So, I was doing my ironing this weekend, and Miss Congeniality 2 was the least bad television option to have on while I was doing it. The movie is awful, and it's a reminder of why we should ditch the America's Sweetheart label, whether we're applying it to Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts, or any other young actress who nips at their heels for a while. It's a title that appears to give actresses permission to appear in all sorts of mediocre junk with the expectation that we ought to like it simply on the strength of their track record and personal charm. And in particular, I think it lets those actresses offer really ugly portrayals of women without the kind of scrutiny that they might get if they weren't Tefloned by prior box office and reviews.
The thing that sucks about Miss Congeniality 2 is that the first movie in the franchise actually was a lot of fun. Sure, Bullock was uglied up in a way that was unrealistic and insulting to her natural charms. But it wasn't objectionable. Sure, her character got a makeover, but that makeover also gave her an in to challenge a group of beauty queens, who turned out to be, among other things, gay, and a former ecoterrorist, on their assumptions about looks, toughness, and behavior. In Miss Congeniality 2, Bullock's character becomes even more disgusting than the backstabbers the original movie deconstructed, and the explanation for it was that she went through a bad breakup. That, plus the ugly, racially-inflected her character has with the awful stereotype that Regina King is wasted on is, makes for a jaw-droppingly bad movie.
Same with something like All About Steve. An actress with less goodwill in the bank would be absolutely destroyed by appearing in something like that. Why would an actress with any measure of personal charism and judgement appear in a movie where she's such an extreme, implausible grotesque? What does it say about what she thinks is good? What performances she thinks she's turned in well?
It's been a while since Julia Roberts has made a movie as unfortunate as All About Steve or Miss Congeniality. But Runaway Bride is pretty vile. It's not actually charming that a woman would grow up with absolutely no self-knowledge, it's sad. And ditching people at the altar causes real damage, and not just to the person doing the ditching. The end result of that should be therapy, not salvation and snuggling with Richard Gere. I will admit to having liked My Best Friend's Wedding at the time, and I will stand by my admiration of Rupert Everett's performance, but as I've grown up, I've realized more and more just how crazy and unlikable pretty much ever character in it is. It's a movie about marriage hysteria, on the part of both Cameron Diaz and Julia Roberts' characters, and it's awful. And in America's Sweethearts, we get to watch the delightful spectacle of Roberts, who has been skinny as long as she's been famous, pretend she's a fat girl who has dedicated her whole life to her sister, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. It's a funny, prescient movie about the era of reality entertainment, but there's a huge, sour note in the middle of it.
This isn't to say that Bullock and Roberts haven't made a lot of charming movies. While You Were Sleeping is the first romantic comedy I ever saw, and it's great, and Bullock's utterly believable in it. I hear great things about Infamous, which I'm looking forward to seeing quite a bit. I adored Roberts in Duplicity last year, and she's great in Closer, which made for one of the most uncomfortable movie-watching experiences I've had in a long time, but is excellent none the less. And that's only the recent movies.
But there ought to be genuine penalties for making rotten movies, particularly ones in which smart actresses debase themselves to turn in rotten portrayals of their fellow women. Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock both have Academy Awards. They both have a lot of money. They don't need the worst movies they've made. And neither do we.