‛...But Who Do You Consider ‛A Ten’?’

Television interviews conducted with the director and cast of the 1996 film Beautiful Girls further captured the gender dynamics not just of the film, but of mid-1990s American culture more broadly.

Lauren Holly being interviewed by Bobbie Wygant for NBC in 1996 (Bobbie Wygant Archive).

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This post is part of the newsletter’s regular ‘Research and Reflections’ series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal development.

Content warning: Misogyny; Rape and sexual assault; Paedophilia; Harassment; Eating disorders.

Spoiler alert: This piece explores themes of the film Beautiful Girls and its promotion, and as such reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

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MO: Hey. Hey, was that Tracey?
WILLIE: Yep.
KEV: Is she hot?
WILLIE: She’s nice.
KEV: Ascribe a numerical value: face, body, personality.
WILLIE (scoffing): No, I’m not gonna do that.
KEV: Come on. Do it.
MO: Don’t be…Don’t be vile, guy–
KEV: (To Mo, interrupting him) Grow up, Mo. (To Willie) Do it.
MO (to Willie): You don’t have to.
WILLIE: Ahhhh, I don’t know, let’s see, uh, face...
MO: Hey, wait, wait. We need a frame of reference.
KEV (turning to Mo): I thought I was being vile guy?
MO: If you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it proper.

This is a rather paradigmatic piece of dialogue from the 1996 film Beautiful Girls, which I previously wrote about as part of my piece on a short cycle of films about ten-year high school reunions made during the mid-to-late 1990s.

The Reunion Film Cycle

It is a film about a male group of friends – in the fictional town of Knights Ridge, Massachusetts – approaching thirty, reflecting upon their lives, and mostly floundering in their relationships with women, whom they alternately idealise, objectify, and mistreat. To recap my synopsis from that earlier piece:

…Beautiful Girls centred on the return of piano player Willie (Timothy Hutton) to his hometown for his tenth-anniversary high school reunion, at a point when he is at a crossroads in his career and in his personal life, being unsure as to whether to marry his long-term girlfriend Tracey (Annabeth Gish).

He finds one of his old schoolfriends, Mo (Noah Emmerich), happy in his life, being married with two children. Two others, Tommy (Matt Dillon) and Paul (Michael Rapaport), together running a snow-shovelling business (with a third former schoolfriend, easy-going Kev (Max Perlich)), are discontented. Tommy, a former high school football star, is bitter about how his life had turned out since graduation. He is continuing an affair with married former high school girlfriend Darian (Lauren Holly), to the dismay of his current girlfriend, Sharon (Mira Sorvino). Paul, meanwhile, lives with Tommy, having become estranged from long-term girlfriend Jan (Martha Plimpton). It is hinted that Jan wants to have children, whereas Paul is in no rush to. Willie meanwhile also strikes up an unlikely friendship with his father’s 13-year-old neighbour, Marty (Natalie Portman), with whom he becomes increasingly infatuated.

The night of the reunion provides a pivotal moment when Tommy, who has decided not to attend, is instead badly beaten up by Darian’s husband Steve (Sam Rothbard) and his friends. The incident not only prompts Tommy to reflect upon his disappointments and to reconcile with Sharon, but also for Paul to successfully propose to Jan, and Willie to recommit to both his career and to Tracey.

I recently watched a series of short interviews that veteran Texan reporter and critic Bobbie Wygant – who died last year at the age of 97 – did with the film’s director Ted Demme, and cast members Dillon, Holly, Hutton, Portman, Rapaport, and Sorvino, for NBC’s regional KXAS-TV affiliate on 20^th January 1996, a month before the film opened in American cinemas. The discussions I think really captured some fascinating gender politics around the film, as well as around contemporary Hollywood actors and the way they publicly presented themselves in relation to their work. The dynamics are heightened by the interviewer being an older woman, who had herself broken ground as a female journalist working in television since the late 1940s.

