The reason I’ve never warmed to Anna Faris is because I don’t think playing all those ditzy nutters has required all that much “acting” from her. I think she’s been tapping into a thing that she feels naturally comfortable with, and she’s been enjoying the work and the juice and the money…whatever. But it’s come to the point with me that when Faris is in a film, I pretty much know what she’s going to do. This was certainly the case with her performance in Observe and Report.
She’s always been delivered a great anarchic spirit in playing those dingalings, but I’m not sure she can do much else. She’s been playing more or less the same note on the cello since her first Scary Movie in 2000. Wouldn’t she have tried by now to play…whatever, a Sigourney Weaver-like corporation chief with an MBA or a steely Russian assassin in a spy film by now if she had it in her? Where would Dustin Hoffman have been if he’d done nothing but play variations on his preppy Benjamin Braddock character in The Graduate from ’68 to ’77?
