|
For years, I felt like Catherine Keener was a secret that only I knew. It was all because of a movie she made in 1996, called Walking and Talking -- a movie that, in my experience, you've either seen and love, or have never heard of. The movie was like an incubator for unknown actors whose careers were about to blow up. Within a year, Anne Heche was in Donnie Brasco and Volcano. Within three years, Todd Field was in Eyes Wide Shut and Once and Again (and just two years after that, he was co-writing and directing multiple Oscar nominee In the Bedroom). Within months, Liev Schreiber got his start in the Scream franchise. Hell, Allison Janney played an unnamed neighbour woman in a scene and a half, and four years after Walking and Talking, she was winning the first of back-to-back Emmys.
But the heart of Walking and Talking is Catherine Keener. As Amelia, she is in the unenviable position of being unhappily single when her lifelong best friend Laura (Heche) announces her engagement to Frank (Field). The movie is a character study with no plot to speak of, really, so it falls to the characters to create drama -- chiefly, to Amelia, about whose insecurity we must care, with whose helplessness as Laura seems to slip away from her we must empathize, and at whose unseemly obsession with The Ugly Guy we must laugh. Keener makes Amelia a kind of neurotic New York Everywoman trying to hold her shit together; the film's most explosive scene is catalyzed by Amelia's telling Laura, "You're different." You know. It's an indie chick flick.
Which is fitting, since Keener is, basically, an indie chick. She started her career in Tom DiCillo films -- shoestring-budgeted affairs like Johnny Suede and Living in Oblivion. And when some of her Walking and Talking co-stars went on to star in mindless blockbusters like Sphere (Schreiber) and The Haunting (Field) -- when Anne Heche was braying at Harrison Ford that something had swum up her pants -- Keener was still making tiny movies that critics liked and no one saw -- like Your Friends and Neighbours, The Real Blonde, and...okay, fine, 8MM. We choose to believe she did that last one in the hope that co-star Nicolas Cage might introduce her to the Coen Brothers.
Keener doesn't have a gigantic range as an actor; the characters she plays all seem to be late-blooming, high-strung white girls who went to Seven Sisters schools. Even Adele Delisi -- the slightly trashy, big-haired, midriff-baring magician's assistant she played in Out of Sight -- had the air of a woman who was only a Fair Isle sweater away from a graduate seminar on Thomas Hardy. Keener's characters exhibit varying degrees of self-assurance (read: abrasiveness), but share a kind of crotchety yet endearing world-weariness seldom seen since the days of great Hollywood dames like Lauren Bacall and Bette Davis.
It was for one of her most dame-ish roles that Keener busted out of the indie ghetto and earned an Oscar nomination -- as the street-smart, wise-cracking Maxine in Being John Malkovich. (It was her stylish smoking in that one that put this commentator in mind of Bacall, and the moment when John Cusack's character -- attempting to cheat on his wife with Maxine -- told her he was a puppeteer and she instantly yelled, "CHECK!" that put me in mind of Davis. But I digress.) Keener lost the Oscar, but no matter -- the exposure seems to have turned her into the brunette Julianne Moore: Keener will appear in no fewer than five movies in 2002. And though none of them is an End of the Affair-esque star vehicle for Keener -- she plays the lead in only one (Lovely and Amazing) of the five, and that one is a wee indie that probably won't play outside major metropolitan markets, which is a shame, incidentally, because it reunites Keener with Nicole Holofcener, her Walking and Talking writer-director, and is great.
So. Catherine Keener has never headlined a major studio picture. None of her movies has ever grossed anything close to $100 million. She is probably years away from even having a shot at an InStyle cover or presenting an Oscar, despite her past nomination. To our minds, she's practically a Hey! It's That Guy!. And yet she somehow ended up on the cover of Famous, the free magazine distributed in theatres of Canada's Famous Players chain. Famous, mind. With CATHERINE KEENER's face underneath the word "Famous." Which is odd, because she isn't really famous -- she isn't now, and if she keeps on making good movies that no one ever sees, she may never be.
For our purposes, this makes things difficult. She's not a starlet. She's never played a Culkin's mother. (Not even Meryl Streep can claim the same.) She's neither a district attorney nor a Miss Daisy, as the saying goes. She keeps playing different kinds of roles without compromising her integrity, showing her tits, or making do with seventeen clichéd lines (with the possible exception of the aforementioned 8MM). And while it is not unheard of for actors to enjoy careers of this kind, the people who have done so tend to be...well, dudes.
Should Catherine Keener be more famous than she is? It's hard to say, since the fact that she is successful yet largely unknown makes it hard to say how famous she actually is. But lots of actors more famous than she -- her own co-stars, say, like Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, and Julia Roberts -- seem to have at least one boring, crappy, or forgettable movie for each Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, and Us cover they've shot. And since any one of them is far too famous to have wasted her time in Lovely and Amazing -- you know, when they could be in such riveting fare as The Sweetest Thing or Enough or America's Sweethearts instead -- then Catherine Keener has surely landed in a place they all should envy, and she is therefore, as far as we're concerned, exactly as famous as she should be.
|
