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September 13, 2005
Celebrity: The Key to a Good Movie
Working in a supermarket for four years in high school, I often heard complaints from customers about “what does his love life have to do with his movies?” Well, as much as I loathe to say it, what we read in U.S. Weekly affects what we see in film.
In a tabloid-obsessed world, where your average moviegoer knows not only the collective filmography of their favorite actor, but also the problems of their love lives and what they eat for breakfast, it’s easy to forge relationships with the men and women who appear on screen.
Through years and years of watching movies, we, the audience, have developed bonds and memories with the people who light up the stories projected in the dark, and ultimately, it’s the history of these actors that affect our opinions of the movies.
For example, I recently caught the tiny flick Broken Flowers, a truly remarkable film that stars Bill Murray.
The story is that of a man caught in the headlights of his philandering, as he receives a letter stating that he has a son. However, it wasn’t so much the story that interested me as Murray himself, stewing and deadpanning toward anything with a pulse. I found myself relying on Murray’s past roles to fill the holes in the many silences of the movie.
The director, Jim Jamursch, seemed to want people to reflect along with Murray as he takes his introspective journey, using the actor’s thirty years in entertainment as the anchor to which to start his excursion.
When I was discussing this movie with a friend, they said that Murray was simply playing himself. I agreed that that was the point. By using the familiar Murray persona, the one that we’ve fallen in love with through Groundhog’s Day and Lost in Translation, the director managed to welcome the viewer right into the world of this offbeat playboy right from the start, never needing to introduce us to this strong, silent type etched upon the screen. After all, we’ve already met.
Broken Flowers would not have been as superb as it was with some character actor plucked out of obscurity. In order for it to work, the director needed a star to carry the quieter moments that the film relied on so thoroughly. Jamursch required the audience to identify with the character from the beginning, so that his trek would be ours. However, a solid relationship with a star isn’t always the greatest thing for a moviečin some cases, not knowing the actors can have its juicy benefits. Wes Craven’s delicious plane thriller Red Eye fits this bill.
The story of a hijacked plane has been done before, but somehow Red Eye pulled off the trick of being fresh and spine-tingling, and ultimately it was because Craven used film-goers’ relationships with two actors we’ve only been briefly introduced to, Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy.
These two, battling and flirting high above the earth, are relatively new to the cinema firmament, and therefore we haven’t seen how they will react under pressure. Familiar is a death knell for anything in the thriller genre (just look at The Skeleton Key for proof), and by taking advantage of our unfamiliarity with the two leads, Craven is able to create genuine shocks. Who knew that Murphy’s eyes could be so calculating or that McAdams could hold her own against the Norman Bates sitting next to her (and still remain plausible)?
Six years from now, when these two have Oscars, paparazzi, and a couple of scandals miring the rags across the supermarket, this film’s eerie newness will be impossible to recapture, but for now, the unfamiliar can give us a jolt.
So, whether new or old, the movie stars and the tabloids that love them affect the way we interpret film, the way we view the personas on screen. So get out to the supermarket, pick up your In Touch, and start flipping-it’s not gossip, it’s research.
Posted by msveum at September 13, 2005 01:09 PM