Renée Zellweger channels Lana Turner in Richard Loncraine's utterly disarming "My One and Only"A few weeks ago, Carrie Rickey of The Philadelphia Inquirer devoted one of the posts on her Flickgrrl blog to considering whether or not Renée Zellweger has hit "that bad age" for an actress.
We've seen it happen to such prolific and seemingly youthful actresses as Sissy Spacek and Sally Field whose careers (on the big screen, at least) stopped with a thud once they reached ... "that bad age." Insidious.
It's not pleasant to watch, but to answer Carrie's question, I really don't see that happening to Zellweger, who turned 40 this year. She's always been a singular, idiosyncratic actress, an acquired taste for some, who has made some compelling, sometimes risky career decisions.
As a result, her filmography, while not as mainstream or filled with high-profile hits as, say, Julia Roberts, is endlessly fascinating.
And her last few films, which may seem unmemorable for some, have frankly provided me with the few lasting movie experiences that I've had recently. What's more, she's had terrific roles in each, arguably the only truly original female roles in movies these days.
There was her turn as writer Beatrix Potter Chris Noonan's neglected "Miss Potter" (2006), her newspaper reporter Lexie Littleton in George Clooney's charming (and also neglected) "Leatherheads" (2008), her sly, wicked vamping as the duplicitous Allie French in Ed Harris' equally provocative "Appaloosa" (also '08) and her near-perfect hommage to Doris Day as corporate hot-shot Lucy Hill in Jonas Elmer's "New in Town" (2009), which was - you guessed it! - neglected.
These were all juicy roles and Zellweger was alarmingly precise and spot-on in each one - as she is in Richard Loncraine's delicious "My One and Only," an old-fashioned entertainment that combines two irresistible genres - the road movie with the romp about a kid's outrageous mother/aunt/grandmother (take your pick). It's part "Auntie Mame," part "Travels with My Aunt" and part "Imitation of Life."
Zellweger clearly had her choice of how to play runaway wife and mother Anne Deveraux (based on Anne Hamilton Spalding, mother of actor George Hamilton). Would she go with Rosalind Russell or Maggie Smith or Lana Turner? Well, Lana wins. And the satisfying result is a restrained comedic performance that's lulled by pathos and a certain tenderness - and tinged with a retro glamour-puss alure. The bottom line is that it's an authentic depiction of the way stars once behaved in movies.
Lana definitely would have approved.
Mark Rendall and Logan Lerman (in the role of the young George Hamilton), playing brothers, keep up with and complement Renée, their on-screen mother
7 comments:
I adore the sheer affectlessness of Zellweger's acting. I think she performs memorably in everything. You don't mention her early work but let's put in a plug for "Empire Records," "The Whole Wide World," "A Price Above Rubies" and "Love and a .45."
And let's not forget "Nurse Betty" or "Deceiver"!
Yours is the first positive comment I've read about "Leatherheads." As someone who finds himself guiltily enjoying this movie, including Zellwegger's performance, when it pops up on HBO, it's nice to find someone who enjoys at least some aspect of it. My hunch is that Clooney did too good a job capturing the spirit of an era that seems completely, almost bizarrely out of sync with today's world. For anyone with little knowledge of that era, the movie must have seemed puzzling at best and nutty at worst. Really - how do you fit Harold Lloyd into a Kurt Cobain world?
wwolfe- I find that, in general, modern movie audiences prefer contemporary-set movies. Anything before 1990 seems to confuse them. Honest. I'm not kidding. And costume pix seem to succeed commercially only when they contain something anachronistic - such as Johnny Depp's "Pirate" flicks.
BTW, I like just about everything about "Leatherheads." A tangy little comedy.
Joe-
Don't forget about Renée's turn as Doris Day in "Down with Love," a more obvious choice than "New in Town"!
Monica-
I didn't really forget it. I just don't like it - or like it as much as I would like to like it. Peyton Reed is a good filmmaker and Renée and Ewan made a terrific film couple, but I just found "Down to Love" to be too condescending towards the material to which it was allegedly paying tribute. It seems to be laughing at the Day-Hudson comedies.
Joe: I'm with you on DOWN WITH LOVE. In some ways I'm a perfect audience for it - I grew up with the Doris Day flicks, enjoy genre tweaking and love a good romantic comedy. But I found it hard watching a story in which every moment was in quotation marks, so to speak. I think in a lot of ways the talented people involved hit what they were aiming for. I only question why they bothered to aim. It comes off as a spoof of a style that was borderline spoofery to begin with.
Ultimately, I think there's more entertainment value in simply rewatching the old Day/Hudson movies. They're dated in a fun way, and you bring your own sense of irony to it. The double entendres were risqué for their time, but are so mild now that they're funny on a different level.
What was the pitch for Down with Love? "Hey, let's make a Day/Hudson movie, only with dirtier jokes." If I were the studio exec, my response would have been, "Okay, but why?"
That said, Zellweger was super as usual, and the end credit sequence showed that the film might actually have worked as a full-on musical.
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