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We understand that Hollywood needs its starlets. Not every movie requires a classically trained and exquisitely disciplined Meryl Streep, or even a wry, dry Helen Hunt, to play its leading lady. Sometimes what a movie needs to play its leading lady is a bit of all right -- someone very attractive, but not necessarily with anything else going for her: a starlet, in other words.
Charlize Theron is a starlet. She surely is very pretty, indeed. And in fifteen movies, she has demonstrated the ability to move and speak and wear beautiful costumes...all at the same time! Charlize Theron is a perfectly serviceable starlet, tangling in the sheets with Johnny Depp or Keanu Reeves, breaking the hearts of Ben Affleck or Tobey Maguire, acting imperious toward Tom Everett Scott or Matt Damon. She is fine -- just fine -- at what she does.
We just think that some people -- most of the world, from the looks of it -- have inaccurately appraised her value as a performer. Because we've seen a lot of her movies, and she's more of a prop -- a crutch, really, for her much-more-famous male co-stars to lean on, until they destroy her trust (perhaps by taking a job from Satan, as Keanu did in The Devil's Advocate, or by impregnating her with an alien baby, as Johnny did in The Astronaut's Wife -- whereupon, in both cases, a single glycerine tear will roll picturesquely down one rounded cheek). But she has yet to play a role in which she had any agency or interest except as an appendage to some man or other. And, frankly, we think that's as it should be. Should Charlize Theron attempt to play a brilliant young would-be art director experimenting with heroin and homosexuality in High Art? No. No, she should not. But would she be out of her element putting on a mink stole and a bright red lipstick and showing up as Robert De Niro's young, drunken wife in Men of Honor? Oh, why not?
So, what's the problem, you might ask? One one level, there is no problem. As an actor, Charlize Theron sucks, and while we wish she weren't always butchering some accent or other, she generally doesn't overreach. And it's not like she's got an Oscar or a Golden Globe, nor even a nomination for either one. We're not giving her a career audit. We're giving her a fame audit. And it basically boils down to this:
Must she be in every movie?!
When, and how, did Charlize Theron become the go-to girl whenever a script calls for a cute, vapid bit of arm candy for some short dork in a story that takes place prior to 1969? Was it that one old-school-glamourous orange satin gown she wore to the Oscars a couple of years back that convinced Hollywood's casting directors that she is a throwback to an earlier -- really, any earlier -- era? Didn't she stop to consider that her turning up in olde-fashioned clothes and working (sort of) a southern accent in both The Legend of Bagger Vance and Men of Honor -- both in November 2000 -- might create some crappy-movie market confusion?
And if she didn't realize it (and, frankly, we don't think it's within her mental abilities to calculate the consequences of her or any actions, and that instead of contemplating the world and her place in it, she rather prefers to have her hair done and go to the beach), isn't there someone in an executive position who understands that a little bit of Chipmunk Cheeks goes a very long way? That if she's rammed down our throats as the very embodiment of coltish sex appeal in every movie that comes down the pike, she'll end up the way poor Liv Tyler did -- a Van Nuys crack whore?
Charlize Theron has nothing to be ashamed of, with the possible exception of her IQ. We'd just rather see a lot less of her. Starting now.
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