Curvy and Nervy

The Opposite of Sex.

Bob Akestar

In praise of Christina Ricci

By Gretchen Giles

THIS IS A SONG of breasts and thighs, peachy upper arms and a bubble butt. This is a hymn to the hint of a double chin, to a stomach that puffs up from under belts, to legs–as Scott Fitzgerald once wrote–that sink into shoes without the benefit of ankles. This is a heterosexual love poem to Christina Ricci, a young actress who proves that a blonde bombshell still has the right to explode. (Here’s hoping that her suddenly svelte form on a recent cover of Premiere is just a passing fancy.)

Anchored by a sweet smile and custardy breasts, Ricci is a kidnapped girl who play-acts the role of wife to Vincent Gallo’s more-than-just-troubled husband in the recently released-to-video Buffalo 66. The trailer to this film neglects Ricci’s cherub face altogether and shows only her bosom, her name slung across the breasts like a Miss America swag, giving the viewer a clue to how Ricci will be seen for the duration of the film: as tits that can talk.

Clad for Buffalo 66 with the innocence of a baby doll in a baby-doll nightie masquerading as a dress, Ricci moves with a jiggly purity that never allows her character unseemly carnality, refuses to suggest sluttishness, and defies such smears of whoredom as silver high heels, sparkly blue eyeshadow, and slip straps seek to bestow. Instead she is an overfilled angel, a cream cake with sugary thighs who shows no hint of a clavicle and has nary a muscle that isn’t smoothly encased in flesh. Nothing on Ricci bristles when it can undulate, no ripples appear that aren’t caused by exhaling, and her rear could never be described as less than ample.

How in Hollywood’s gym-culture has this woman gotten job after job as a sex queen? And who’d have guessed from watching the dour eyes and dark braids displayed in The Addams Family that Wednesday’s child would be so full of grace? Whether sweater-shrugging the seduction of a gay man in The Opposite of Sex or juggling down the pants of a frightened pubescent in The Ice Storm or rolling like a tube of cookie dough toward Gallo’s intense angularity on a motel bed in Buffalo 66, Ricci has nothing whatsoever in common with today’s notion of strained muscular beauty. She doesn’t even match the perfect size 12 waist of Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch.

Like Drew Barrymore, Ricci displays a voluptuous milkshake beauty that must drive other actresses crazy. Surely she pays homage to the Stairmaster, but it’s hard not to imagine a plate of profiteroles sitting where the Evian should be. Yet there is nothing overfed about Ricci. Rather, she has the sturdy girl-next-door bounty of real girls–plus those custardy breasts. And it is her repeat portrayals of real-girl wickedness and real-girl sexuality that keep one riveted to the screen after the allure of breast and hip and impossibly round thigh begin to fade.

Ricci’s wan hitchhiker camping out in Johnny Depp’s nightmare hotel room in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas gives the parent-chills to any who watch her. Her need to be returned immediately home to a five-food-group meal is shockingly apparent. In The Ice Storm, Ricci’s portrayal of sexual awakening lasts longer than Sigourney Weaver’s triumph at a key party, leveled as it is by Ricci’s head resting childishly on film-dad Kevin Kline’s shoulder as he carries her home. Even her black-bra’d flauntings in The Opposite of Sex eventually make some sense of why anyone would wish to ruin the life of her perfectly nice half-brother. And in Buffalo 66, Ricci gives meaning and rhythm to a role that should only provoke us to ask why the hell such a pretty young thing would hang out with a gaunt creep like Gallo.

In all these films, there is an inevitable moment when the viewer wants to scream “Run!” at Ricci’s pouting visage. But she’s stubborn and never does. Rather, she scowls at the Watergate hearings, tans her tummy by the pool, or sits on a mound of filthy Vegas carpet to wait it out. And with her sits enough creamy-silk real-girl flesh to make two of Parker Posey.

As most actresses seem to consist of little more than what’s left of a chicken after a barbecue–bones and a bit of skin–it’s heartening to see that someone as heroically built as Christina Ricci still gets to fill out a role, because she’s certainly got the talent to do it.

From the February 11-17, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Passion Play

Close encounter: Emily Watson and James Frain star in Hilary and Jackie.

Poet Jane Hirshfield on genius, happiness, and the film ‘Hilary and Jackie’

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton–driven by an impulse he has never properly explained–takes interesting people to interesting movies in an ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. Each discussion is taped, labeled, and cataloged. When moved to do so, Templeton shares these tangential chitchats with the public. This time out he takes renowned poet and teacher Jane Hirshfield to see Hilary and Jackie.

