Zellweger’s face still a cause for controversy
Let’s talk about Renee Zellweger’s face. Why not? Everyone else is. Zellweger, who is 47 and grew up in Katy, stars in the new movie “Bridget Jones’s Baby,” 15 years after she played that role in “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”
Variety’s movie critic, Owen Gleiberman, opened himself up for a world of well-deserved hurt by writing a piece about her face which doesn’t quite look the same as it did 15 years ago:
“I thought: She doesn’t look like Bridget Jones! Oddly, that made it matter more. Celebrities, like anyone else, have the right to look however they want, but the characters they play become part of us. I suddenly felt like something had been taken away.”
Something, of course, had been taken away: 15 years.
Zellweger seems to be a lightning rod for body-shaming. The first time she played the redoubtable Ms. Jones, she gained weight for the role. Not a lot – maybe 20 or 30 pounds — not even enough to make her close to the American average. (She also put on weight for the 2004 sequel.) Fans freaked out. “I was followed around Heathrow by a guy who wanted to take a picture of my backside,” she said at the time.
In ensuing years, as vulture.com has chronicled, she weathered criticism for losing too much weight, having her lips plumped, doing Botox, and on and on, whether any of this were true or not.
Then in 2014, she appeared on the red carpet looking as if she had had work done on her face. Whatever unkindnesses she had suffered up to that point were doubled down on — as if her face belonged somehow to the public (or critics) and not to herself alone.
As last week’s lawsuit by 50-year-old former Fox News commentator Gretchen Carlson shows (and whether her allegations of sexual harassment are true or not, they don’t seem remotely outlandish), a woman past her baby-making years might consider not showing her face in public.
Unless she’s Meryl Streep or Helen Mirren, who have hall passes to age beautifully — and all the Hollywood roles for older white women.
Hollywood isn’t the real world, of course. But it is the real world to the 10th power. In the real world, women in their 50s and 60s literally fade out of sight, invisible to people around them.
I know because I’m one of them. It is, I’m not terribly ashamed to report, a great thing if you want to sneak into a movie theater, and not so great if you want to be acknowledged or respected.
Here’s a small story. A couple of weeks ago, the Chronicle offered free coffee to employees for a morning. The idea was that we’d be instructed on how to work the new-fangled coffee machine. Being a sucker for a freebie, I waited in line. The young, male coffee instructor carefully explained the machine to the person in front of me. Then he turned to the person in back of me. Fortunately, age has made me clever about getting my own coffee.
As the New York magazine film critic David Edelstein said on Facebook: “The fact is, anyone who doesn’t view this issue as part of the horrors experienced by women in this society in general, and women in Hollywood in particular, has no business writing about human beings.”
I think Zellweger does or doesn’t do whatever to her face because she wants to work. I also think she must have grown a strong mental carapace against the criticism.
And I can’t wait for, 25 years from now, “Bridget Jones’s Grandbaby,” and the field day critics will have with her face then.