The ultimate cautionary tale in this regard may be Faye Dunaway, whose uncanny, over-the-top impersonation of Joan Crawford in ³Mommie Dearest² derailed her once luminous career. The problem wasnıt that Ms. Dunaway was unconvincing. It was the opposite: Ms. Dunaway, a diva herself, became movie-queen-in-decline Crawford, and the two actresses are now irrevocably linked in B-movie camp hysteria.
Picasso called art ³the lie that tells the truth.² But if a performance is in part based on previous movie performances, isnıt it more like a lie that tells a lie a simulacrum at best?
The curious thing about movies like ³The Aviator²or ³The Life and Death of Peter Sellers² is that they resemble more than anything magazine articles from star-struck magazines like Vanity Fair or Star. (³The Aviator² was even the subject of an expansive photo spread in Vanity Fair a few months ago.) Like a hungry shark, Hollywood is learning from its parasites to cannibalize itself: If audiences are more interested in movie-star personas than real people, then give them what they want.
But you have to wonder what movies will arrive after we exhaust the classic actors, once Jim Carrey has taken on Cary Grant and Colin Farrell has won the Oscar for portraying Peter Lorre; when our nostalgia speeds up to the point that it converges with our celebrity worship; that is, when we long for the golden age of last yearıs Star magazine. A movie about Nicole Kidman starring Kate Winslet? A biopic of Julia Roberts starring Julia Roberts?
The frightening thing which youıll know if you hit the movie theaters last week to catch the lazy movie-star commercial ³Oceanıs 12² is that weıre already halfway there. At one point in the convoluted plot, Ms. Robertsıs character, art curator Tess Ocean,briefly impersonates ...famous movie star Julia Roberts. In this coy wink at his audienceıs own starstruckness, director Steven Soderbergh picks up the heady gauntlet thrown down by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who, in 1999ıs ³Being John Malkovich,² implied that everybody wants to be inside the head of a movie star.
Even, it turns out, movie stars themselves.
Chris Schmidt