Independent spirit

Parker Posey hears two voices. One tells her she’s an established film presence. The other tells her she’s still swimming upstream.

The voice of optimism reminds her that in her 10-year career she’s played all manner of provocatively unhinged women in more than three dozen films, most notably a seductive Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis fanatic (“The House of Yes”), a sadistic cheerleader (“Dazed and Confused”), a manic show-dog owner (“Best in Show”), an aimless Dairy Queen attendant (“Waiting for Guffman”), an unfaithful Manhattan book editor (“Personal Velocity”) and a fish-out-of-water librarian (“Party Girl”).

The voice of reproach reminds her that most of these parts were in movies most people never saw -- some classy indie flicks, certainly, but small change by Hollywood standards.

The voice of optimism reminds her that a cult of hip directors, critics and fans routinely swoons over her range, her comedic timing, and the way her characters seem to lack a censoring device so that earnest, often delightfully inappropriate language erupts from them like hard beads of lava. “The wonderful thing about Parker is, she is able to play two or even sometimes three contradictory emotions at the same time,” says “Personal Velocity” writer-director Rebecca Miller, who needed Posey to be torn between elation and anxiety. “She has an exquisite ‘engine’ as an actor. If she were a car, she would be a Jaguar.”

The voice of reproach reminds Posey that if all that were true, Something Big -- a meaty mainstream role -- should have happened to her by now.

It’s not that she loses a lot of sleep over this. She’s confident of her skills. “I get myself more than I ever have,” she says. It’s that, in her journey from acting school to a TV soap to low-budget-film icon, she has almost always chosen art over fame. And she’s at an age, 34, where you involuntarily evaluate your choices.

Dipping into Hollywood

On a recent visit from Manhattan to perform with fellow cast members of the folk-music satire “A Mighty Wind,” Posey was waiting to order lunch at an outdoor table at the Chateau Marmont when a woman a couple of tables away walked over and handed her a paperback book she hoped to turn into a movie. “It’s my fantasy that you’d be in this,” the woman said. “I saw you and thought, ‘She’s my dream person.’ ” She apologized for interrupting, and Posey, a Southern-bred, mannerly woman, thanked her sweetly. Yet a nerve had been pricked.

“When I think somebody comes over here and gives me a book they want me to play,” she said a couple of minutes later, “I think, there’s no way I could get approval to play the part. I might come close, they might talk about me, but it’s so slippery who gets cast.”

What she should have volunteered was the good news: She’d just gotten that ever-elusive meaty part in a mainstream movie. Yet only when a reporter asked half an hour later what roles were in her future did she sigh, “Thank God, praise the Lord!” and disclose that she had been cast in “Laws of Attraction,” a comedy starring Julianne Moore and Pierce Brosnan as rival divorce lawyers. She’ll play a high-strung fashion designer divorcing a rock-star husband, a part she views as rich with histrionic potential. (“I’ll be approaching it like a drama. Hopefully you’ll laugh.”)

Posey has lost out on Hollywood parts before, her vaunted edginess working against her, and she had to lobby for this one, arguing that she could play a character significantly younger than the 41-year-old Moore. (“I shouldn’t have to fight ... but there’s a way to stand up for yourself without being combative.”) She’ll head for Dublin next week to start filming.

Perhaps at last her talent for playing larger-than-life characters with no trace of irony will be “discovered” by millions of less adventurous moviegoers more partial to Brosnan’s James Bond fare. These are people whose films do not usually include moments like the one in the black comedy “The House of Yes,” when Posey’s mentally ill, manipulative, witty character explains mile-a-minute to her twin brother’s new fiancee, “I spend most of my days with my head in the toilet bowl throwing up pills. I can’t really think when I take the pills and a person needs to think.”

Director Mark Waters said he cast Posey in the 1997 adaptation of a play “because she was the only one who seemed to be able to deliver stylized dialogue without putting quotation marks on it.” Posey makes her character, Jackie O -- who seduces her brother and torments everyone in the household with deadly results -- implausibly sympathetic. “She was able to be this ferocious force of nature that sucked everything into her whirlwind but had this fragility, this emotional quality that made you root for her,” Waters said.

Yet it is that very complexity -- what one film critic called Posey’s ability to appear slightly but intriguingly disassociated from her character -- that seems to make her an awkward fit for big Hollywood productions, which often demand more simplicity. Great things were predicted when Posey won a special jury award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 for “The House of Yes” and two of her other films were screened there that same year. Comparisons to Katharine Hepburn -- that aptitude for unpredictable, urbane dialogue, spitting irreverence -- began to follow her.

What didn’t follow her was work, let alone stardom. After appearing in about 30 films from 1993 to 1998, her appearances dwindled. As more studios tried to appropriate “indie” sensibilities, there were fewer quality low-budget films to choose from -- and no rush by the studios to grab Posey, or at least the most interesting part of her. Instead she got small parts in such flicks as “You’ve Got Mail,” “Scream 3” and “Josie and the Pussycats.”

