Susan Sarandon Breaks the Rule That Says Actresses Can't Age
By
KAREN DURBIN
NY
Times, September 8, 2002
No
work for women over 50? This month Susan Sarandon is in "Igby
Goes Down," "The Banger Sisters" and "Moonlight
Mile."
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a new comedy called "The Banger Sisters," Susan Sarandon
plays a former rock 'n' roll groupie named Lavinia, now a terminally
respectable Phoenix matron whose condescending teenage daughters and
politically ambitious husband are unaware of her sizzling past.
Until, that is, her old partner in naughtiness, Suzette (a
raffish-looking Goldie Hawn), turns up to touch her for a loan but,
seeing a need greater than her own, gets busy liberating Lavinia
from all that soul-killing self-effacement.
Before long, Lavinia is deep in her walk-in
closet, burrowing through layers of designer dullness to unearth a
secret 30-year-old cache: skin-tight shiny pants and a clingy,
low-cut top. Then she takes scissors to her lacquered flip, chopping
and fluffing it, artichoke style, and the women head out to the
nearest club.
In less confident hands, Lavinia might have
been played strictly for laughs a middle-aged woman trying to
revisit her sexy past in a tawdry disco, poor thing. But the way Ms.
Sarandon plays her, there's nothing past about it. The women give
themselves up to the music, and Ms. Sarandon's body seems almost
literally to unwind, as loose and supple as a snake. As she begins
to sway, you can feel her character's tension give way to a
deepening joy; soon she's lost in a sensuality so transcendent it
amounts to a state of grace. It's a privileged moment, and sensibly,
the camera just sits there and takes it in.
 Talking recently in Chelsea's gallery district,
Ms. Sarandon was quick to share the credit. "Goldie and I had a
chemistry and a love for each other that was genuine," she
said, "and that may have brought something to the movie that
wouldn't necessarily have been there had it been other people."
Later, Bob Dolman, who wrote and directed "The Banger
Sisters," explained by phone why he and his cinematographer
decided on the spot to keep the cameras rolling. The two women, he
said, "were on a journey."
This month, Ms. Sarandon's journey lets her off
at an unlikely destination, as the inadvertent subject of her own
minifestival. She has new movies opening three weeks in a row:
"Igby Goes Down" on Friday, "The Banger Sisters"
on Sept. 20 and "Moonlight Mile" on the 27th. This would
be a remarkable harmonic convergence for any star. For one who's
female and about to celebrate her 56th birthday, it's unprecedented.
"It's kind of funny," she said,
"because I'm getting questions like: `Well, Letterman wants you
to go on. But which movie are you going to go on for?' "
Ms. Sarandon's career has been defying
probability for years, slipping past Hollywood's prohibitive rules
about actresses and aging (actually, just one rule: they can't) and,
in the process, blazing a trail. Like Harrison Ford and Clint
Eastwood (not to mention Paul Newman and Gene Hackman, Ms.
Sarandon's co-stars in the 1998 romantic thriller
"Twilight"), she not only gets to keep working after 50,
she gets to play objects of desire the key that unlocks most
starring roles. No matter how many unglamourous roles she plays
most notably her powerful, Oscar-winning turn as the activist nun
Helen Prejean in "Dead Man Walking" (1995) she's the
actress most strongly identified in filmgoers' minds with the
once-foreign concept of the sexy older woman. Susan Sarandon is our
Simone Signoret, a woman who simply can't age out of her sexual
attractiveness, because her attractiveness has nothing to do with
being young.
 Susan
Sarandon as an eccentric Upper East Sider in Burr Steers's "Igby
Goes Down." (Sept. 13)
American attitudes toward female youth and
beauty have been growing more sophisticated, but Ms. Sarandon can
rightly claim to have helped them along. A recent flurry of articles
trumpeted the arrival of a new social phenomenon: older women
pairing off with younger men. New? Ms. Sarandon got there a dozen
years ago in "White Palace," playing the 43-year-old
fast-food waitress who proves irresistible to James Spader's
27-year-old yuppie. And that was just art imitating life, which had
already imitated art a couple of years earlier. Since 1988, Ms.
Sarandon has been raising a family, her daughter and their two sons,
with the actor and director Tim Robbins, who is 12 years her junior.
They met on the set of Ron Shelton's deliciously feminist-flavored
baseball comedy "Bull Durham," in which Ms. Sarandon plays
the magisterial Annie, a groupie like no other literary and
dryly funny, soulful yet genuinely self-sufficient, and, in sexual
matters, the one who calls the shots.
In one of the more audacious and amusing scenes
in American romantic comedy, she summons the raw but talented young
pitcher Nuke LaLoosh (Mr. Robbins) and the seasoned, seen-it-all
catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) to her home for drinks and a
gentle grilling, so that she can decide which man to welcome to her
bed for the season. Looking simultaneously hooked and thoroughly put
out, Mr. Costner gets to the heart of what makes the movie feel
fresh. "Why do you get to choose?" he asks. "Why
don't I get to choose?" As any woman could have told him, the
answer is simplicity itself: Because it's finally her turn.
Ms. Sarandon was 42 when "Bull
Durham" came out, and, while she had a number of high-profile
films to her credit, including "Atlantic City" (1980),
"The Hunger" (1983) and "The Witches of Eastwick"
(1987), it was only then, at the point when most actresses' careers
begin to falter, that hers took off.
