Nuns, whores and femmes fatales

The whole idea of "good" movie roles for women is crap -- I'll take a lace-and-leather sexpot over Nicole Kidman's prosthetic-honker performance in "The Hours" any day of the week.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Mar 20, 2003 | When Nicole Kidman accepted the Golden Globe award for her performance as Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry's "The Hours," she praised it as a picture that finally offered solid, meaty roles for women. Never mind that the meatiest part in "The Hours" probably belongs to Miramax head Harvey Weinstein in the role of Big Daddy. At the Golden Globes ceremony you could almost see him ticking off his accomplishments for 2002: "Epic neo-historical sprawl, check; crowd-pleasing movie musical, check; good roles for women, check."

At Oscar time, everyone who cares about movies takes stock of the roles and performances that made an impression in the past year. And every year, it's always the most noticeable performances -- particularly the ones that receive Academy Award nominations -- that people use to gauge how well women have been represented in movies.

But what, exactly, constitutes a "good" role for an actress in 2003? Is it possible that the roles actresses themselves consider good aren't always the ones that translate best to the screen? And maybe the most important question: Are moviegoers these days more open to the subtleties of a good performance, regardless of the most obvious characteristics of the role, or less?

The complaint that there are few good roles for actresses is perennial. But even more pernicious is the fact that year after year, people -- and that means critics and the entertainment media, as well as civilian moviegoers -- miss the great roles for women that are practically right under their noses. Worse yet, they forget that what an actress does with a role is far more important than the role itself. Why is playing a depressive writer or an anti-death-penalty nun automatically considered superior to (or more difficult than) playing a kook (like Katharine Hepburn in "Bringing Up Baby"), a prostitute (like Jane Fonda in "Klute"), or a femme fatale (like Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity")?

Just two years ago, Angela Bassett (a wonderful actress, and one who has never gotten her due) claimed that she turned down the lead role in "Monster's Ball" -- the one that garnered Halle Berry an Oscar -- because she didn't want to play a prostitute. Forget that Bassett's comment was needlessly catty. (African-Americans and other minorities have few enough opportunities in Hollywood as it is; a little generosity among colleagues wouldn't hurt.) Whatever the shortcomings of "Monster's Ball" (and there are plenty), there's something seriously wrong with the idea that a woman who's troubled and turns to sex for comfort should be automatically considered a whore.

It probably didn't help Berry's stock as a "serious" actress -- whatever that means -- that the next time audiences saw her she was a Bond girl, albeit a charming and sexy one. Last year alone, we saw universally acceptable bad girls (Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones, who both gave marvelous performances in "Chicago") and girls who are seen as just plain bad (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in Brian De Palma's "Femme Fatale," who gave a sly performance in a role, and a movie, that was widely ignored by critics and moviegoers).

In that context, there's something distastefully prefabricated about the way "The Hours" has been lauded as a showcase for "serious" actresses, as opposed to the others who, the common wisdom goes, just play hotties. "The Hours" is a movie with characters who fearlessly live the life of the mind (whatever that is) and who are, for the most part, decidedly unsexy. Because the movie is about Women and their Problems, it comes to us wrapped up in the assumption that it's actually a serious, deep film instead of a boring and ponderous one. (If ever a movie deserved to be called "Female Trouble," this is it.) "The Hours" is the kind of movie designed to allow actresses to be their most actressy, the kind of thing that's probably more likely to sucker literary types than average moviegoers who, rightly, demand a good story with interesting characters. In an otherwise perceptive New York Review of Books essay on "The Hours" and Virginia Woolf, literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn writes, "Rarely has a mainstream film offered three more interesting roles for three more accomplished actresses, each of whom makes the most of an admittedly rare opportunity: there are moments ... that will make you cry."

Mendelsohn never addresses exactly what's so "rare" about this opportunity; we can assume that he means the characters in "The Hours" are serious women with lots on their minds, and that it's rare to find such characters in a mainstream film. But what it really means is that Kidman gets a chance to give a meticulously calibrated but drab performance, with a prosthetic honker as its center of gravity.

Virginia Woolf is an intensely charismatic presence in her photographs, and her contemporaries seemed to consider her striking -- she didn't exactly have a reputation for being homely. While it's a curious quirk of the moviemaking world that Kidman should need to be uglied up for audiences to take her seriously in the role, as if her skill alone wouldn't have been enough, it's equally annoying that Woolf herself should have to be reshaped as a brainy plain Jane, a frumpy, depressed boho square peg, to serve the movie's purposes.

In "The Hours," the actresses' moments have been practically preshaped for them -- you can just see that artfully extruded star-shape squeezing its way out of the Play-Doh pumper when Meryl Streep, as the contemporary do-gooder and general rusher-arounder Clarissa, crumples in a teary breakdown on her kitchen floor. Julianne Moore, as Laura Brown, a '50s housewife on the verge of a breakdown, gives the subtlest (and, for my money, the best) of the three performances, but considering how consistent her work has been over the years, sometimes in roles that would have been forgettable had they been played by other actresses, I wouldn't rush to elevate this performance over any of her others.

All of which means that when it's time to trot out the examples of "good" and "bad" roles for women, the characters in "The Hours" are bound to end up as a false example of the great strides Hollywood has made in terms of improving movie roles for women.

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Let's have a look at what happened in 1992, a year in which, for no discernible reason, the media raised a hullaballoo over the paucity of good roles for actresses. I remember a TV commentator intoning, in that special timbre of concerned cluelessness that "serious" reporters often adopt when they find themselves having to cover an arts story, that the only roles available to women were those of sex kittens (cut to a clip of Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct") or cats (cut to a clip of Michelle Pfeiffer in "Batman Returns") -- a neat way of diminishing both the roles and the actresses who played them in one quick, cheap shot.

Next Page: "I am Catwoman -- hear me roar!"

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