DAMN AGES
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"Growing up is hard to do"
I’d like to think that as a member in good standing of the general viewing audience, the physical features or attributes of performers don’t make much of a conscious impression on me. (Not so in real life. I am absolutely merciless in my criticism of other people’s appearances.) An exception to this is actress Glenn Close. We’re not talking about whether she’s attractive or not. It’s just that her sharp, angular features have always made me think of those creepy marionettes.
Which goes to explaining my distraction at the beginning of Damages, a recent TV series starring Close. So immersed in my unease with her appearance, I simply was not paying attention to anything else happening in the show, stuff like.. the plot. When the end of episode one unfolded as it did, I was caught completely off-guard. Here’s hoping that the show’s smarts and not my diverted attention allowed the rug to be pulled out from under my feet. If so, Damages could be a fun ride.
How to describe it? Gothic? Byzantine? Hyper-melodramatic? All those and then some. As for Close’s Patty Hewes, let’s just say the roles of Cruella De Vil in the live action 101 Dalmatians and Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction combined wouldn’t even register on the scale of gleeful crazy-assed treachery that this character partakes in.
Glenn Close is the most recent example of an ‘older’ actress finding refuge and reinvigoration on television. There’s Holly Hunter playing the extremely messed up cop, Grace Hanadarko, on Saving Grace. As the lovingly overbearing mother, Nora Walker, in Brothers and Sisters, Sally Field added another Emmy to go with her two Oscars.
It seems that television is now the place for actresses of a certain age to find more satisfying roles. On the big screen, menopause comes early. Once women start flirting with 40 and can no longer pull off being the ingénue or sultry seductress, all that’s left them are the matronly roles or the embittered divorcée/widow/single career-minded shrew. Painful, lingering diseases with premature deaths are also in plentiful supply. The only sign of sexuality in most of the movies’ aging females comes in a harmlessly randy, potty-mouthed Golden Girls lasciviousness.
To say there is a certain double standard when it comes to similarly aged actors in Hollywood is to take a big gulp from a steaming cup of obvious.
While most middle-aged men I know collapse into a heap three-quarters of the way down the first baseline trying to beat out an infield single, 52 year-old Bruce Willis revived the Die Hard series, unleashing his Det. John McClane on a bunch of weak-assed youngsters. In the world according to Bruce, twenty something computer nerds are all 98-pound weaklings to his aging but still ripped warrior. (Could it possibly be a projection of Bruce’s angst over seeing his ex-wife take up with a young’un?) You’re not getting older, Bruce baby, you’re just getting more awesome. Even more improbable is the 60+ Sylvester Stallone returning to the ring in Rocky Balboa, and the jungle in Rambo. It’s hard to gauge the level of delusion with everyone involved in those two projects, from the actor himself to those giving him the greenlight. Did anybody at any time honestly believe they weren’t working on a freak show? How soon should we expect the next illogical step? Boxer pitted against soldier in Alien versus Predator fashion, battling it out for global supremacy and boffo box office.
Is that any less conceivable than Harrison Ford reprising the role of Indiana Jones? Officially a senior citizen, with a career sagging along with his jowls, Ford continues to foist his action hero persona upon us in an increasingly unbelievable fashion. It seems the older action stars get, the less they’re able to distinguish between their real and their screen lives. Hey, Ford must be thinking, I’ve got a disturbingly skinny girlfriend more than 20 years younger than I am. I must still be a swashbuckling hero.
So, we should fully expect to see Johnny Depp’s Capt. Jack Sparrow slowly transform into Keith Richards over the next couple decades or so and Nicholas Cage running around in a toupee saving national treasures long after he qualifies for a Denny’s senior discount.
It all makes sense in these days of arrested development. If young adults are refusing to grow up and move out of their parents’ basements, why can’t 60 be the new 40 or maybe even 30? Somebody’s got to act that age. Until the kids grow up and accept the responsibility, the adults among us, including the really old ones, will have to do it.
Not that there’s anything wrong with growing old. OK, there is, what with the whole breakdown of both body and mind, and death drawing ever nearer. The simple fact is that getting older is inevitable. No matter what your plastic surgeon and Hollywood try to tell you, it can’t be avoided except if you’re a movie star with a viable film franchise that can spit out an endless number of sequels.
Maybe that’s the reason an age inequality between the sexes exists in the movies. Actresses haven’t worked hard enough at establishing their franchise characters. To remain forever young, Angelina Jolie’s going to have to stop getting pregnant and adopting children and start flogging her Lara Croft series. Jennifer Garner can save herself from looking old by relying less on her L’Oreal products and more on pushing for the next Elektra instalment.So it turns out that I just might notice appearances a little. One might even go so far as to call me fixated. Glenn Close looks just as much like a scary marionette at 60 as she did at 40. She can’t help that any more than she can help getting older. Even if actors are paid to pretend, they can only be expected to reasonably pretend to be young for so long before it starts to look more than a little sad. If it means retiring to the hinterlands of TV in order to act your age, so be it. Better Harrison Ford playing a feisty grandfather in a sitcom than out there as a creaky Indiana Jones implausibly saving the world from the Communists. There’s only so much disbelief that we can be asked to suspend.
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