JANE HIRSHFIELD gazes down at the round, white, marble-topped table between us. Sliding her decaf mocha to one side, and placing both of her hands on the cool, smooth stone, she glances up and smiles.

“They talked about wanting to be special,” she says, referring to Hilary and Jacqueline du Pré, the two real-life sisters at the center of the provocative new film Hilary and Jackie. Now seated at a small cafe in downtown Sausalito–Hirshfield lives in nearby Mill Valley–we’ve already found much to discuss since seeing the film at a nearby theater.

“Special,” Hirshfield repeats. “Well. I would say this about being special. Special doesn’t matter. This tabletop is not trying to be special. It doesn’t need to. It is sufficient in itself. As a matter of fact–it’s perfect.”

“At the very least,” I reply, now gazing at the table myself, “it certainly isn’t unhappy.”

“Definitely not,” Hirshfield says, laughing, patting its glistening surface. “No suffering here.”

Jacqueline du Pré, on the other hand–as portrayed in the film by Emily Watson–was most decidedly unhappy–this in spite of enormous international success as a concert cellist in the 1960s. The real Jackie du Pré died at the age of 42, a victim of a long illness, multiple sclerosis, that ended her career years before taking her life. Conversely, Hilary du Pré–who with her brother, Piers du Pré, wrote A Genius in the Family, the book on which the film is based–traded her own dream of playing the flute in concert for the less-glamorous role of mother and wife. Initially considered the more gifted of the two, Hilary (played by Rachel Griffiths) watched as her sister, by sheer effort and stubbornness, essentially willed herself into becoming a world-class musician. Ironically, it was Hilary who found the deeper happiness that always eluded Jackie.

“That’s one of the things that I found so interesting in the movie,” Hirshfield says, “that Jackie became a great musician out of envy. ‘God damn it, I will be noticed!’ Through sheer willpower, she changed roles with her sister. She became the genius.

“And that was an almost fateful wrong turn–because it didn’t work. It didn’t give Jackie the happiness she wanted. It didn’t give her the consolation she wanted. It makes the story a tragedy of the classical Greek kind.”

Hirshfield, renowned as a poet and teacher, is the author of numerous award-winning books of poetry, including The October Palace and The Lives of the Heart. She edited Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, and crafted dazzling translations in The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems of Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu. She is also the author of a recent book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, praised by the poet and fellow Zen-practitioner Gary Snyder as being “fearless” and full of “diamond-hard insights.” She is widely considered one of our country’s greatest living poets.

AS FOR THAT aforementioned notion–illustrated so clearly in the film–that artistic genius can be built by effort and determination alone, Hirshfield is still pondering the idea.

“Well, you know that saying ‘Ten percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration,’ ” she says. “But what the movie is saying is that, without great ambition, no one will become a great artist.

“I don’t want to agree with that,” she adds. “But it doesn’t mean it may not be true.”

“It’s certainly an idea that is supported by our culture,” I note.

“That’s the Western romantic image of the artist, that art is born of striving and torment,” Hirshfield replies. “And in Jackie’s case, as shown here, it was that torment of wishing to be seen–and wishing to be loved.

“And yet,” she muses, “that desire is presented as something unworkable in the end, because life will strip you of all accomplishments. It will. Life strips everybody of all their accomplishments, some sooner than others. But nobody dies with their accomplishments. You simply die with your heart.

“If anything in the film troubles me,” she goes on, “it might be the implication that the one who chases art won’t be happy, and that the one who will be happy is the one who walks away from the realm of creativity. I think that’s a cultural stereotype, and it’s unfortunate. It’s the Sylvia Plath model, the ‘art-and-unhappiness’ connection.

“It says that the artist is a person who will never be satisfied, that the artist is always self-centered. And of course, in this movie–if you step way back from the fact that this is biography, that it actually happened–there’s the notion that the artist will pay. The artist will suffer. The artist will get MS and die, while the non-artist will stay healthy and will breed and live on. And that troubles me, because I don’t think there’s one way of doing anything. So when that old stereotype leaps up–particularly as put onto women–it is, to me, a bit of a difficulty.”

Hirshfield pauses, absently running her hand along the table once again. After a moment, she describes the time she read all of Yeats’ poems, chronologically, from first to the last.

“I was quite delighted to see some very bad poems in there,” she admits. “It was nice to know that Yeats, too, could write badly. Because if Yeats can write badly, then I can write badly–and it doesn’t mean the end of everything. It merely means we all write badly.

“The trick,” she says, “is to sometimes write well.”

From the February 11-17, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.