Actors navigate public's matrix
We are watching a lithe, beautiful assassin packing serious heat and a supreme sense of cool as she teaches a nervous young man how to shoot. The confident assassin, named Fox, embodies all that is predatory, ruthless and lethally sexy.
But as we watch Fox, the antiheroine of last summer's hyper-violent action flick "Wanted," we are also watching Angelina Jolie, whose off-screen persona as humanitarian activist and mother is every bit as strong as the fictional one. And the ability of viewers to accept those two ideas simultaneously turns out to be crucial to the audience's satisfaction and the film's success. As Fox ruthlessly dispatches bad guys from screeching cars or speeding trains, it doesn't matter that we might have recently seen the woman playing her speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations or taking her children to school.
Bloodthirsty killer or global humanitarian? Clearly, when it comes to Jolie, we'll take both.
The matrix of stardom is that mental space we navigate every time we encounter our biggest stars on the screen. These are stars of megawattage, actors who despite their acting talents are long past being able to melt anonymously into their roles. They are the superstars whose off-screen lives we follow in an ongoing narrative that can be every bit as riveting as their movies.
That ongoing "real-life" narrative forms one of the struts of the stardom matrix, which is propped up by a delicate balance among the stars' off-screen identities, their on-screen characters and the audience's projections. The question isn't whether we can forget we're watching a particular actor but whether we can somehow hold in our minds that we are watching that actor, and still believe in the character.
(No, this isn't the same as typecasting. The matrix allows for casting against type, often with delightful results. And yes, the matrix is like "The Matrix," to a point -- the subliminal way we apprehend competing or complementary personas.)
To consider the past year in movies is to behold fascinating, in some cases cautionary examples of the matrix of stardom. Why did we accept Jolie in "Wanted" but not "Changeling"? Why did Robert Downey Jr. triumph when Nicole Kidman failed? How is Brad Pitt managing his matrix in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"? How is Clint Eastwood going meta with the matrix in "Gran Torino"?
And can Tom Cruise's matrix be saved?
