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Movie Interview
Any Given (Super Bowl) Sunday
Director Oliver Stone talks about his days on the field, why defensive calls are ruining the game and his favorite Super Bowls ever.
By Anthony Lappé
[01/29/00]

Column
Rock 'n' roll will never die
Lennon and McCartney come together in VH1's reunion fantasy "Two of Us." Plus: Never mind the bollocks, he-e-e-re's Johnny (Rotten).
By Joyce Millman
[01/31/00]

Movie Interview
Like a "Virgin"
Director Sofia Coppola talks about her film adaptation of "The Virgin Suicides," her proud father and Vincent Gallo's sex life (sort of).
By Mark Ebner
[02/01/00]

Music
A jazz singer's story
Teri Thornton went from the "greatest voice since Ella Fitzgerald" to a nobody and back. When will she get her own VH1 special?
By Angela Starita
[02/01/00]

Column
Please, sir, may I have a mother?
Despite the WB's reputation as the teen-sex network, shows like "Dawson's Creek" and "Roswell" owe their appeal more to the damaged-family yearnings of a Brontë or Dickens novel than to sheer skin.
By Sarah Vowell
[02/02/00]

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The first (and better) half of the romantic thriller "Eyewitness" (1981) defines the Weaver appeal. William Hurt, as an educated janitor, falls in love with Weaver, a Gotham TV news reporter, from afar, and finds himself burbling out his love for her when she interviews him for a murder story. Yet Weaver isn't threatened or put off by this potential stalker; she's touched, amused, intrigued. Where angels fear to tread, Weaver skips merrily.

But for a dozen years, a more complex Weaver persona has been emerging. Even as the valiant Dian Fossey in "Gorillas in the Mist" (1988), Weaver began to bring out the hidden torments of her heroines. And ever since "Death and the Maiden" (1994), Roman Polanski's brilliant tale of a female torture and rape victim who turns the rack on her rapist, Weaver has specialized in characters who are at odds with both their environments and themselves.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

That even went for "Alien Resurrection" (1997), where Weaver's talented Ms. Ripley, our stalwart deep-space warrior, was cloned with part-human, part-alien DNA. And it goes double for her 1999 efforts, the erratically powerful "A Map of the World," in which she plays a public-school nurse and farm-community outsider who is accused of molesting a child, and the blissfully funny "Galaxy Quest," in which she plays an actress trapped in the persona of her sci-fi TV series role.

When I spoke with Weaver last week on the phone from Los Angeles (where she had attended the Golden Globes as a best actress nominee for "A Map of the World"), she agreed with the notion that she now favors characters who carry around their own internal pressure chambers. "It's interesting you put it that way," she said. "It makes a lot of sense, when you look at my roles. But actually, there's never been any rhyme or reason to my career. I've never gotten things that I've gone after. I was lucky to get to play Alice Goodwin in 'A Map of the World'; her character is one of the richest I've ever had, so surprising and irreverent and uncompromising.

"She's different from me, but she's also similar in that I have a young child, and I work, and my husband [theater director Jim Simpson] also works. It's always this juggling routine to salvage the most you can from, oh, every other day, and have everyone stay healthy and clean. Alice is always playing catch-up; she's a pig, her house is a mess. And she has a dear friend, and I have a dear friend like that, the mother of children your child plays with."

As those who've read Jane Hamilton's novel know, early on, a child of that friend drowns while in Alice's care. Alice is still in a psychological tailspin when she is accused of molesting a schoolboy whom she happens to detest. Weaver said that, reading the script (by Peter Hedges and Polly Platt), she loved "the way it was told, that it didn't go for tear-jerking scenes or traditional 'women's' scenes; it was refreshing to come across real people -- it was like a job from heaven."

I don't agree with Weaver about the finished film directed by Scott Elliott. A better title than "A Map of the World" might be "Town Without Pity." In the film, as opposed to the novel (it's a matter of tone and emphasis), it's hard to take how rudely all the rural citizens act toward her after the drowning, and how swiftly everyone judges her after she is charged with molestation. Alice's husband (David Strathairn) can't get anyone to care for their kids -- and gets spit on in a parking lot, right in front of them. What's worse, Alice's own actions grow from ambiguous to murky. In the movie, it's not made clear why, in the TV room of the county jail, she knocks herself out on a table rather than grapple with a combative fellow inmate. (In the book, she aims to protect herself from a worse beating; in the movie she appears to be still punishing herself.) And the film turns her recollection of slapping the accusing boy into some kind of repressed memory.

But Weaver's performance gives the movie spine and bite. Weaver said that for all of Alice's ups and downs and fits and starts, "She's still Alice Goodwin, still opening her big fat mouth and still a bossy-boots. You know she won't compromise and that she will stay true to herself."

I told Weaver that the intense physicality of her performance made the character's mental states real. No matter what the setting, Alice comes off oddly clumsy -- as if circumstances like her husband's yen to be a farmer have made her a literal misfit. (Near the end, she looks more at ease in city streets.) "It's so funny you would say that," Weaver replied. "I guess what I feel about the body in acting is: The body does not know that you're acting. If you say certain words and you're in a certain environment, the body doesn't know that you are faking anything. If you are relaxed -- if you've done your homework and feel open -- the body feels that a child has died or that a husband is acting oppressive. The director says 'action' and the body plays the scene. Alice just seemed to me all elbows and knees, angular and testy."

Weaver can't explain precisely how her kinetic transformations work. She does say that whenever she needs help, she asks "for a physical stimulus -- the taste and feel and odor of fried food, the smell of dirty laundry. The body doesn't know you're just doing a job. It's your most powerful tool and the one you have to be relaxed with. I was able to see Charles Aznavour perform last year, and I was thinking, any great singer is relaxed with his voice that way; that's why his music is so amazing."

Next page | "Let's not be naive. What do I know about being abused and raped?"