Less Than Beautiful

Movies need more...what's the term? "Interesting" faces. Movies need noses that droop, eyes that sag, and wrinkles that cut though actor's faces like crevasses. They need thinning hair, bulging bellies, and mottled chins. This is especially true if the character is, in fact, supposed to be so-so looking.

Take Janeane Garofolo in The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Okay, fine, she wasn't Uma Thurman. But she was nice to look at. And even back then, you could tell that Uma would hunt you down and kill you if you busted up her wedding. Janeane was cute, funny, and clearly less prone to cutting swaths of vengeance that left a bloody wake.

Eric Stoltz and Mary Stuart Masterson played high school misfits in Some Kind of Wonderful. Misfits compared to what? Oh, yeah. Lea Thompson. Thanks for clearing that up.

Independent movies aren't any help. You search far and wide for a sad sack loser, and end up with the likes of Parker Posey or Hope Davis. Now there's some slice-of-life grittiness. If a movie does need an interesting-looking character, skilled makeup artists will simply take an attractive person, attach some glasses, and slap on some schlubby clothes. This allows for a She's All That-style reveal where the person proves to be a swimsuit model in disguise.

Linda Cardellini deftly turned Velma into a heart-stopping, leather-clad sex kitten in that cinematic milestone Scooby Doo 2, but it happens with guys, too: the nerdy nephew in Roger Dodger cleaned up pretty well by the end. Tobey Maguire was always one pair of glasses and a radioactive spider away from impressing Kirsten Dunst.

Sure, you occasionally run across homely actors who ascend to stardom, but everyone seems to forget that they're not beautiful. Billy Bob Thornton may be one of the homeliest men alive, but no one realizes it anymore because (a) he had fictional sex with Lauren Graham in Bad Santa and (b) he had real-life sex with Angelina Jolie. This is a guy who would normally blend in with Easter Island statues.

I often find myself reduced to zeroing in on the few flaws that the silver screen allows me to see. Personally, I've always been of the opinion that if you detached Julia Robert's enormous jaw and displayed it in a museum, paleontologists would fall over themselves to name a brand-new species of dinosaur. Still, picking on Julia is the cinematic equivalent of splitting hairs. I wouldn't expect to see her taking my picture at the DMV.

In independent and mainstream movies alike, I think it would elevate the material if the actors occasionally looked more like the people I see every day.

I'm not arguing for across-the-board realism. I get as motion sick from Dogma 95 camerawork as the next guy, and I don't think "escapism" is a dirty word. I'm just saying that some of the stories in movies would resonate more if I could identify with the characters.

Consider some of the exceptions to the rules I outlined above:

• Heather Matarazzo in Welcome to the Dollhouse. Now that's a geek girl who was really a geek girl, and she won my heart.


• Paul Giamatti in American Splendor. What if they had cast Ben Affleck as the acerbic cartoonist? I wouldn't have teared up a little bit at the end, except maybe in gratitude that the movie was over.


• Philip Seymour Hoffman in... well, anything.


• Gwyneth Paltrow. I know, I know&emdash;she's allegedly one of the beautiful people. But c'mon. She looks like a gigantic potato chip.


• Kathy Bates in... well, anything. But especially About Schmidt. You know the scene. You either laughed hysterically or you went home and tore out your hot tub in a fit of maniacal rage.

I realize we've got another allegedly classic Giamatti performance coming next week with Sideways, but I haven't seen it

But these exceptions are so few and far between that it's painful to even list them. In fact, it's ironic that Kathy Bates won several awards for her portrayal of a homely waitress in the stage play Frankie and Johnny at the Claire de Lune. Now, I'm scratching my head here... who portrayed the same character when they got around to adapting the play into a movie? Oh, yeah.

Michelle Pfeiffer.

You can visit Greg at his site Geese Aplenty.