie that has her close to its center. But it's also true that in both these movies, which we made when she was in her early twenties, she comes across as, emotionally, about twelve years old. When she was engaged in real life to Johnny Depp, who was eight years her senior, it was reported that no less an expert on grown-up behavior than Cher had warned her that she wasn't ready for such a leap. in the movies, seeing her married off to either Daniel Day Lewis or Gabriel Byrne was creepy, in ways the filmmakers could not have intended.

Ryder's last big-deal role was probably in 1999's Girl, Interrupted, a movie that wound up belonging her co-star, Angelina Jolie (who won an Oscar for it), and with good reason. Thorpe does her best to characterize Ryder's fallen star sound the result of some combination of a conspiracy and a perfect storm of "bad creative decisions, or perhaps just bad luck, which gradually began to edge Ryder deeper into a kind of Hollywood twilight." Yes, there was the shoplifting incident, which fed into other stories, like the one about her flaking out on the set of The Godfather III, gave her a reputation for being a troublesome fruitcake. But the fact is that Ryder's demons are small-time compared to those of Robert Downey, Jr., and there was always somebody willing to work with him while waiting for him to prove himself insurable again. Ryder was much in demand when she was barely an adult because she was beautiful and unusual and willing to work, and a number of people who got their foot in the door of the industry that way learned to act as they went along. Ryder never did. A lot of these people were discarded by the industry as their looks faded; what's most special about Ryder, who at 37 is still very easy on the eyes, is that her looks held up just fine and still Hollywood was eager to discard her, because she showed no sign of ever learning to act a lick. She and Downey were both in Richard Linklater's rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly, and the amazing thing was how much of him came through even as a cartoon, while her improved-upon screen image had the same hollow shell behind it that it always had.

Maybe Ryder will get her comeback: stranger things have happened, and if it does, good for her. But it's annoying to see writers present her career as a story of a major talent that's been neglected or gone to waste, because such talk amounts to a slight of other, genuine talents. So many really gifted actresses have to fight harder for parts as they grow older, and some of them never really win a round. Given that, how is it anything but simple justice that Ryder should have trouble getting good roles when the salient fact of her career has been her failure to seem to grow up? All she had to offer the camera was her face, and if the general feeling in Hollywood is that that's not enough to compensate for the trouble she's apt to cause, keep in mind that she's less trouble than a lot of people who manage to keep themselves in work. And then there's the wildy gifted people who don't stay in the race at all. "If Ryder's artistic rehabilitation works out over the summer," Thorpe writes breathlessly, "she will have re-emerged at the age of 37 as one of the most impressive veterans of a 1980s Hollywood bratpack scene that has seen many casualties. An emblem of troubled, talented youth, Ryder was a sort of female equivalent to River Phoenix, but unlike him she has survived." If I read this correctly, in the comparison between Phoenix, whose career included some indelible performances before it was cut short, and Ryder, whose career doesn't and wasn't, Ryder wins because, for reasons connected to a fluke of mortality and blind luck, she's the one who's still employable. Seriously, does anyone really want to go there?

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Nick's Take

Screengrab Review: "Star Trek"--Scott's Take

Michelle Pfeiffer, "Dangerous Liasons" Director Reteam for Colette's "Cheri"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Michelle Pfeiffer turned 50 last year, and though the years haven't been that bad on her, her screen image has definitely cooled a bit. Her last couple of movies went straight to DVD, and her few other screen performances since 2001 have been in supporting performances (White Oleander, Hairspray, Stardust). Now she's starring as an aging French courtesan in Cheri, directed by Stephen Frears and adapted from the Colette novel. The movie is having its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, and Mick Brown's timely profile of Pfeiffer will do until somebody publishes her biography. The title character of Cheri is the son (Rupert Friend) of a colleague (Kathy Bates) who Pfeiffer's character, Léa de Lonval, agrees to educate in the ways of sex and love, with predictably bittersweet results. "Being in that stage of life wasn't something I really had to do a lot of research for,' Pfeiffer told Brown, "because I'm already there. Although in some ways it's a little bit harder to really understand and articulate to yourself, because you're right in the middle of it. Probably 10 years from now I'll be able to look at this phase of my life and be able to understand her journey more. But I think for a lot of women 50 is a very particular age. I'm not one that's ever really thought about birthdays, but this was a big one and I was not looking forward to it. But surprisingly it has left me feeling liberated in a strange kind of way. Sort of, the pressure's off."

For Pfeiffer, Cheri marks a return to the literary period-picture world of Dangerous Liasons and The Age of Innocence. Pfeiffer speculates that she fits into these movies about the social manners of an earlier time because "I'm good at disguising my feelings." Frears, who directed her twenty years ago in Liasons, says she was first on his list of actresses for the role, and "It's quite a short list… She is exactly the right age, and just by being beautiful herself, that struggle has been a large part of her. And she wears it very gracefully. She puts jeans and a cap on and she looks about 16. I remember saying to her when I met her, I think we're going to have trouble making you look old.' But she was just very good about it. She wasn't saying, 'Oh, go on, make me look younger,' like you might imagine Hollywood actresses do. She wasn't asking to conceal anything. The main problem was this great, great cameraman [Darius Khondji] who had been trained to make beautiful women look even more beautiful, and who was completely soppy – he kept saying, 'I can only make her look beautiful.' She was much more straightforward about it. I took my hat off to her."

