Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
Maybe they have to avoid the question because, in her résumé, there's not a list of successful big-budget garbage for them to glom onto. Paltrow has kept largely to small- to medium-budget "specialty" films. The new "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is the first thing Paltrow has done that belongs in the blockbuster league, and even it is an odd duck among blockbusters. Composed almost entirely of computer-generated effects (there are only actors and props -- no sets), "Sky Captain," by first-time writer-director Kerry Conran, plays like what you'd get from a kid who shoots Super 8 movies in his backyard and has been given $70 million to do what he wants. But like every other element of the movie, the actors, including Paltrow, exist only to fulfill some iconic function and are part of an enormous, sustained conception that sits on the screen without ever coming alive.
Like most people, I first saw Gwyneth Paltrow in Steve Kloves' film "Flesh and Bone," where she played a young con artist whose specialty is sneaking into wakes and, with the aid of Vaseline, stealing the rings off the fingers of corpses. Her whole affect in the picture was so fuck-you blasé, so unabashedly nasty, that she won me over right away.
The trouble was, that same blasé affect defined her other work from the period. In the early '90s, just before her movie career broke, I saw her onstage as Nina in a Williamstown Theater Festival production of "The Seagull," co-starring with her mother and Christopher Walken. It wasn't a good performance. Wan and resigned where Nina is tormented and lyric, Paltrow moped through the role, her flat, nasal voice finding none of the pathos or sad comedy of Chekhov's lines.
Paltrow has sometimes put her zonked, bruised quality to startling use, as in the role of the Vegas cocktail waitress/hooker in Paul Thomas Anderson's terrific "Hard Eight" (still too little seen and still Anderson's best movie). But other times she just seemed dissociated from the pictures she was in, a promising actress who needed some training to refine her potential (and especially to bring some variety to her voice). The stardom that followed, to say nothing of the Oscar, stymied that.
If Paltrow is only sometimes the actress she can be, she is also, more often than not, a delightful screen presence. Movies like "Emma" (in which she seemed wholly inauthentic) and last year's "Sylvia" (as well as perhaps the upcoming screen version of David Auburn's play "Proof," which Paltrow played onstage in London) are her prestige outings. She's much more enjoyable in throwaway pictures. My colleague Stephanie Zacharek described what a fetching clotheshorse Paltrow made in the tepid "A Perfect Murder." In the wrinkle-in-time romantic fantasy "Sliding Doors," Paltrow got to mix charm with coolly cutting sarcasm. Playing an Englishwoman, Paltrow went believably from withering indignation to clipped vulnerability to a sort of dry coquetry, and she matched up very well with John Hannah, whose slight frame complimented hers. And Paltrow's charm lent a sweetness to last year's "View From the Top," in which she played a small-town girl who dreams of becoming a stewardess. The picture was a trifle but, like Mike Nichols' "Working Girl," it was about the weird intersection of blue-collar and white-collar jobs, and it didn't condescend to the people in those jobs or to their dreams. Silly comedies, though, are often treated as if they're beneath contempt. Which is certainly how Paltrow speaks of it in a recent Entertainment Weekly interview.
That interview reveals one unattractive movie-star habit -- that of distancing yourself from your failures. "If you go back and look at interviews," she says, "you'll never, you'll maybe twice hear me saying I genuinely love a film, because I don't lie." Forget that sometimes telling a lie is simply a matter of being gracious to the people you work with. Paltrow's priding herself on her honesty suggests that she's not the best judge of her work because, with the exception of "Shakespeare in Love," in which she deserved every bit of praise she got, her best work has been done in movies that were either critical or commercial failures or both.
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