From a present-day perspective, the interviews are also thrown into sharper relief by the fact Beautiful Girls was made by Miramax, whose co-founder Harvey Weinstein is currently serving a lengthy jail term for rape and other sexual offences. Weinstein’s long-rumoured exploitation of his position as one of Hollywood’s leading producers to repeatedly assault women in the industry were eventually extensively reported by the New York Times and New Yorker in 2017. Among over one hundred women to have accused him of harassment and or assault were Mira Sorvino and Lauren Holly. Sorvino’s reported encounter with Weinstein took place only a few months before the interview with Wygant. Holly’s occurred later in the decade.¹

In this post, I want to reflect on three recurring features of the interviews: the construction of the masculinity of the film’s male characters and cast; of the femininity of its female characters and cast; and of the age-inappropriate relationship between Willie and Marty.

‘Is that pretty much the way men are?’

Wygant spoke warmly about Beautiful Girls, especially in her conversations with Demme and Dillon, telling the latter, ‘I think that you can look at all, everything that's going on, and find in almost every character something to identify with in your own life.’ Dillon agreed, commenting:

That’s what appealed to me about the script, actually, is that you can– these characters are so kind of universal, in a way, you know, you can be from a small town in the South or big town up in the East, or you can be- Well I, uh, it’s not maybe urbane, it wouldn’t be like a– but in a neighbourhood, it’s a sense of community, of a group of guys and friendship and camaraderie and that, in that sense it’s very universal. It’s a small picture with big themes.

Demme similarly described Beautiful Girls as ‘a very small movie, um, about a small town and really kind of regular joes’. This emphasis on the small town capturing something essential and ordinary and truthful came through as Demme discussed his initial reluctance to cast Michael Rapaport for his role despite the latter’s enthusiasm for the project. He confessed to Wygant that he had thought Rapaport ‘a little too urban’ for the part, and joked about only agreeing to have him in the film on the grounds of fining him five dollars ‘every time I hear ‘New York’ [said in an exaggerated imitation of Rapaport’s accent]’. Given that Rapaport is Jewish and grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (Demme and Dillon both hailed from smaller settlements within New York state), the comment carried slightly racial as well as geographical connotations as to what comprised authenticity.

As Demme’s and Dillon’s responses indicated, their notion of authenticity was also integrally connected to masculinity, something Wygant teased out in her questions. She asked Dillon, for example, ‘Do you have a group of guys you hang out with?’, to which he responded that he did have friends from high school ‘not unlike the characters in the film’. He expanded upon this by characterising both sets of relationships as a healthy example of male bonding:

WYGANT: And do you talk about the same things they talk about in the film, you know, who’s going with whom, and what’s happening and, you know, that kind of thing?

DILLON: Yeah and we, we talk about each other too, like what is, it– you know, we laugh, we joke around, I mean we joke around, the friends that I grew up with – my character isn’t like the funny character in the film, really, in this film – but the guys I grew up with, that’s all we do. We laugh, and we joke around, and we also talk about things. I mean, I have some friends, man, we talk about– we get into such deep stuff, you know, too, we can get really deep with each other and that’s important, you know, that’s what’s important, and I think hopefully that can come off a little bit in this film, is that these guys need each other. It’s not just that they’re hanging around just to kill time, but that there’s a real need to have the consistency of friendship, you know.

Yet Wygant also put Demme and Rapaport visibly less at ease when she shifted the conversation towards differences and relationships between men and women, which were so integral to the film and yet which rubbed uncomfortably against the claims, highlighted above, as to the universality and wholesomeness of the male characters’ experiences.

WYGANT: It seems to me that, uh, a group of guys, this is kind of the way they would be and– see, as women we never know how men really are when they’re just behind the curtain, the boys– we don’t, we don’t ever get to know that, right but, uh– is that pretty much the way men are?

DEMME (hesitantly and somewhat embarrassedly): At least the guys that I know, you know, I mean– and we never get to go behind your curtain either, you know, so it’s not like it’s a one-way street, you know.

