Less is really more

Though Hope Davis isn’t the type of actress to carefully plot her career in movies -- the way a more status-hungry pro might think “effects-heavy blockbuster, then romantic comedy, followed by prestigious year-end release” -- she nevertheless clings to a goal:

“I never want to have to make a comeback,” she says. “And if that means flying low under the radar, that’s fine with me. I never want to have to be figuring out how to bust back in.”

Davis may not bear the stamp of boffo box office, even if last year’s critical smash “About Schmidt” playing Jack Nicholson’s pent-up daughter was her biggest hit. But the swanlike blond’s name in a cast usually has the power to soothe the minds of moviegoers who require a standard of intelligence, sophistication and adventurousness. It’s the notion of integrity that fuels her.

“That was the dream, to be working with people who are artists, you know?” the 39-year-old New Yorker says over dinner recently during a brief trip to Los Angeles. “If I can keep doing what I’m doing now, that’s great.”

This mutual attraction between discerning audiences and a discerning Davis began with the 1996 indie comedy “The Daytrippers,” in which her heartbreaking silence stood out amid the otherwise eccentric cast (Anne Meara, Parker Posey among them) of nonstop talkers. This month it’s likely to grow stronger, with her sharply different turns as a possibly unfaithful spouse in Alan Rudolph’s domestic saga “The Secret Lives of Dentists” and as real-life comic book writer Harvey Pekar’s unsentimental, analytical wife Joyce Brabner in “American Splendor,” which opens Friday. Both are small-budgeted, quickly shot films.

There have been occasional studio movies -- “Arlington Road” and “Hearts in Atlantis,” for example -- but Davis prefers the kind of set where money constraints energize the filming process. “You get so much done because you’re moving so quickly through the day,” Davis says. “You never do something 20 times, because they can’t afford it. When something happens 12, 14 times, I’m sleeping. It’s so boring.”

The idiosyncratic nature of “American Splendor” spoke to Davis: from the first-time feature filmmakers (documentarians Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman) to the style, which shifts from acted segments to bits of the real Harvey and Joyce, to the source material of Pekar’s bitterly funny odes to mundane Cleveland life. “It’s the same as the acting in ‘About Schmidt,’ ” Davis says about how she approached “Splendor’s” street-level satire. “It’s about believing in the person, not winking at the camera. You’re not trying to show them how crazy these people are.”

A key for Davis was addressing Brabner’s beef that her husband’s full-on pessimism in the comic book unfairly paints her as little more than an inky scowl or a garden-variety bespectacled East Coast neurotic.

“Hope had a totally different take on Joyce,” co-director Pulcini says. “She saw Joyce as all business. Harvey is a project, and she’s taking that project on, and Hope has that great steely determination, naturally, which she tapped into.”

The relentlessly curious Brabner made for an uneasy Davis when filming began. Unlike the uninterested Pekar’s frequent on-set napping, Brabner wanted to observe -- from beside the camera. “I became so self-conscious, I felt like an utter fraud,” Davis recalls. “She’s very interesting and smart and fun to talk to, but she can be very imposing. I had to ask her not to watch me, and she was really bummed about that.”

When asked about her polite banishment, Brabner jokes that the only awkwardness was at lunch breaks. “She would say, ‘Joyce, come, sit over here,’ and I’d be like, ‘Should I sneak in behind a leaf of lettuce?’ ” Brabner says. Nevertheless, she says Davis captured the “inner” her, with “a much better-looking face and figure, even when they put her in a fright wig.”

Melancholy mien

Davis is often referred to as a thinking man’s sex symbol, probably because in many of her movies she communicates a ravishing melancholia. When first encountering the blue-sweatered, blue-jeaned Davis, sipping silently on a club soda and gazing around nonchalantly, one is instantly reminded of her role in “Next Stop Wonderland.” In that 1998 paean to romantic loneliness, the actress was often perched on a barstool, either half-heartedly querying personal ad respondents or musing on fate with co-workers, but always looking sleepy-sexy.

