Perhaps the most impressive duet of Pfeiffer's career is the one she plays with Michael Keaton in "Batman Returns" (1992). When director Tim Burton eschews the folderol that clutters the film and focuses in on these two, he approaches the level of "The Empire Strikes Back" or "Superman II," films that offer the peculiarly moving spectacle of seeing comic-book characters inhabited by human-scale emotions. Certainly, Selina Kyle, the shy-mouse secretary who finds the second of her nine lives as Catwoman, is the wildest bit of acting Pfeiffer's ever done. Using a timid little voice in her first scenes, and with her hair as scattered as her stray thoughts, Pfeiffer heads right for caricature while maintaining a keening edge of emotional desperation beneath. One look at Selina's pink apartment, cluttered up with a child's stuffed animals and doll houses, tells you all you need to know about the character. When she's outfitted as the latex avenger Catwoman, everything in Pfeiffer's portrayal changes, from the insinuating, slow-as-molasses stride she employs to the deep slow-as-molasses voice that might be coming out of Tallulah Bankhead. As Selina falls in love with Bruce Wayne and their secret identities get in the way, Pfeiffer's performance grows even more neurotically lyrical, until she seems to be skipping along the knife's edge that separates fantasy from total emotional disintegration.

As Pfeiffer kept racking up one critically acclaimed performance after another, mostly in films that weren't hits, she seemed to be in the same position as the '30s Hollywood starlet she played in "Natica Jackson." In one scene, the studio head complains that Natica "can't carry a picture by herself," while her agent counters, "She walks off with every picture she's in and you know it." The debate about Pfeiffer was whether she had the star power to "open" a movie without the benefit of a famous male co-star. (Articles that attempted to address just how big a star Pfeiffer was felt duty bound to mention that she'd turned down both "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Thelma and Louise," as if saying no to those stinkers were proof of her bad judgment.) The argument wasn't settled until the urban-school melodrama "Dangerous Minds" turned out to be a surprise hit in the summer of 1995. But Pfeiffer continued to turn out astonishing performances, as she had in 1992's "Love Field," a slickly crafted melodrama about a Dallas housewife who runs away from her husband to take a Greyhound north for JFK's funeral. Pfeiffer pulls off an amazing transformation in the film, showing us how a woman who at first seems as silly as her peroxided puff of hair emerges from her fantasies to construct a real life for herself. And as a waitress who surrenders to the persistent courtship of a short-order cook (a rather creepy Al Pacino) in "Frankie and Johnny" (1991), Pfeiffer gave what may be her best performance to date.

Her casting in that film set off a brouhaha, however. The material, adapted by Terrence McNally from his play "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune," is squarely in the pathos-of-the-little-people mode (like Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty"). Kathy Bates had played the part onstage, and Pfeiffer's casting unleashed the usual blather about the unfair advantage beauty has in the movies. But if you listened to the complaints, which ran along the lines of "Michelle Pfeiffer is too beautiful to be a waitress," you had to question the assumptions beneath them. Were those people saying that working-class women are ugly, or were they just falling back on the old canard that actors can't believably play ordinary people? As Frankie, Pfeiffer wears little make-up, has circles under her eyes and lets her hair go slack and dull. But she isn't playing the actress's game of courting praise by drabbing herself down. Frankie's weariness comes from the inside, from too many identical days of slinging hash and too many nights with louses. In a sense, Pfeiffer's beauty works so well because, for Frankie, it's beside the point; she's too slugged out by life to take notice of herself. The resistance she puts up to Pacino's Johnny may be the spikiest acting Pfeiffer's done, and it undercuts the play's simple-minded premise that heartbreak has caused Frankie to hide from the adventure of life. Pfeiffer plays Frankie as a woman stubborn enough to insist on making her own decisions, sick of having to live up to other people's expectations. Pfeiffer reverses the power structure of the play so that by the time she yields to Pacino, it's entirely on Her terms. She puts real grit in McNally's phony symphony of the big city, an edge that the writer's well-made play design can't smooth down.

It's hard not to feel that, in the last few years, Pfeiffer has been in something of a holding pattern. Her movie choices seem less fortuitous ("Wolf," "To Gillian on her 37th Birthday," "Up Close and Personal,"), and though she's often been fine in them, they don't seem to inspire her. It may be that her attention is elsewhere -- perhaps in raising her two children, an adopted daughter and a younger son from her marriage to producer David E. Kelley ("The Practice," "Ally McBeal"). Pfeiffer has voiced her reluctance to do any movies whose production would take her away from her children. And it may be that she is trying to reflect her experience as a mother with parts like "One Fine Day," "A Thousand Acres" and this year's "The Deep End of the Ocean." The trouble is that mom roles, by definition, tend toward the soft and sexless (some of the exceptions being Diane Keaton in "Shoot the Moon," Andie McDowell in "Unstrung Heroes" and Allison Steadman in "Life Is Sweet"), and the roles Pfeiffer is choosing leave no place for either her toughness or her lyricism.

Critics and feminists have been quick to complain that in the movies, women past 40 are no longer viewed sexually. Part of that problem is the virtuous roles that are touted for actresses past 40, washed-out domestic bits that are supposed to "address the concerns of real women" or some such thing (and are often from bestsellers written by women, as in the case of "A Thousand Acres" and "The Deep End of the Ocean"); overtly sexual roles are considered demeaning or inappropriate. The luxuriance Pfeiffer brings to the fairy queen Titania in Michael Hoffman's mucked-up new film of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a step in the right direction. But why does playing your age too often mean drabbing yourself down? And where does that leave those actresses, like Michelle Pfeiffer, whose sexuality is inseparable from their intelligence and their excitement?

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