Mighty Aphrodite (1995)
Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)

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JUMP DOWN:    Raunch Without Suggestiveness
Flexibility        Bouvarde and Pécuchette       

Different Every Time Out

Mira Sorvino is that rare actress who is more interesting because you can’t begin to formulate from her roles who she "really" is. It isn’t just a question of being a character actress, because Judy Holliday was a character actress with a core star personality. And it doesn’t come across the way it does with Meryl Streep, as a major absence--no Palladium in the goddess’s shrine. Sorvino is different every time out but with precocious authority worn very lightly. She has exceptional flexibility and, despite her blonde looks, a fibrousness that makes her idiomatic comic performances unusually sturdy as characterizations.

Everyone got to know Sorvino in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite for which she won a supporting Oscar. But this wasn’t like Goldie Hawn’s win for Cactus Flower in which the actress giggled her way to stardom. It was almost more of a performance than Allen’s underdeveloped movie knew how to make use of. In it Allen plays Lenny, a sportswriter whose marriage stalls after he and his downtown art world wife adopt a baby boy. When their Wunderkind is about to start school, Lenny illegally looks up the boy’s natural mother in the twisted hope that she’ll turn out to offer solace for the attention he isn’t getting from his wife. The biological mother turns out to be Sorvino, a six-foot-tall knockout whose real name is buried at the bottom of a heap of stage, screen, change-of-mood, and change-your-luck identities, the two most recent of which are Linda Ash, hooker, and Judy Cum, porn starlet.

Raunch Without Suggestiveness

When Lenny first goes to Linda’s apartment, and she, thinking he’s the usual john, shows him around while he hyperventilates (This is the mother of my little genius!), I laughed non-stop for about five minutes. Linda’s being a worker in the sex industry enables Allen to put in some blue material (gag clocks and watches, the titles of skinflicks, outrageously high, low, and tight-in-all-the-right-places get-ups) that loosens the movie up in a way new for him. (In that respect, it’s as if he’s showing the world by turning his reputation as a dirty old man into a new source of energy.) And Sorvino works marvelously in and against type at the same time. Hovering over Lenny, sweetly pecking at him, and prattling with a dopily expectant look, she’s like a maternal ostrich. She has some hilariously raunchy dialogue which is just sprinkled here and there as if Linda didn’t know that discussing how well-hung another john wasn’t does not function as time-passing chitchat. But her Linda isn’t just the tramp who completes the punch line. Raunchy without suggestiveness, she’s a girl so confused she doesn’t even realize her life is crap--square zero has been world enough for her.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t other things Linda would like in her life. With her slightly unsteady falsetto, all wavering in search of a tone, she practices the role of Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story to get Lenny’s opinion about her acting ability. And she goes along with Lenny’s plan to get her out of prostitution by setting her up with Kevin, a young, none-too-bright boxer who trains at the gym where Lenny hangs out. (Lenny tells Kevin that Linda’s practically a virgin, and Linda almost always remembers to stick to the story.) The great thing is that Allen has Sorvino play it without condescension. There’s a certain amount in the script, which assumes that the middle-class Lenny can step into poor Linda’s life and "raise" her to his level; she ends up married in Connecticut. (This compounds the countervailing feeling that Allen has conceived of the picture as P.R. to contain the damage caused by his battle with Mia Farrow. Here we see him as a doting father and an uncorrupter of young women.) But I’m glad that Lenny doesn’t try to make an anthropologist of Linda. He gets her to switch her ambition from starring in The Philadelphia Story on Broadway to being a hairdresser, which is refreshingly realistic, as far as the re-education of movie heroines goes.

In a sense Allen is repeating himself with Linda after Jennifer Tilly’s trampy, grasping Olive in Bullets Over Broadway the year before. (Tilly was astonishing, pouring herself into Olive’s plans and resentments as into her clothes.) But there’s a tonal difference between Olive, with her suspicious, narrowed snake’s eyes, and likeable Linda. Olive was a ditz, but she was big-time, like Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain. She had some power to throw around, and you could imagine being wary of her. Linda is not even a box cover girl in porn, and you can see that what makes her appealing to us is what keeps her small time. She’s fluffy with the lint that gathers on ordinary people as they bumble through their lives.

I didn’t realize how flexible Sorvino’s acting was until I saw her in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, directed by David Mirkin from Robin Schiff’s script. Her manner as Romy is totally different from Linda’s in Mighty Aphrodite. Linda’s voice is friendly-brainless (as if she were constantly being goosed) yet she has a surprisingly still manner--Sorvino doesn’t play physically to the dumb blonde stereotype (the Marilyn Monroe woozy wamble). As Romy she’s a bit swaggery, almost butch, and announces her dialogue in a flat tone (as if there weren’t enough space in her cranium for resonance) that’s perfect for a girl whose activities are entirely devoted to looking "cute" and impressing people.