As to her recent career slowdown, Pfeiffer claims to be okay with it ("Everyone slows down when they get to my age, but that's fine."), adding, "But there are fewer roles for all of us in the movie industry. They're making a fraction of the movies they used to make; and so many of them are either animation or these franchise films that you see more and more A-list actors doing. The middle-range financed film hardly exists any more." She lives outside Los Angeles, raises her kids, and checks in with her analyst. "I remember I had an acting coach, Milton Katselas, who I studied with when I was first starting out, and he would ask us, 'OK, how do you think this character would behave in this scene?' And you'd give your little explanation – 'Well, I think…' And then he'd say, 'OK, now how would you really behave in this scene?' And the first answer was almost always bullshit. But we don't even realise it."

English Storyteller, American Stories

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

The hook in this interview in London's Telegraph magazine is Daniel Day-Lewis' meticulous, detail-oriented approach to acting, and indeed, there's plenty of that for those looking for such a thing. He talks at length of his immersive, Method-based approach (he built a tent of skins, paddled a canoe, and learned to handle a flintlock rifle while filming The Last of the Mohicans), compares his art to the craft of woodworking, and dismisses the many obvious tics of his characters -- being in jail or paralyzed in a wheelchair -- as surface fripperies, with the real heart of the character coming from making the lives of someone utterly different from them seem immediate and real. But much more interesting is the fact that the London-born actor, currently starring in P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood, spends much of the interview (which is, after all, with a British newspaper) trashing the opportunities of British cinema. From an early age, he says, "I wanted to tell American stories." He articulates his near-contempt for the strict class structure of his homeland, and thinks of the tradition of honing your craft in theatrical classics as little more than an obstacle. "My love of American movies was like a secret that I carried around with me," he says, and admits that if it hadn't been Martin Scorsese who approached him about playing Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, he would have turned it down as "too English".

That Gal!: Miriam Margolyes

Peter Smith — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

If Miriam Margolyes had never appeared in a single film, she would still have a special place in the history of British television. While attending Oxford University, she appeared on the game show University Challenge, and, after getting a question wrong during a live broadcast, had the dubious distinction of being the first person to say "fuck" on the British airwaves. Luckily for filmgoers, though, she didn't let the shame destroy her career, and has gone on to become one of the most sought-after character actresses in the English film industry. A veteran of a number of television gigs, like former That Gal! Natasha Richardson, she was a regular on The Black Adder (including a memorable portrayal of Queen Victoria), but it's on film where she's shone the brightest. The diminutive Margolyes stands only five feet tall, and doesn't have the toned body that would have made her a superstar, but her forceful personality, distinctively pitched voice (she was Fly the Sheepdog in the Babe films), and great versatility have secured her a place in British cinema history in a number of roles that it's hard to imagine anyone else doing. Equally at home with drama or comedy, and able to convey unladylike, rip-snorting hilarity with as much ease as she can towering rage or deep sympathy, the openly lesbian Margolyes got her start in theatre and is frequently cited by the gay press in the U.K. as one of the country's most prominent 'out' personalities. She's enjoyed success on both sides of the Atlantic among critics, even if her name isn't on the tip of every casting director's tongue; she's won Best Supporting Actress awards from both BAFTA and the Los Angeles Critics Circle. And while the public may not immediately be able to recall her name, her face, with its tight mouth and bulging eyes, is immediately memorable to everyone who sees her. Recently, Margolyes has announced her decision to become an Australian citizen; if she goes through with it, England will lose one its most talented actresses.

Where to see Miriam Margolyes at her best:

LITTLE DORRIT (1988)

Miriam Margolyes had already been acting for over twenty years, and making movies for a dozen, when Christine Edzard cast her as Flora Finching in her film adaptation of this Charles Dickens novel. It turned out to be her breakthrough role; she stole every scene she was in and won a Best Supporting Actress award from the L.A. Critics Circle. The part has stayed with her; she's currently touring in a one-woman show called Dickens' Women in which Flora has pride of place.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)

When Martin Scorsese gave Margolyes the role of Mrs. Mingott in his Edith Wharton adaptation, she was fifty-two years old — the age at which an actress who'd worked as hard as she had should start to get the recognition she deserved. And as the sole comic character in the rather grim drama of manners, she finally did: it won her wide acclaim in the United States for the first time in her career, and back home, it netted her a Best Supporting Actress honor from BAFTA. Her terrific performance in The Age of Innocence signaled a career renaissance.

HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS (2002)

It's hardly the best of the Harry Potter films, but any role in the blockbuster franchise is a healthy paycheck, and Margoyles certainly deserved one when she took on the role of Hogwarts herbologist Prof. Pomona Sprout. It would have been easy enough to just cash the check and sleepwalk through the part, but Margoyles, as she does with her best comic roles, sinks her teeth into it, getting the most mileage she can out of every moment she's on screen as the dowdy witch.

— Leonard Pierce