The A-list avoids typecasting
By Jay Carr, Globe Staff, 09/12/99
The faces are the same. But the roles are a little different this season. Not for years, in fact, has Hollywood's A-list made such a collective effort to break away from typecasting as in movies opening between now and Christmas. How will they get away from playing the usual suspects? Try Kevin Spacey unraveling in a suburb with a Stepford Wife played by Annette Bening in "American Beauty." How about Matt Damon as a bad guy in "The Talented Mr. Ripley"? Jodie Foster wising up royalty in Siam sans Rodgers and Hammerstein in "Anna and the King"? Robert De Niro stepping outside gangland to play a security guard guided by a gay neighbor through the aftermath of a stroke in "Flawless"? Angelina Jolie as a cop in "The Bone Collector"? Tom Hanks as a prison guard in "The Green Mile"? And Johnny Depp trying to keep his head on straight in "Sleepy Hollow"?
One thing has stayed the same. Of the more than 150 movies jostling one another, a lot of the high-visibility entries come from novels. Memoirs, too. "Angela's Ashes," Frank O'Connor's wrenching recollection of growing up poor, is due with Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle as the struggling Irish family's mother and father, respectively; she hammered into depression by his drinking. "Girl, Interrupted," Susanna Kaysen's story of her institutionalization, is due with Winona Ryder and Jolie. The latter will be very much in evidence this fall as she plays a cop who is the eyes and ears of Denzel Washington's paralyzed forensics expert tracking a grisly serial killer in "The Bone Collector."
It'll be a double-header for Washington, too. He'll also star in "Hurricane," about middleweight boxing champ Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, fighting to clear himself from a triple murder charge. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton will put the gloves on in "The Fight Club," a bashfest directed by "Seven" helmer David Fincher. Not that all the sparring will take place in the ring. Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman will slug it out, mother-daughter-wise, in the film of Mona Simpson's novel "Anywhere But Here." The trouble faced by Michelle Pfeiffer and Bruce Willis in "The Story of Us" is that they no longer get a kick out of each other. The romantic twist in "Random Hearts": Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas play characters whose respective deceased spouses were having an affair. The interplay is more complicated in "Hanging Up," Nora Ephron's new movie, based on her sister Delia's partly autobiographical novel about sisters - Diane Keaton, Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow - reprioritizing when their father (Walter Matthau) is ill.
Other high-profile items from the realm of fiction include "Snow Falling on Cedars," starring Ethan Hawke in a series of interlocking mysteries involving an American man and a Japanese woman. John Irving wrote his own screenplay for "The Cider House Rules," starring Tobey Maguire in a rites-of-passage odyssey. Kevin Costner is on the mound in Mark Shaara's "For Love of the Game," about a flawed Detroit Tigers pitching ace working on a perfect game against the Yankees. Leonardo Di Caprio discovers a few cracks in a seeming paradise in "The Beach," filmed in Thailand and based on the novel of the same name by Alex Garland. Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes plunge into Graham Greene's semiautobiographical novel "The End of the Affair." And you do remember that "Sleepy Hollow," in which Tim Burton will send the Headless Horseman after Depp, is based on a novel by that old hit maker, Washington Irving.
Frank Darabont, who masterminded "The Shawshank Redemption," went behind bars again for another Stephen King novel, "The Green Mile," starring Hanks as a Death Row guard in a Depression-era Southern prison. Martin Scorsese will crank it up with Nicolas Cage in "Bringing Out the Dead," about New York paramedics fighting to keep the death rate down during an intense weekend. Al Pacino and Russell Crowe fight big tobacco in "The Insider," based on fired cigarette company executive and whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand's story. Keeping Damon's charming sociopath company in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" will be Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, and Cate Blanchett. Perennial fave "Stuart Little" will return in a live-action version starring Geena Davis and a computer graphics imaging title-roleist.
Speaking of Damon, he and longtime pal Ben Affleck will finally turn up in "Dogma," Kevin Smith's contemporary retelling of Christ's appearance on earth. Affleck, meanwhile, will headline one of the season's high-impact action entries, "Reindeer Games," playing a hard-luck ex-con roped in to a casino heist. "Three Kings," starring the larcenous trio of George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube, could have been called Operation Desert Heist, concerning, as it does, a theft of gold bullion at the end of the Gulf War. Pierce Brosnan will reprise James Bond in "The World Is Not Enough," protecting a murdered oil biggie's daughter from mad bomber Robert Carlyle. In "End of Days," Arnold Schwarzenegger is back, taking on the devil, no less, a role assigned to Gabriel Byrne. And no list of guy flicks could fail to include Oliver Stone's football saga, "Any Given Sunday," in which Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid, and Al Pacino compete to call the signals.
There'll also be a double dose of Robin Williams, first in "Jakob the Liar," playing a beleaguered Jew keeping spirits up in the ghetto, then in "Bicentennial Man," as a robot who turns human and falls in love. Billy Bob Thornton returns to his native Arkansas for "Daddy and Them," his directorial follow-up to "Sling Blade." Laura Dern, Thornton's real-life significant other and costar in the film, describes it as white trash comedy. "Boogie Nights" filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson's follow-up focusing on San Fernando Valley types, "Magnolia," generated buzz enough for Tom Cruise to phone and offer an uncredited cameo. (The offer was accepted.) The biopic-deprived will note that Jim Carrey will check in as comic Andy Kaufman in "Man on the Moon," and Milla Jovovich will be the latest actress to play the sainted "Joan of Arc." And, oh yes. Look for "Toy Story 2" and "Scream 3." But who's counting?