Wygant was here in fact referencing a line by Paul to Willie in the film:

You never let them behind the curtain, Will. You never let them see the little old man behind the curtain working the levers of the great and powerful Oz. They are all sisters, Willie... they aren’t allowed back there...they mustn’t see.

Continuing with his rather defensive and halting answer, Demme stressed the collaborative nature of his approach to filmmaking. In working with male and female actors, and actively engaging them in the development of the film’s script, he explained, ‘…they’re going to bring realism to it; it’s not like a guy’s writing a script for a girl, which happens all the time usually…’

Rapaport, meanwhile, had stressed how he ‘identified’ with the character of Paul; and yet recoiled somewhat when Wygant invited him to engage in the kind of behaviour Paul does in the film. She told him, ‘your character in Beautiful Girls is always, uh, rating girls from one to ten’ (This was not actually the case: as noted above, the particular line about this was from the character of Paul’s friend and co-worker, Kev). The line of questioning in any case left Rapaport visibly embarrassed:

WYGANT: …but who do you consider ‘a ten’?

RAPAPORT: I could consider all, all the females in this movie, I think, um, uh, Rosie O’Donnell [who played a comic role as Sharon’s outspoken feminist friend, Gina], Natalie Portman, Lauren Holly, Uma Thurman [who also had a relatively small role in the film as Andera, one friend’s visiting cousin whom all the other male characters become briefly besotted with], Mira Sorvino, those are all tens. Those– those girls are all, you know, special and um, uh, you know, all of them, you know, they’re all special girls, um, so, all those girls did– Martha Plimpton is a ten, you know, so I had a bunch of them around on the set for inspiration.

WYGANT: All right, aside from the women in the film, then tell me who is the ‘ten’.

RAPAPORT: Besi-, beside…and not including you?

WYGANT: Uh, oh, please don’t include me.

RAPAPORT: Um, who’s a ten, who- who’s a ten, who’s – it’s my mother, June Brody, is a ten, she’s a ten.

WYGANT: I can’t win with you, I can see.

RAPAPORT: Yeah, I mean, you know those, these are the ones, you know, who- who were– who, uh, who were– who were special to me.

Demme responded similarly when Wygant put the question to him, first citing his wife and mother, and the friends he had made through his wife, and then listing Holly, Thurman, Portman, and O’Donnell:

…no, I mean I’m not being diplomatic, I mean, they all– I mean that’s why I cast them all, they’re all in their own way, they’re all tens, you know, it’s– it’s, you know, no one’s a ten across the board, you know, no one, thank God, but, um, you know they’re just– they’re…they’re all amazing women in this movie.

In this way, both Demme and Rapaport, asked by a significantly older female interviewer to participate in a mode of activity from the film, specifically objectifying and sexualising women, using a standardising mode of assessment, instead unconvincingly sought to portray it as celebratory of women and their qualities in all their variety. Wygant continued to ask Rapaport about another form of behaviour his character did engage in in the film:

WYGANT: Did you ever have pin up pictures in your room?

RAPAPORT: Um of– of models? Because I–

WYGANT: Any.

RAPAPORT: Yeah, well I had pin-up pictures of, like, you know…like sportspeople. I had pin-up pictures of Eddie Murphy, you know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be Ed, I wanted to be, you know, I’d pin up pictures of John Travolta and Sylvester Stallone, these are the people who I grew up, you know. Dr J and Larry Bird, these are people, you know…and then I would have like a few like uh, you know, from the Sports Illustrated, you know, swimsuit issue, I’d cut some of those pictures out and stuff like that, but I always like, you know, had the guys up there that I idolised, you know.