It’s as if the internal dialogue between her lovelorn character’s yearning and standoff-ish selves were a new kind of screen charisma: chemistry with oneself. “She’s never a blank slate,” says her longtime friend and “Dentists” co-star Campbell Scott. “In fact, when she’s quiet, Hope seems severely full.”

When “Dentists” director Rudolph met with her in a New York restaurant to play the arty, discontented wife, he took full advantage of the Davis stare. “Every time she looked away for some reason, I would study her face,” says Rudolph, who understood that Davis’ character must be mysterious yet sympathetic. “I said to her, ‘I’d like to really exploit your beauty because you’re stunning, so I might take the extra adjustment to make sure we capture it in the most flattering way.’ And she said, ‘Really? Nobody ever wants me for that. They usually hire me because I look like a Midwest girl.’ ”

Davis is actually a New York girl by way of Tenafly, N.J. Although the family -- engineer father William, librarian mom Joan, plus an older and younger sister -- lived in the Garden State, weekends were spent soaking up Manhattan culture: art, ballet and theater. The shy kid who kept to herself in the schoolyard felt her worries dissipate on the big-city streets. “I like apartments, being up off the ground and having tons of people sleeping around. I definitely fantasized about moving to the city.”

In Streep’s footsteps

Not that her artistic dreams didn’t exacerbate Davis’ admittedly fretful nature. Getting rejected for ballet school left her feeling “washed up” at 15, until a production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” came along. “It’s perfect for teenage girls,” Davis says of the adolescent hysteria that makes the Salem witch-trial play a high school drama department standard.

“You keep it together all day and then, man, oh, man, Friday night comes and your whole French class is in the front row and you really let it rip.” . , I definitely fell in love with acting then.”

It wasn’t her major at Vassar College, however, even though she knew it was her calling. “It was a big deal in my family to go to college,” Davis explains, “so my parents were very clear that if I wanted to act, I should go to New York, and if I wanted to go to college, I should study something else.”

Emboldened by the mandate, Davis opted for a cognitive science degree -- “it’s biology, psychology, linguistics, and it was fascinating,” she says -- but an itch is an itch. Davis did plays there and found time to rifle the archives for information on her idol: fellow New Jerseyite and Vassar grad Meryl Streep.

“I found this file on ‘Miss Julie,’ which she had done at Vassar, and there were costume drawings for her,” Davis says. “I was shaking as I held the pages.”

Upon graduation, Davis headed for the theater mecca of Chicago. Davis recalls her pie-in-the-sky bravado: “You know, it’s ‘We’ll go there, get jobs at Steppenwolf.’ Right.” Yet when her big break came, it was sizable: landing the female role in the 1989 Chicago premiere of homeboy David Mamet’s Hollywood satire “Speed-the-Plow,” directed by Joel Schumacher.

“I was so nervous I went through the entire play in my head every night before going on stage,” she recalls. Schumacher even flew her to Los Angeles for her film debut, a bit part in his 1990 drama “Flatliners.” But for true-blues like Davis, who was a staple on the New York stage in the early ‘90s, some things never die. “I never did get a job at Steppenwolf,” she says, the disappointment lingering.

Davis treasures what she does enough that when asked to divulge some of the camera tricks Jack Nicholson imparted on her, she politely demurs. “It’s his secret,” she says, as if addressing something mystical. “I’ll use them till the day I die.”

What she will talk about is how inspired she was by the three-time Academy Award winner. “He’s still so passionate about it. It’s great when you meet people who are not bored or jaded or bitchy, you know? He still knows this is a great job.”

Right now, the “great job” has transported Davis and her actor husband, Jon Patrick Walker, and 1-year-old daughter, Georgia, to South Africa for “Black Stallion” director Carroll Ballard’s newest, untitled, travelogue saga, in which she plays a farm widow whose boy befriends a cheetah. Davis has already learned how to plow fields and drive a Range Rover with a wildcat in the passenger seat, filmic tasks on the other end of the spectrum from the adult banter she’s grown accustomed to from indies.

“I’m usually in the kind of films my daughter won’t enjoy until she’s 30,” Davis joked recently on the phone from Johannesburg. “So it’ll be nice to be in a film that she can see.”