Paul Reubens vs. Alan Cumming
Battle of the Smirking Sissies

We read quite a lot about movies around FT HQ, and we are aware of things like movie "buzz," as it's known, well before some movies are actually released. We'd started hearing buzz about Blow around the time that very cool (misleadingly so, as we would later ruefully remark) teaser trailer started running in theatres. We knew this was supposed to be Paul Reubens's latest comeback role. We hoped that was so, because we like him. But we had no idea that the buzz was so great that he'd actually been included in the Hall of Fame of Vanity Fair's 2001 Hollywood issue, all dressed up like a satyr, rolling his enormous, knowing brown eyes away from the camera.

Only...when we looked closer, we saw it wasn't him. It was Reubens's twelve-years-younger, Scottish doppelganger, Alan Cumming. And all at once, in that poignant moment, we realized that it wouldn't matter how many comebacks Reubens lined up, in ever more respectable co-starring vehicles. Alan Cumming's rise spells the end of Paul Reubens's career.

If you know Cumming primarily as the respected stage actor who starred in Cabaret and is currently on Broadway in Noel Coward's Design for Living, comparing him to an early '80s comedian primarily known by the name of the simpering man-child character he created might seem daft -- and, really, unfair to both sides of the equation. The fact is that Cumming has, since breaking through to the U.S. market back in the beloved Minnie Driver weight-gain vehicle Circle of Friends, done both his own share of Michael Cainesque paycheque movies, and Paul Reuben's share, on top of that. Sure, Cumming might like you to think he followed up his turn as the creepy, fey would-be Driver seducer Sean Walsh in the middlebrow CoF by playing the creepy, fey would-be Gwyneth Paltrow seducer Rev. Elton in the (unimpeachably cred-ridden) Miramax adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma. In fact, the official follow-up to Circle of Friends came when he starred as a villain in the Bond film GoldenEye.

Couldn't the Bond villain role have gone to a Paul Reubens willing to work a Russian accent? Sure it could. And, given that we already know Reubens has no compunction about starring in movies aimed at the teen and early twenties demo (hi, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie), so why couldn't he, instead of Alan Cumming, have starred in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, Spice World, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, or the current Spy Kids or Josie and the Pussycats? Or the Annie TV movie? Or Buddy, that movie in which Rene Russo has a gorilla she dresses up in human clothes and serves tea? Oh, wait. Paul Reubens was in Buddy, along with Alan Cumming. But still, you see our point. Evidently there is no shortage of roles for lisping, urbane movie villains. Cumming is averaging something like four movies a year now. It would be nice for him to spread the wealth to the lisping villain who paved the way for Cumming's whole career to date, practically.

But it would seem that, since Buffy, Reubens has decided to move away both from the simpering man-child that initially made his (fake) name, and from the lisping villain he surely could have played ad nauseam (we say "surely" because Cumming kind of has). Instead, he's decided to embrace the role of gay procurer of narcotics, following in the trail so successfully blazed for him by Mike Myers in 54. Well, except for the "successfully" part. Let's just say that both Myers and Reubens have got the "blazing" part down cold.

Well, we saw Blow. And the parts with Reubens in them were the only parts that didn't...well, you know. So we wish him well with all that. We just think maybe he should think about taking Alan Cumming's agent out for drinks; we suspect that there are lots of seconds to be had there that are plenty sloppy enough for the Pee-wee we all know and love.