Karen Heller: More than makeup smooths gritty films
In “Hairspray,” the $75 million movie based on the Broadway musical predicated on the 1988 John Waters original (which cost $48 and change), John Travolta resembles an outsized Cabbage Patch Doll in a Gidget flip.
As Baltimore laundress and agoraphobe Edna Turnblad, Travolta is suffocated by a fat suit, as much a threat to memorable acting as CGI.
The performance is a disaster.
“Playing a woman attracted me,” the star told the New York Times. “Playing a drag queen did not.”
There’s tolerance and progress for you. A role created by an out director and a huge, scary drag queen (Divine), adapted by a gay actor fluent in the chiffon ways of drag (Harvey Fierstein), is destroyed by an ordinarily dynamic actor going out of his way not to play gay.
It’s death by latex and image concern.
“Hairspray’s” original conceit wed Waters’ unique aesthetic, plus the raw shock of Divine, with a sunny optimism toward racial progress. Take away that paradox, and you’ve got Disney.
If the intention is to have Edna seem like a woman, thereby murdering the original concept, why didn’t the producers hire a large actress? Is it because, since the death of Shelley Winters, there isn’t one left in L.A.?
There was one clear remedy for such nonsense. We rented “Grease.”
My daughter remains perplexed as to how Edna and Danny Zuko could be portrayed by the same man. I’m perplexed as to how a 1978 musical can be more interesting, dark and risqué than a contemporary vehicle. Stockard Channing’s Rizzo is subversive, an unrepentant bad girl. And we’re both perplexed as to how anyone could willingly cover Travolta’s cleft chin or swaddle him so completely that he can’t dance.
“Hairspray” appears so test-marketed, picked-over and streamlined — half an hour of the play is missing — as to have all the nutrients and spice drained from the product. This is “High School Musical” with a Baltimore accent.
It says something when a movie, ostensibly about race, body issues, a drag queen, acceptance and equality, has less zing than what television is serving these days.
Cable, specifically TNT, FX and Showtime, is in the hunt for “Sopranos” lovers still detoxing from the finale while scratching our heads over what, precisely, is up with “John From Cincinnati.” Cable is where aging beauties — that is, over 40 — get reborn as gritty character actors.
Apparently, gritty characters require substance issues, the sort routinely banned from the old sanitized networks in a form of moral plastic surgery. On ABC’s “Brothers and Sisters,” Sally Field — who can let it rip, given the chance — is reduced to playing dotty, the final station for older thespians.
In “Saving Grace’s” debut Monday, the divine Holly Hunter, as an Oklahoma City detective, has sex (with her married partner), swears profusely, smokes, guzzles Jack Daniel’s for breakfast and poses nude for a neighbor. And that’s in the first five minutes.
Naturally, she’s saved by a chew-loving angel while being saddled with enough emotional baggage for several Jerry Springers (molested by a priest in fourth grade, sister dead in the Murrah Building bombing). Why couldn’t Grace be a barstool-variety self-destructive? Or would that not offer salvation potential in the buckle of the Bible Belt?
Still, I have hope for the series, even with the angel business and Hunter’s face appearing as though someone’s gone over it with a floor waxer. There’s not a line left.
Entertainment doesn’t need to offer moral lessons or bend to a star’s vanity in molding a character in absolutely the wrong direction. It only needs to resonate, to awe, to amuse, and a little surprise or two would be nice, exceeding audience expectations that have been so worn down and lowered by the prevalence of inferior work.