Will Aniston always be Rachel?
Her newest film makes you wish she’d step out of Friends’ shadow more often
Can she leave Rachel behind her?
It’s nearly a decade since Friends ended its 10-season run, but Jennifer Aniston is still the focus of media frenzy. Her new film We’re the Millers won’t upset any applecarts — her fans will love it, her detractors will hate it, and critics will continue to sneer, not least because she plays a stripper who strips all the way down to … her bra and panties.
But for her millions of loyal fans, Aniston will always be the character she played on Friends. Rachel Green was funny but not too funny, pretty but not too pretty, sexy but not too sexy, scatterbrained but not too scatterbrained — someone who came into their homes every week for 10 years, someone they know. Their BFF! The girl next door who put on a plucky face and soldiered on when her husband dumped her for Angelina Jolie. The patron saint of jilted women everywhere.
The devotion Aniston inspires is almost as scarily intense as the hatred, both factions making it their business to dissect her private life, psychoanalyze her choice of clothes and makeup, and lob invective at each other in the continuing Team Aniston versus Team Jolie wars.
But there are three things we should realize about Jennifer Aniston: One, you don’t spend a decade in a smartly written sitcom without acquiring razor-sharp comic timing. Two, at least some of the loathing she inspires is due to her area of expertise being that most despised of genres — the rom-com. Three, the reputation she has somehow been saddled with for being “boxoffice poison” is false. With few exceptions, her films have made money.
She has played her share of boring girlfriends, but hitching her star to those of Jim Carrey (in Bruce Almighty) or Adam Sandler (in Just Go With It, a remake of the 1969 comedy Cactus Flower, with Aniston in the Ingrid Bergman role), or blending into an ensemble romcom cast (something at which she has had plenty of practice) in He’s Just Not That Into You, enabling her to add some smash hits to her CV.
Nevertheless, in nearly every case where Aniston has had star or equal billing, the box-office takings have been substantial; she’s one of the few female stars who can command audiences worldwide.
“The Rachel” is not just a hairdo but a performance, of which she has been offering sometimes intriguing variations for over a decade. There’s Rachel with a gay friend in The Object of My Affection (one of the first rom-coms to acknowledge that a girl’s best friend is sometimes homosexual), Rachel as Manic Pixie Dreamgirl (a bubbly, life-loving creature that exists only on film) in Along Came Polly (a film that cunningly subverts the cliché to turn her into the Voice of Reason opposite Ben Stiller’s neurotic), Rachel falling out of love with Vince Vaughn in The BreakUp, a reverse rom-com that bravely addresses the decline of a relationship rather than its flowering.
In Marley and Me, Rachel played a second fiddle to a Labrador retriever (or to the 22 different dogs that played it), but is there not something retriever-esque about the actress herself?
The sleek blondness, long silky hair and eagerness to please? By now, Aniston must have run every conceivable variation on the Rachel persona, but is she capable of leaving it behind?
It’s not often she has strayed outside her comfort zone, but the results when she has are interesting enough to make you wish she’d try it more often.
In The Good Girl (2002), scripted by Freaks and Geeks alumnus Mike White, she’s a Texan Madame Bovary, a careworn shopgirl who has an affair with a younger co-worker. It’s a de-glamorized, authentic and unpatronizing performance with no Rachel in it at all.
Three years later, Aniston subverted her girl-next-door image even further in Derailed, a modern noir in which her attempted adulterous tryst with fellow commuter Clive Owen goes horribly wrong, leading to rape, blackmail and murder.
Nor is there any Rachel to be seen in Horrible Bosses, for which the actress wears a brunette wig, and strips to her bra and panties (what’s the point of spending all that time in the gym if you can’t show off your flat tummy?) as a predatory nymphomaniac dentist.
She and Colin Farrell, sporting a comb-over, are the funniest things in a plot that abandons early echoes of Strangers on a Train for random slapstick, but it was a box office hit and may yet persuade Aniston that she doesn’t always have to channel Rachel.
Her next film sounds even more promising. Life of Crime, an adaptation based on The Switch by the late Elmore Leonard, which will première at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, is a prequel to Rum Punch (Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown).
Aniston plays a housewife kidnapped by Mos Def and John Hawkes in earlier incarnations of characters played by Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro in Jackie Brown. Needless to say, the kidnapping doesn’t go as planned.
It might be just the thing to bury Rachel Green for good, so keep your fingers crossed.