Stars can’t act their age now

Browsing through a Hollywood memorabilia shop recently, I came across a batch of transfixing old photos. They were copies of one of the best-known fashion advertising campaigns of the past 40 years, for Blackglama furs. The famous tagline -- “What becomes a legend most?” -- was all that accompanied this series of smokily glamorous black-and-white portraits, dating largely from the ‘60s and ‘70s, of such stars as Marlene Dietrich, Sophia Loren and Natalie Wood.

It wasn’t the sight of all these beautiful bodies draped in politically incorrect animal pelts that was so startling. It was that in their sophistication, their urbanity, indeed, in their sheer adultness, these people seemed like creatures from another planet. They suggested worldly experience -- of sex, love, wealth and wit -- and at the same time managed to wear it all lightly.

Such adults, in all their cosmopolitan splendor, seem to be an endangered species in today’s world of micro-celebrity. The stars who twinkle in our current firmament might be sexy, buff, quirky and full of elfin energy, but adult they are not. There is a world of difference between the debonair Cary Grant in “Charade,” and Mark Wahlberg, who plays the same character in the current remake, “The Truth About Charlie.” The former is urbane, the latter simply urban.

We live, it seems, a million light years away from the knowing, rakish charm of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, the regal old-world bearing of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh or even the diamond-studded panache of Richard Burton and Liz Taylor. It’s Brad and Jennifer, and Reese and Ryan who rule our world now, but they do so more as prom king and queen, and that is how we respond to them.

Where did all the adults go? Studios report the core movie audience is in the 16-to-24 age group. As a result, filmmakers strain every chord to keep their attention.

The actors on the big screen today are, in fact, mostly the same age as ever they were, but with few exceptions, they look, sound, act and respond like teenagers, or at least people on whom real adulthood has yet to dawn. The sight of Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant in the recent French comedy “8 Women” -- elegant, indifferent, self-mocking, adult -- contrasts sharply with that of the superannuated adolescents parading before us now in most mainstream movies and on TV.

“Nobody seems to be playing roles that are age-appropriate,” says Peter Rainer, film critic of New York magazine and chairman of the National Society of Film Critics. “It’s good that there has been a certain freeing up in terms of age in the movies, but it doesn’t compensate for what we’ve lost. In earlier times, a cult of youthful innocence certainly existed, but you still had more people portraying mature characters and stories that were adult-oriented. And studio movies are also being produced by younger people, with no background in them and little life experience of anything else.”

Quick to mature

A quick look into the film archives brings the point home. It’s sobering to consider that when the cool, sophisticated, restrained Grace Kelly wafted into the frame in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” in 1954, she was just 25. And that when Lauren Bacall told Humphrey Bogart to just “put your lips together and blow” in “To Have and Have Not,” she was a mere 19. Compare that with the zany, “aren’t I crazy?” muggings of 30-year-old Cameron Diaz or the blank waifishness of the unfortunate Winona Ryder, so evident in her doe-caught-in-the-headlights look during her trial. (And for the ultimate juvenile offense! How one yearns for the full-blooded drama of a Lana Turner murder trial.)

The difference between the suave reliability of the pristine Cary Grant and the sputtering tentativeness of his supposed modern incarnation, Hugh Grant, shows how, no matter how grown up you might appear, it’s required nowadays that in matters of behavior, it’s best to defer to the child within.

Indeed, the terms “leading man” and “leading lady” increasingly seem to be misnomers.

The lack of glamour in today’s celebrities is frequently bemoaned by those nostalgic for the golden age. But it seems what we are really regretting is the end of something bigger, adulthood. Being grown up is the absolute prerequisite for possessing true glamour, and the out-of-control cult of youth, with its desperate need to praise the shiny and new above all else, has in the past 20 years stealthily but effectively robbed us of a sense that adultness is to be aspired to.

“Our obsession with youth is not new, but it’s definitely accelerated,” says Morris Berman, author of “The Twilight of American Culture.” Looking at American culture in Freudian terms, he says, we can see how the “adult” part of the psyche, the superego, has, since the ‘60s, effectively been discarded, leaving only the id -- that part representing selfish, childlike desires. This is reflected in the movies. “Infants want to be entertained and tend to resist education,” Berman says. “Compare movies from the ‘50s with those of the ‘90s. Just in terms of camera time for conversation, those from the ‘50s moved slowly and people talked. Now, the length of sentences are short, and that’s because a child’s attention span is so short.”

This triumph of childhood over adulthood may have disabled whole movie genres. The wispy romantic comedies of Doris Day and Rock Hudson in the ‘50s might have borne little relation to reality, but these actors played characters who were recognizably and independently adult, and reacted to each other as such. Compare this with the sweetie-pie, kooky little-girl posturings of Meg Ryan in recent attempts at such pairings during the past decade, and “Pillow Talk” takes on all the weight of a Chekhov play.

If, as could be argued, an idea of European sophistication informed our ideas of what was adult and glamorous in Hollywood in past decades, then the worldwide dominance of a certain kind of American culture -- its youth culture -- has effectively sidelined it. “In the ‘50s and into the ‘60s, there was a European sensibility that still had an influence in movies,” said Barbara Steele, a British actress and Emmy-winning producer, “and the American strength was a great kind of freshness. Now, it’s hard to relate to anybody on screen. There’s a sort of empty infantilism, a total lack of a sense of experience.”

Of course, the aura of sophistication that was spun around celebrities in the past was often the work of publicists. Certainly, as the newly unexpurgated diaries of the late British photographer and socialite Cecil Beaton show, he was less than impressed by the ordinariness and provincialism of many of the celebrities of yesteryear he encountered in the flesh.

But this does not take away from the fact that there was an aspiration to mystery, to worldliness and the suggestion of having been around the block -- qualities that don’t fit well into our current cultural atmosphere of perpetual adolescence. But, hey, we can talk about that later, “Friends” is on. Pass me my water bottle and baseball cap.