ACTORS DARE TO TAKE ON UNGLAMOROUS ROLES.
Last week, Bryan Abrams published an interview with Robin Mathews, who did Reese Witherspoon’s makeup for her performance as writer Cheryl Strayed in Wild.
“Mathews was tasked with transforming the effervescent actress into a former heroin user who spent week after gruelling week being battered, bitten and bruised by the elements,” Abrams explained. “What’s more, Mathews had to do this all out of sequence, applying a fresh cut on Witherspoon on a Monday that needed to look two-weeks old and scabbed over on a Tuesday.”
Reading Mathews explain that “I have files on my computer on every type of injury you can imagine,” to use as inspiration for bruises and lost toenails, and extol the virtues of a “milk protein” available in Britain that “allows you to paint onto the actor’s lip, then as their lips are drying, you have them purse and relax lips and it makes chapped lips,” was fascinating.
And I was intrigued not least because I walked out of a screening of Wild feeling like Witherspoon looked awfully radiant for someone who was supposed to be overcoming her grief at her mother’s death, a stint of heroin use and the dissolution of her marriage by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.
But as I’ve had time to sit with the movie, which I saw in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, I’ve come to the conclusion that my initial reaction was wrong. Even though — and especially because — Hollywood productions normally feature casts that don’t look anything like humans actually do, films and television can do interesting and important work when they remember that physical appearance is not actually an indicator of moral worth.
Pretty women are not inherently good or necessarily mean and cruel. Ugly ones are not inherently evil or desperate, nor are they sweet, beaten-down saints with no complications. And sometimes, how a woman looks is much less relevant than her choices and her courage.
If you really want to look for a dramatic on-screen transformation, it’s worth taking a look at Monster, Patty Jenkins’s 2003 movie about serial killer Aileen Wuornos. One of the most common ways to compliment an actor who wears heavy makeup or facial prosthetics or gains or loses a lot of weight for a role is to say he or she is unrecognizable.
In the case of Charlize Theron’s performance as Wuornos, that’s literally true: She utterly disappears behind a mat of ratty hair, ill-fitting T-shirts with cutoff sleeves, 30 extra pounds and fake teeth.
But the most radical thing Jenkins does in Monster is not to tell a story about a frankly ugly woman who is also a sex worker, or even to tell a story about a sex worker who killed one client after he raped and attacked her and then kept on killing other men.
It’s to argue that a woman who is not conventionally attractive, who is poor to the point of homelessness, working outside of the law and disconnected from everyone, including her own family, might be worthy of a big, swooning romance.
The sequence early in Monster, when Aileen has her first real date with Selby (Christina Ricci) at a roller rink, focuses closely on their faces, capturing the gathering emotional intensity of the moment and scoring it with Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, the ultimate, cheesy anthem of American possibility. Even the mockery of a few other skaters, unaccustomed to seeing a lesbian couple, cannot ruin the moment for Aileen and Selby.
That Aileen is worthy of love doesn’t make her a good person, and Jenkins’ willingness to sever the connection Hollywood so often draws between those two qualities is one of the movie’s most admirable traits. Monster ends up a study in self-justification. It’s riveting not so much because of what Theron does to her face as what she does with it as she embarks on the murders that will make her famous.
Nothing so dramatic happens in Wild.
As Cheryl Strayed, Witherspoon mourns her mother (Laura Dern), torpedoes her marriage to Paul (Thomas Sadoski in a role that does nothing to make up for the awfulness that is The Newsroom) and shoots heroin, which is a lot for one woman’s life, but definitely short of serial murder.
Wild doesn’t dwell in any particularly explicit way on the way Strayed’s face changes, in part because she spends so much of the movie alone. Sometimes her loveliness, even in grief, means that it’s easy for her to find the other partners she sleeps with in order to sabotage her marriage. At another moment, her relative fragility makes her seem like a mark to the first truly unpleasant men she encounters on the trail.
But while Mathews could do all sorts of things to change Strayed’s face at different points in Wild, the thing that really matters is Strayed’s body and her relationship to it. We see the toll she’s charging her feet on the Pacific Crest Trail in the bloody toenails she discards when she makes camp at night. We see her lift her pack more easily, and by the time she plunges into the snow alone, we’re less afraid for her.
Something similar happens in Cake, Jennifer Aniston’s latest movie, which will have a limited release for awards qualification this month and then go wide in January. Aniston plays Claire, a woman who lives with chronic pain because of a terrible accident that has also fractured her family. And while much has been made of the fact that Aniston doesn’t wear makeup other than that which gives Claire fake scars, once again Cake is not about how Claire’s face looks, but how connected she is to her injured body. Aniston gives a wonderful, subtle physical performance. The moments when Claire dares to confront her own pain and challenge her body to do the things it used to be capable of are among the best in the movie.
If Monster is a movie partially about how little bearing Hollywood’s standards for beauty actually have when two people fall in love, movies like Wild and Cake are about how little ugly and pretty matter at all when a woman has a chance to just sit with herself.
What really matters in the tough moments — be it a long hike or the deep end of Claire’s lonely Los Angeles swimming pool — is the strength to keep on walking, or to swim instead of sink.