Hope Davis vs. Lili Taylor
Battle of the Soulful Indie Queens

Now that Miramax has done so much to transform "independent" movies, the adjective "indie" has less meaning than it did in, say, the mid-'80s. Back then, an indie was made by someone like John Waters, looked every bit as cheap as it probably was, and played in a handful of art-house cinemas or university screening rooms. Now, movies as disparate as The Blair Witch Project, The English Patient, and Chuck & Buck are all indies -- now that Sylvester Stallone is headlining Cop Land and Parker Posey is playing Tom Hanks's red-herring love interest in You've Got Mail, what do the studio/indie distinctions even mean? It takes a particularly dogged commitment to independent projects to be identified as an indie queen these days.

That is a commitment Lili Taylor and Hope Davis share. They've shared it, in fact, in two recent projects: Deadline (a not at all independent NBC series starring their frequent collaborator Oliver Platt), and The Impostors (starring Platt and virtually every actor who's ever crossed paths with Stanley Tucci). Each of them has also had slummed in big-budget schlock -- Taylor in movies like Ransom and The Haunting, and Davis in movies like Arlington Road and Mr. Wrong. But both actors have washed off the taint by turning in performance after performance in respectable -- noble, even -- indie movies.

Davis's signature roles -- Eliza in The Daytrippers, Erin in Next Stop, Wonderland Sofie in Mumford, -- have her looking pretty and (to greater and less degrees) melancholy. She's the original tragic WASP. [Attention: Spoilers!] Her husband, played by Stanley Tucci, cheats on her with a man. Or her bleeding-heart activist boyfriend, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, leaves her and takes the VCR. Or, she finds herself attracted to a somewhat shady psychiatrist, played by Loren Dean. (Who? It doesn't matter.) So she broods, and sighs, and brushes her lovely hair off her shoulders as her eyes pool with tears. Will she ever be happy again?

Taylor's had a longer career, playing a wider variety of characters, but the ones with which she's most frequently associated -- Corey in Say Anything..., Valerie Solanas in I Shot Andy Warhol, Jojo in Mystic Pizza -- she plays smart, fast-talking girls with fragile cores. Just as Janeane Garofalo is presented to us as Hollywood's idea of a fat girl, Taylor -- with her clever eyes, ready smile, and flawless skin -- is often cast as plain, most infamously in Dogfight, in which River Phoenix chooses her to help him win a contest based on who can pick up the homeliest girl.

Like Davis, Taylor plays women who are disappointed by life; the difference is that the shorter, sassier, less WASPy Taylor is generally called upon to be more plucky. In the case of Warhol, her pluck leads her all the way to murder. Can we picture Davis as a crazed feminist activist? Not really. Would Taylor, conversely, work as a pouting narcoleptic (like the one Davis played in Mumford)? No, because we're conditioned to think of her as being scrappy enough not to be affected by such a namby-pamby affliction.

As long as Taylor and Davis continue to get themselves cast in the same shows or movies, they won't have to compete for the title of reigning indie queen. But Stanley Tucci's wife just had a baby, and he can't take care of these ladies forever. Whose face will appear most frequently on Miramax posters? Who will get (maybe) a juicy recurring role on The West Wing while still showing up frequently on Broadway?

Advantage: Hope Davis. She's prettier. Hollywood's all about looks, dude. Sad, but true.