The reason is all over the screen. Annie is a
well-written role, but Ms. Sarandon inhabits it with an authority
she had never shown before, as easy as it is breathtaking. That
quality has shaped and sustained her career ever since, enabling her
to take every role she plays up an extra notch sometimes, as in
"Thelma and Louise," to icon status. It's also what fuels
her sexual charisma. She shows other women how to be sexual and
still be in charge of themselves. Ms. Sarandon continues to be sexy
for the same reason that aging male actors do her appeal is
governed not by the traditional feminine tropes of innocence or
surrender but by the supposedly masculine ones of confidence and
authority.
Those qualities, reflected in her personal life
and in the political activism she shares with Mr. Robbins, came
early for Ms. Sarandon. The oldest of nine children in a
conservative Roman Catholic family in New Jersey, she developed a
sense of her own authority at a young age. She started living with
the actor Chris Sarandon in the late 60's, while they were students
at Catholic University in Washington. When the university and her
parents objected, they married, divorcing amicably a few years
later. That was the only marriage for Ms. Sarandon, who has gone her
own way ever since. She had her first child (who plays one of her
daughters in "The Banger Sisters") when she was 39 and
living with the Italian director Franco Amurri. She named her Eva
for Eve, Ms. Sarandon said, "the first person to get a bum
rap for thinking for herself."
Where Ms. Sarandon's work is concerned, the
word authority takes on an extra layer of meaning. In movies as
disparate as "Bull Durham" and "Dead Man
Walking," she's consciously, implacably the author of herself.
That's why her recovery of her early, sexy self in "The Banger
Sisters" is an act of integrity as well as liberation. In her
early roles, she was a competent actress, then a good one; by the
time she played Brooke Shields's young prostitute mother in
"Pretty Baby" (1978), she had also become drop-dead
gorgeous. But she wasn't memorable yet, except for the indelible
opening scene in "Atlantic City," where we watch her,
through Burt Lancaster's eyes, in her kitchen window, standing at
the sink, peeling her blouse down and stroking herself with cut
lemons. We're as mystified and fascinated as he is. What's she
doing? It looks both matter-of-fact and disturbingly sexual
rather like Ms. Sarandon herself. It's a predictor of the career to
come.
Ms. Sarandon pointed out that she had to
audition for the role of Annie, something many actors refuse to do
once they reach a certain level; she flew in from Europe at her own
expense. In return, "Bull Durham" kicked her career into
high gear.
That it has stayed there reflects her
willingness to go where the good work is and her disregard for the
trappings of stardom. Brad Silberling wrote and directed the partly
autobiographical "Moonlight Mile," about the way the
parents and fiancι of a young woman cope with her senseless murder.
Mr. Silberling sent the script to Ms. Sarandon, having written the
part of the mother with her in mind. "I was expecting to have
to jump through the typical set of hoops," he said.
"Instead, her agent called and said, `She wants to meet you.'
" She made a commitment on the spot, and, although the picture
took more than a year to get off the ground, honored it. "It
was just flawlessly simple," he said, incredulity creeping into
his voice.
"It was Susan agreeing that got my picture
made," Burr Steers said flatly of "Igby Goes Down."
Mr. Steers, a first-time writer-director, approached Ms. Sarandon
through his uncle, Gore Vidal, who plays a society prelate in the
movie and who is an old friend of hers. An acid satire of blueblood
New York at its most coolly self-absorbed, "Igby Goes
Down" offered Ms. Sarandon the rare chance to play an
unapologetically awful person: Mimi Slocumb, Upper East Side ice
queen and matriarch of the family from hell.
"It's so much fun when you're not burdened
with sincerity in any way," Ms. Sarandon said. It may get to be
a habit. The day we met, she had just returned from Prague, where
she had played another wicked woman, one Princess Wensicia, in a
television mini-series of the science fiction fantasy "Children
of Dune." "She's just evil, evil, evil," Ms. Sarandon
said. "I'm practically unrecognizable. It was a blast."
She pointed out that she was paid more for her
work in the mini-series than for her three new films combined.
Although "The Banger Sisters" and "Moonlight
Mile" have stronger studio connections than "Igby Goes
Down," all have independent or quasi-independent roots, and it
shows in their budgets. Ms. Sarandon isn't complaining; on the
contrary, she talks about them with the protectiveness of a mother.
When the studio seemed to be hesitating last spring over the release
of "Moonlight Mile," an ambitious mix of black humor and
emotional devastation, Ms. Sarandon chose it for screening at the
Taos Film Festival, which was giving her an award. The enthusiastic
reception helped prove that the movie would have an audience.
Recently Ms. Sarandon was being honored yet
again she thinks it was by Premiere magazine. When she saw that
the room was filled with a power crowd, "all people who could
greenlight projects one way or another," she decided, not
surprisingly, to preach a little, even if there wasn't much hope of
conversion. "I said you wouldn't have to worry about being
accused either of creating stereotypes or of being politically
correct, if everyone in this room just decided to make one movie
that they really felt passionate about, instead of trying to work
it, as politics does, according to the polls," she recalled.
"Hollywood would be completely different."
These days, Ms. Sarandon's list of prizes has
grown nearly as long as her filmography. But the one she got at Taos
says it best. They gave her the Maverick Award.
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