Michelle Pfeiffer Has a Pair of Brass Ones

So, over the weekend I saw Stardust, an ensemble fantasy epic with an all-star cast. I sent a couple of missives to friends suggesting they see it, which sparked a mini-debate about Michelle Pfeiffer.

As far as I'm concerned, Ms. Pfeiffer has borne the burden of beauty for far too long, and as a result she's been grossly under rated as an actress. In you early years, Hollywood could only cast her as the willowy, weepy ingenue. To be fair, however, there aren't a lot of roles of substance for women, let alone women under the age of thirty. If your nipples point upward, you're going to be playing some version of "the girlfriend," and you'd better be able to weep or glow on cue. Both skills are easily within Pfeiffer's grasp.

Roles of substance for women seem to most plentiful -- meaning one or two every one or two years -- for women between the ages of thirty and forty. However, that puts actresses in a bit of conundrum. Do they make their cinematic mark, or do they have a family. Those ten years seem to be the golden years in Hollywood. Nicole Kidman opted for a focus on career and adopted children. Pfeiffer stayed at home with her family.

Now, after the age of forty, the women's roles tend to fall into an even more rigid cookie cutter than "the girlfriend." Women as they turn forty in Hollywood turn shrewish. Oh, there are the few lucky actresses who can parlay a leading role at forty five, but let's not kid ourselves. They land those roles for two reasons: 1) they have the box-office chops to make the investment a gamble, and 2) they don't require much in the way of lighting magic to make the audience believe she's still thirty-five, which is the age the character was written.

Even Diane Keaton, who in the past few years has been praised for portraying a woman of certain age falling in love, is really just playing a thirty-five-year old character trapped in a sixty-year-old body. Kudos to Keaton for keeping the surgeons at bay for as long as she has, but as an actress she's done little to advance the cause of the maturing woman in Hollywood.

This all came into screeching relief with the culmination of that television milestone Age of Love. In my defense, I've have never watched a dating show before and I feel you have to have tried something before you can condemn it. For those uninformed, the premise was a bevy of women, some in their twenties, some in their forties, all vying for the attention of a thirty-year-old piece of man meat. All the women ,but one twenty-five, one forty-eight were eliminated. In the final moments the two women were tarted up in baby-doll dresses and false eyelashes and individually presented to the ersatz Prince Charming. And surprise! He chose the woman five years his junior instead of eighteen years his senior.

This left Jen, the forty-eight-year old, teetering in four-in heels and a day-glo pink baby-doll dress, coming to the realization that she had been a fool to think that the age difference wouldn't come into play. Jen is a gloriously beautiful woman, who has somehow managed to stop the clock at thirty-five. But I don't mean just physically. Mentally and emotionally she was thirty-five as well. The crushing disappointment for Jen did not come in the realization that she was staring fifty in the face, I think that disappointment was the realization that she was about to be fifty and was in no way prepared for it.

I think that with age comes the responsibility of leadership. There comes a responsibility for authority, and I think that the denial that there is life after forty is really just the denial of that responsibility. I think that men, who have a hard time facing mortality, and the responsibility of age handle it in many ways, but the most powerful is to sublimate the female, robbing her of any opportunity to establish authority, and then expecting her to magically have it once she's passed child-bearing years. If she doesn't have that authority, in Hollywood representation anyway, she's forced to become a bitch to establish and maintain it. And a successful bitch will never be as successful as a successful man, simply because she had to become a bitch to do it.

And becoming a bitch is the ultimate in disgrace for a woman. It is the penultimate insult, and the one that no woman really has a defense against. She either has to accept the moniker with aplomb, break down into tears to prove her femininity, or become an even bigger bitch to silence the insult. There is absolutely no way to win for her.

Unless you're Michelle Pfeiffer, in which case you take the lemons that are intended to turn her into a sourpuss and make lemonade. There has been one actress before her who has successfully played the Hollywood game and won. Bette Davis. Sure, at the end of her career there were some creaky star vehicles that paid the rent. But, just as she was to be discarded she was given a role that would have humiliated a lesser actress and she created an icon of mature womanhood. Shame on you if you don't know to which role I'm referring.

Mark my words, Michelle Pfeiffer will do the same thing.