GETTING CLOSER TO SUPERSTARDOM
written by Christopher Loudon; transcribed by Laila Guelli
If Natalie Portman’s searing performance in director Mike Nichols’ Closer earns her this year’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, she should consider the victiory her own private American tragedy. Let me explain. Observing the arc of Portman’s professional development over the past decade or so, one’s reminded of the young Elizabeth Taylor, and not just in terms of the comparable resplendence of their beauty. As a juvenile actress, the Jerusalem-born Portman charged into the screen with the same velocity as British émigré Taylor literally did in the National Velvet. Portman’s arrival, most noticeably, at age 12, as orphaned Mathilda, befriended and mentored by the professional assassin next door after her parents are killed, in writer/director Luc Besson’s controversial Léon (aka the Professional) and then again linked to an older man as the flirty Marty in Beautiful Girls (who blithely explains to Timothy Hutton that is “thirteen, but I have an old soul”), suggested Taylor’s same intoxicating blend of intelligent innocence and deeply-buried yet churning sexual energy.
What followed for Portman was a succession of roles that mirrored the parching-toward womanhood Taylor endured with pleasant but puerile parts in such moneymakers as Little Women, A Date with Judy and Father of the Bride.
Portman’s onscreen coming-of-age began inauspiciously as 14-year-old Laura, erudite youngest daughter of Goldie Hawn and Alan Alda in Everyone Says I Love You, Woody Allen’s engaging attempt at a musical, then rapidly improved with standout performances in Anywhere But Here, as meek Midwesterner Ann August who, transplanted to LA, finally learns to stand up to her overbearing mother (Susan Sarandon), and as pregnant, abandoned teenager Novalee Nation, who progresses from wide-eyed victim to self-assured single mom, in director Matt Williams’ cloying Where the Heart Is. Even more interesting are the parts the seemingly too-pure Portman didn’t get. She lost the role of sweetly slutty ‘band aid’ Penny Lane in Almost Famous to Kate Hudson because director Cameron Crowe felt she would have it “a totally different movie, one where Penny Lane was a child and her innocence was so important to all of them that they all protected her,” and was passed over for Claire Danes by Baz Luhrmann to play Juliet (to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo) because Luhrmann felt she looked so dewy-eyed that DiCaprio would be seen as molesting a child.
Taylor, though she failed to garner even a nomination, should have won her first Oscar in 1952 (at age 20) for her stunning portrayal of gorgeous, mature-beyond-her-years heiress Angela Vickers in George Stevens’ magnificent A Place in the Sun (adapted from half of An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser’s landmark study of the toxic cocktail that the blending of ambition and lust can create), a performance that finally made the world take notice of her as both a serious actress and a grown woman. Precisely the same be said of the 23-year-old Portman in Closer. As vaguely trippy, warmly duplicitous New York stripper Alice, transplanted to London, she coaxes obituary writer Dan (Jude Law) out of his bookish shell and becomes his muse and, in the film’s pivotal, provocative strip club sequence, transforms cuckolded dermatologist Larry (Clive Owen) into a gelatinous mass of predatory desire. Demonstrating a heretofore bushel-hidden fieriness, Portman burns Law, Owen and Julia Roberts, her female opposite in the Patrick Marber-penned four-hander, right off the screen.
The Taylor/Portman parallels presumably end here. Yes, Portman has been romantically linked with various costars and celebrities, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Lukas Haas, Hayden Christensen (the Anakin Skywalker to her Senator Amidala), Gael Garcia Bernal and, most recently, her Garden State director and costar Zach Braff, but it’s hard to imagine her following in Taylor’s serial bride footsteps. Nor does she have Taylor’s once-unquenchable thirst for headline-grabbing notoriety: instead insisting “I’d rather be smart than a movie star.”
Indeed, the post-Closer Portman, whom Roberts has described as “a little wood nymph that just comes and brings joy and light and interesting ideas,” seems more likely to resemble Audrey Hepburn, with whom she shares nt only a well-scrubbed coltishness and deep-seated desire for privacy, but a thirst for knowledge and experience that extends way beyond the cloistered Hollywood community. Close your eyes and it’s easy to picture Portman in such signature Hepburn roles as Breakfast at Tiffany’s heartbreakingly effervescent Holly Golightly or Two for the Road’s embittered Joanna Wallace.
But, Oscar or no, Portman may well opt for no path to icon-hood. Eighteen months ago, she gratuated with honours from Harvard (where one of her professors, legal eagle Alan Dershowitz, gushed that “she could become a great lawyer, a great scholar, a major creative intellectual”) and has since remained quite vocal about the possibility of chucking stardom in favour of a non-acting career that would make use of her psychology degree or leverage her tremendous humanitarian work with FINCA (the Foundation for International Community Assistance), providing financial assistance to female entrepreneurs in impoverished countries. Nor is the self-described “boring goody-two-shoes” willing to accept that she’s poised to eclipse such estimable contemporaries as Kirsten Dunst and Reese Witherspoon en route to becoming the next big thing shyly insisting, “I’m not yet awesome.” We beg to differ.