Rapaport thus sought to shift the portrayal of his own passage into young adulthood – he was one of the younger cast members, being only 25 at the time of the interview – away from parallels with Paul’s immature lechery and towards a more innocent aspiration to imitate male role models. He subsequently presented himself as moving wide-eyed between this adolescent boyishness and the healthy homosocial masculinity Dillon had also evoked in his interview:

Like, I remember one day, I was playing basketball with Tim Hutton, and I was like, I told him, I said, ‘I used to watch you when I was like, 15’, you know and, before I thought about acting, you know, and um, with Matt Dillon too, these are people that, you know, before I was, you know, interested in being in movies that I would just enjoy as a fan and, um…it was it was good to be in a movie with them and, you know– and I told Matt yesterday, I said, you know, just as a fan, not as a friend and not as a, you know, peer or anything, I said, ‘you’re so good in this movie’ and, you know…and I was proud of him, and I was happy for him, just as a fan, so…

A more uncomfortable parallel between Rapaport and his character, Paul, lay in the latter’s pestering of his ex, Jan, to eventually win her back – including aggressively proposing to her and at one point childishly dumping snow in her driveway. In real life, Rapaport would the following year be arrested for the aggravated harassment of his former girlfriend, the actor Lili Taylor; he subsequently pleaded guilty, with the judge issuing a protection order preventing him from contacting her.

‘She was everything in high school, wasn’t she?’

Wygant spoke to both Holly and Sorvino far less about the film as a whole, and much more specifically about the parts they played. In Holly’s case, Wygant identified the character of Darian as a particular type of woman, and wanted to know how far her passage from youth to adulthood resembled the actor’s own:

WYGANT: Congratulations to you on Beautiful Girls and your role in it, you play a very interesting woman, Darian.

HOLLY: Mmm-hmm.

WYGANT: She was everything in high school, wasn’t she…

HOLLY: Everything.

WYGANT: …beauty queen, cheerleader, I mean she was…

HOLLY (doing air quotes): ‘The Girl’.

WYGANT: The girl on campus, yes, and then she marries a guy and um, has a family and uh, but she’s still– there’s that high school sweetheart, she can’t get rid of him.

HOLLY: She can’t let go. I think he reminds her too much of her heyday, she wants to feel that, you know, a little bit, she likes being the queen. Like, I think she feels empowered, you know, by keeping Tommy on a string a little.

WYGANT: When you were in high school, were you Miss Everything?

HOLLY: No. Um, I– I certainly knew them, and all of that, but I was more kind of middle of the road. I mean, I was never homecoming queen or prom queen, or anything like that, and by the same token, you know, I wasn’t the wallflower or anything. I was– I had lots of friends and was involved in lots of things. I just wasn’t ‘The Girl’.

Both Wygant and Holly thus constructed girlhood and womanhood as inherently performative, in a manner parallel to that of acting in film, of there being certain defined roles available for them to play – a repertoire they could both identify with. This rather contrasted with Wygant’s affected display of mild incomprehension as to how men are.

Wygant interpreted Sorvino’s character, Sharon, as instead emblemising a particularly universal female experience, rather than a specific type of woman, with which the actor agreed, and expanded upon at length:

WYGANT: …This character is somebody that I think every woman maybe has had a touch of that in her life, don’t you think?

SORVINO: Oh, I think so, yes. I think it’s– it’s a sort of– the part that we don’t like to have happen, but it does, you know, that sort of a period where you’re really not being very good to yourself, you’re totally in love with somebody, it isn’t going right, you stick it out, you see, you think somehow it is going to change, you think, if you work hard enough, if you can just be better, they will love you back, it’s your fault, whatever and, you know, she doesn’t like herself, she doesn’t like her body image, she’s got an eating disorder, you know, and I think every woman has had a moment where they just hate the way God put them together and wishes that there was a different– a different pattern on the table, but- but the nice thing is– is that she starts realising that that mentality has to go, she has to start taking care of her own life and not put it in the hands of somebody else who at this point is not really able to give her any of the validation that she needs…she’s got to give it to herself, and whether or not he can come up with it is another story.