I don’t think any comic actress has ever done idiomatic character sketch acting with less grotesque distortion. She’s at the opposite end of that spectrum from Gilda Radner as Rosanna Rosannadanna or Lisa Loopner, for instance. Sorvino starts with caricatural outlines and then inhabits them. Not that she creates fuller characters than the comedy as written, as Adam Sandler does in The Wedding Singer. She minimizes the distortion and then creates a caricature so full-bodied it has more vitality than most straight dramatic acting. The solidity of her cartoon characterization permits her to play the pathos of Linda’s regret over having given up her baby more meaningfully than any straight dramatic moment the intent Helena Bonham-Carter offers in the same movie.

In Romy and Michele the effect Sorvino achieves is more uncommon than pathos. In their first teaming she and Lisa Kudrow work together like veteran partners, but Sorvino is the one who makes the poodle-goofy artificiality seem like what we mean by reality. Which is to say she carries the movie without grabbing all the attention, as a male star like Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler in his Waterboy mode would do as part of his contract with the audience.

Both actresses come off especially well because sketch writing doesn’t get any better than this, certainly not in the Wayne’s World or Austin Powers movies. Romy and Michele are two chicks from Tucson who now live in Venice Beach, work low-level service jobs, and live for shopping and manhunting at nightclubs. Having survived a difficult high school experience when they didn’t really belong to any group (it didn’t help their status to have their senior yearbook photo taken together), Romy and Michele are so bonded in their idiocy that to a statement like, "I hate throwing up in public," which most of us wouldn’t think required comment, the other will say emphatically, "Me too!" as if they will never cease to be amazed by how much they have in common. They might as well still be in high school in the opening scene as they lie in their parallel twin beds snacking and watching Pretty Woman, every girl’s favorite romantic comedy of the ’90s, for the thirty-sixth time. What sets this scene apart is that Romy and Michele love making fun of it. Romy narrates, "Ohmigod, listen to that sad, sad music," as Julia Roberts is driven out of a Rodeo Drive boutique. Kudrow’s Michele agrees ... then backslides: "But it is actually kind of sad." Under Romy’s stony look, Michele sobs and then redeems herself, "I just get really happy when they finally let her shop."

The girls care about making an impression but are fairly dense as to how they come across. Romy is the counter girl at a Jaguar dealer and when the mechanic Ramon takes too long delivering a customer’s car and then behaves inappropriately when he does show up, Romy turns to the car’s owner and apologizes: "He is such an asshole." The girls’ mutually supportive rationalizations have kept them from measuring their standing in the world. Early on Romy checks out a new outfit in the mirror, practices a move you’d never have occasion to use unless your hula hoop were slipping, and then exclaims, "I can’t believe how cute I look!" Michele joins her and the two of them decide they’ve never looked cuter, at which Romy remarks, "Don’t you love how we can just say that to each other and we know we’re not being conceited?" Michele concurs, "Oh I know, no, we’re just being honest." Magnificently oblivious airheads, they feel "cutting edge" even though there’s never been a knife following through behind them. They even imagine that their life in Venice will be enviable to their former classmates at their tenth year reunion.

We do grasp that between the two of them Romy is the one with the brain cell, and it’s Romy who, when filling out the questionnaire for the reunion, realizes that their lives aren’t much on paper. Even wised-up to this extent, however, they’re still dodos. Driving to the reunion, while practicing to tell everyone they invented Post-Its, they get into a spat because in Romy’s version she had all the ideas and Michele did nothing essential or difficult. It de-evolves into a spat over which one of them is cuter, and then over which one of them is the Mary and which the Rhoda in their friendship.

These preparatory sketch scenes are great, but the quality of the writing becomes a vexed issue, its strengths and weaknesses closely linked. The movie is less interesting when Romy and Michele think their way through the dilemma brought on when Romy realizes how impressive their lives aren’t. Their plan shifts from telling the truth, to borrowing Ramon’s Jaguar and telling the Post-Its story, to just being themselves, to just being themselves with a vengeance. The problem is that the joke is partially at the expense of people miserably obsessed with high school, but then when we meet their old classmates the movie becomes a melodrama in which we’re expected to root for our girls against the bitchy ex-cheerleaders who still put them down. This is what knocks the movie out of the class of Clueless (which had all its literary problems worked out for it by a master 180 years in advance).

In the end the cheesy melodrama is resolved and the girls triumph in Tucson in a way that changes their life for the better in Venice. The movie is in best form just laughing at its twin dummy heroines (the Bouvard and Pécuchet of the now national Valley Girl type). It could be called satire of adolescent fantasists who project success in the future without disciplining themselves in what they’ll need to achieve it. (It’s the opposite of a jane-of-all-trades fantasy like Flashdance.) But though the jokes depend in part on cultural trends of the past ten years, the movie isn’t topical satire, and certainly not satire with any urgent demand for reform. The movie isn’t consciousness-raising. Rather, it’s consciousness-accepting, a happily corrupt bargain: we want them to stay dumb and superficial because they’re amusing that way. As Wilde’s Lady Bracknell asserts, "Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone." 1   Romy and Michele remain untouched even at the end of the movie.

1. Lady Bracknell: Wilde 41 (Act I). (return to text)