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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
With roles as diverse as Catwoman and Madame de Tourvel, she has racked up one critically acclaimed performance after another.
May 25, 1999 | Just before the release of "Dangerous Liaisons" in 1988, a story made the rounds that the film's director, Stephen Frears, had been reluctant to cast Michelle Pfeiffer in the role of Madame de Tourvel, the good woman whose life is destroyed when she loses her heart to the rake Valmont. Jonathan Demme, who had just finished filming "Married to the Mob" with Pfeiffer, offered to screen a rough cut of that film for Frears, who was impressed with Pfeiffer but still hesitant. "I just don't know," he reportedly said to Demme. "She's going to be acting with John Malkovich and Glenn Close." Demme stifled the words that popped into his mind: "They'd better watch out then."
No other actor of the past 10 to 12 years has come close to Michelle Pfeiffer for sheer versatility. No two of the performances she has turned out -- in pictures as varied as "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "The Russia House," "Batman Returns," "Frankie and Johnny," "Love Field," "Tequila Sunrise" and the PBS adaptation of John O'Hara's short story "Natica Jackson" -- are remotely alike. You can see Pfeiffer's range in the innocuous Alan Alda comedy "Sweet Liberty" (1986), in which she plays a movie star acting in a revolutionary war epic. The first time we see Pfeiffer she's preparing to go before the cameras in period character, all crinolines and hoop skirts and 18th century grace. Seeing her out of costume two scenes later is an almost Brechtian shock. Dressed in a baggy work shirt, her hair a cascading tangle, Pfeiffer puffs on a cigarette while berating her agent over the phone. Everything about her manner is sharp, abrupt, neurotically modern. Alda exclaims, "It's like you're two entirely different people." Pfeiffer answers, "If all I could be was two different people, I'd be out of business."
And yet during the first years she was in movies, it was a crapshoot whether Pfeiffer would get to prove herself at all. She had to overcome the obstacle that all enormously attractive people face: the assumption that somebody that pretty just can't act. She didn't get much help from the window-dressing roles that came her way (after she dropped out of college to pursue an acting career) in movies like "Grease 2" and "Into the Night," or in the short-lived TV shows "Delta House" and "B.A.D. Cats." It was easy to make the mistake of thinking this was just another pretty SoCal girl. But there's a weird reticence to those performances, a way in which Pfeiffer, sensing the worthlessness of the material, is deliberately holding part of herself back. What's lacking in her is exactly the thing most starlets are desperate to get across: a willingness to please.
She was window dressing again in Brian De Palma's "Scarface." Playing a gangster's moll, she makes a memorable entrance -- dressed in a form-fitting sequined gown, Pfeiffer slowly descends in a glass elevator. But this time the movie makes a place for her character's trashy hauteur in the drop-dead moment that follows: Pfeiffer sits bored in a Miami nightclub, not even bothering to hide her disdain, while her Mr. Big boyfriend (Robert Loggia) gets indiscriminately drunk with a couple of associates. Having had enough of this boys' show, Pfeiffer turns to Loggia and, in a voice that could freeze vodka, asks, "So, Frank, ya wanna dance, ya wanna sit there and have a heart attack?" It's a great tough-broad delivery, the kind that gets an actress noticed. But nobody could have guessed the range and the delicacy that were still to come.
They didn't quite come in the medieval fantasy "Ladyhawke" (1985) or the suburban fantasy "The Witches of Eastwick" (1987). But with 1987's "Natica Jackson" and the 1-2-3 punch of the following year's "Married to the Mob," "Tequila Sunrise" and "Dangerous Liaisons," Pfeiffer established the distinctive mix that has continued to define her performances.
The most characteristic quality of American acting has always been its straightforwardness, a no-nonsense approach that reflects the slangy, casual, wisecracking tone of American life. Pfeiffer has embraced that style while adding something it usually doesn't admit: poeticism. As much as any actress since Julie Christie or Judy Davis, Pfeiffer is attuned to evanescent shifts of mood. Her emotions seem visible, moving just below the surface of her luminous skin. To say she's an actress made for movies isn't merely to say that her beauty invites the camera but that the camera magnifies the subtle interplay of emotions that, at almost any given moment, are flickering over her face. That's why she was so perfectly cast in "Dangerous Liaisons" as a woman whose place in society depends on her ability to maintain a social mask, yet who is so guileless she can't hide what she's feeling. You could say the same thing of her role in Fred Schepisi's 1990 "The Russia House" (which is looking more and more like one of the decade's best films) as a Russian publishing assistant who gets involved in smuggling a document detailing the Soviet Union's nuclear capability to the West. Even with Glasnost, Pfeiffer's Katya is living in a society where she has to constantly watch herself, maintaining a poker face during surreptitious coded phone conversations with her physicist lover (the superb Klaus Maria Brandauer), and arresting the dreamy smile that comes over her when she hears a snatch of folk music in a restaurant and realizes she's giving something of herself away.
And it's tenderness that's present beneath the surface of Pfeiffer's more hard-boiled roles. Like nobody else, Pfeiffer can play tough and utterly vulnerable, as in the role of Susie Diamond, the professional escort turned lounge singer in "The Fabulous Baker Boys" (1989). In that film, Pfeiffer and Jeff Bridges act out the most unyielding love duet imaginable. They're two people who are attracted to each other yet refuse to budge an inch. Each time they settle into the warm bath of seduction, one or both of them douse the mood in cold water. There's a sentimental side to "The Fabulous Baker Boys" that's in tune with the romantic self-pity of the standards that underscore the action. But Pfeiffer has a way of cutting through that, of making the daggers she aims hit their targets. The morning after she and Bridges first sleep together, she deadpans, "Don't worry ... your high-school graduation ring is safe." The performance might seem all edges if it weren't for the way Pfeiffer floods the aftermath of those moments with regret. The irony of Susie Diamond is that the protective armor she erects only makes it easier for her to beat herself up.