What happened, writer Alissa Quart suggested last fall in Film Comment magazine, was that Posey stayed true to her independent roots and her style of “exhibitionist realism” while “the indie brand became thoroughly diluted by its conspicuous commercial ties.” Posey is “still the Indie Queen,” Quart wrote. “The great sadness is there’s no longer a sovereign empire for her to rule.”

Posey would prefer to mock these analyses because they “almost negate what I’ve done, the extreme luck that I’ve had, ‘cause it has really been a very lucky career, kind of an anomaly. Actors come up to me all the time and say, ‘I’m so glad you’re doing well, you know -- if you can do it, I can, too.’ ”

Confident and cool

Her lack of mainstream success (even the fact that she still lives in the same Chelsea apartment she occupied near the beginning of her career) has stoked her following. Last fall, a British journalist trying to personalize the mystique of shopping in thrift stores declared, “There is something inherently thrift-chic” about Posey. The editor of a new, similarly minded American magazine, Budget Living, Sarah Grey Miller, gushes that Posey is the one celebrity who personifies “what we’re about.” Posey, says Miller, symbolizes people who are “confident enough to find a cool backpack at Kmart.”

Male Poseyphiles are drawn to a woman who is “beautiful, mischievous, saucy ... playful, cynical, a bit of a smirk that implies there’s something going on upstairs,” says Toronto newspaper columnist Christopher Hutsul, who last month devoted a passing sentence to Posey in a column imagining a different sort of men’s magazine: one with fewer pictures of Christina Aguilera and “a monthly photo spread of Parker Posey in various pastel cardigans.” The attraction, Hutsul explained in an interview, is that Posey seems to be the kind of woman you could hang out with, take out to breakfast, bring to a family barbecue.

On this day at lunch Posey is plainly dressed -- sleeveless patterned blouse, jeans, no makeup -- but still striking. She’s brought a New York Times to read after the interview. A stranger expecting the stream-of-consciousness patter he has seen onstage would be disappointed. Posey’s sentences can come at you hesitantly, separated by long pauses, taking their sweet time to gel into complete thoughts -- until the subject changes from fame to craft.

Ask her, for example, about her uncharacteristically controlled role as a grim prosecutor in “The Event,” Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald’s ensemble drama about AIDS and assisted suicide, due for release in September. Now the words rush out as she explains the emotional architecture of her character, Nicole, who is determined to file charges against a group of people who threw a party to facilitate and celebrate the death of an AIDS patient. “She still lives at home. She was never loved. She’s still waiting for her mom to be a mother. And she has no regard for other people’s emotional lives or situations. I think she’s imitating a powerful man. Oh, my God, she’s so -- there are, like, layers of cloud between her and other people, so much pain. That kind of person who’s asleep. .... The prospect of playing someone who really doesn’t love herself and doesn’t know how to communicate was interesting to me.”

The work, she says, is “an excuse for transformation.... I like to think I escape into someone else. It’s a compulsion. It’s a real desire.” She talks the same way about her hobby, pottery. “You start with this object outside of yourself, you move it to the center of the wheel, you develop a sensitivity between your hands and your heart.”

Her father, a gregarious car dealer in Laurel, Miss., named her after ‘50s supermodel Suzy Parker. She grew up wanting to dance and act. “I made myself a promise when I was little,” Posey says with a tremor of a laugh. “I would live in an imaginary world; I wanted to, half the time.”

After unsuccessfully applying for the dance program at the North Carolina School of the Arts, she turned to acting at the State University of New York in Purchase. In 1991, in her senior year, “As the World Turns” was having trouble filling the bad-girl role of Tess Shelby and asked the school to send candidates. Posey got the job.

Posey says her stage training makes her relish parts with emotional complexity. She offers Greta in “Personal Velocity,” a low-level book editor with the sole talent of trimming unnecessary words, who by a fluke winds up editing a best-selling author and simultaneously decides to junk her dull husband. The part required an exploration of someone “you will never know.... It’s like being in love with someone you’ll never understand.”

Director Miller remembers Posey “feeling sorry for Greta, laughing at her and becoming her all at the same time” on the day of her costume fitting. “She had this walk, this funny flat-footed walk, and I felt her lack of self-esteem and her determination in that walk. I knew she had the character just hearing her walk up to me.”

Posey plans to move out of her Chelsea apartment into more fashionable digs this year. She has her own projects she’d like to produce and act in, stories about an actress who stages her own kidnapping and a woman who’s never had an orgasm. Her confidence was boosted by three nominations last year -- an Independent Spirit (best actress for “Personal Velocity”), a Golden Globe (best supporting actress for TV’s “Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay”) and a Lortel Award for off-Broadway (best lead actress in Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July,” a play about a reunion of ‘60s radicals).

“I’m struggling, but I’m not drowning,” she says. She tries to tell herself, “ ‘Parker, look behind you, look what’s happened to you, look how far you’ve come....’ I’m still working, I’m still searching, I’m still finding that edge.”

As Steven Spielberg doubtlessly noted when he and Posey bumped into each other in a Gelson’s parking lot last year.

“He was in his car,” Posey said. “He said, ‘I love your work!’ I said, ‘Love yours too, man! Gimme a job!’ ”