It is notable how sympathetically and deeply Holly and Sorvino here interpreted characters who, while both presented in Beautiful Girls as damaged, are not expanded upon in the film, their motives – beyond their respective pursuits of Tommy’s affection – not deeply explained, in the same way as the men’s in the film are. Sorvino subsequently praised the film in the interview, unprompted by Wygant, for the quality of the material it provided the cast to work with:

The great thing about Beautiful Girls is that I felt that when I read it, the dialogue just jumped up at me, and each of the individual characters really had strong personalities that we hadn’t seen before, and it was an ensemble that really wove together beautifully. So as a reader I said, this is a very good script, I’d be interested in doing this, even though it’s an ensemble, it doesn’t give you like the– the showy place to kind of do your thing and– but instead you kind of share it, it’s like a team, you know, so that’s– it was actually a great experience.

The rest of these interviews centred far more on the two actors’ careers and their intersections with their personal lives, and two particular men in those lives. Holly was at that time going out with Jim Carrey, whom she would later briefly marry. Wygant had previously interviewed both Holly and Carrey just two months earlier, when they were promoting the film Dumb and Dumber, in which they had both starred. Before this latest interview with Holly had formally commenced, Wygant whisperingly complimented her on her new blonde hairstyle, before asking her ‘Does Jim like it?’; Holly smiled and answered in the affirmative.

Wygant subsequently described Holly as about the ‘busiest actress I know’, given the number of films she had been cast in recently. Holly modestly expressed mild incomprehension at the momentum her career had achieved, attributing much of it to Dumb and Dumber, and to Carrey:

It’s amazing what a movie that cracks 100 million at the box office will do, and people see you and then they give you opportunities, and then next thing I know, you know, I’m on magazine covers because of my boyfriend.

Wygant was only too eager to pick up on this mention of Carrey, firstly asking whether there would be a sequel to Dumb and Dumber, before enquiring as to how the two of them managed to find time to spend together given their hectic careers:

WYGANT: Yeah, I wonder that you two can ever see one another.

HOLLY: It’s– we definitely ah– that’s a whole job in itself. We make a little calendar about when we can see each other and try to work it out and– but it’s important, and you make that happen. It’s priority.

WYGANT: But at the same time it is difficult, isn’t it?

HOLLY (nodding): Very difficult, very difficult. We– it’s not a normal, probably, relationship…I mean, we don’t have dinner together every night or anything like that.

WYGANT: But then when you are together, it must be just so special.

HOLLY (nodding again): Definitely, and– and…I think that that makes it nice too, because you appreciate one another.

WYGANT: How many times a day are you on the phone to Jim Carrey?

HOLLY (laughing nervously): Um, it depends on the day. There have been days where it’s been twenty, and there have been days when it’s…just once.

WYGANT: And he– then when you’re not calling him, he’s calling you?

HOLLY: Yeah, we– we know how to reach each other.

WYGANT (laughing hard): Your cell phone bill must be…

HOLLY (laughing): Yeah, yeah.

WYGANT: …astronomical.

HOLLY: Probably, yeah

WYGANT: I hope you’re buying stock in those companies.

HOLLY: Yeah, that’s what I should– (pointing at Wygant) That’s a good idea!

Wygant began her interview with Sorvino with a similar tone of familiarity, referring back to an interview from the previous year:

WYGANT: We talked when Mighty Aphrodite was coming out, and you have had such a fantastic reaction to that performance, even talking about Oscar nominations, and so forth. How do you feel about Oscar nominations?

SORVINO: Ahhhh, there’s– I– I try not to think about it, you know, the…I– they don’t come out for another month, and I– I would never want to assume that I would get one; it’s very flattering that people have said stuff like that, but I just had to, kind of, put it out of my mind.

WYGANT: What’s interesting is that, ah, your father [actor Paul Sorvino] well could be nominated for– for his performance as Kissinger in Nixon.

SORVINO: That would be great.

WYGANT: Wouldn’t that be something if you both were?

SORVINO: That would be…pretty wild.

WYGANT: …the Sorvino hour, but anyway.²

The interview subsequently turned to Sorvino’s part in Beautiful Girls, and then, as with Holly, as to how busy she was. Wygant asked: ‘I would guess that maybe you have more scripts tossed at you now than at any previous time, right?’ Sorvino concurred, and expanded upon the challenges of identifying the right roles when she was receiving so many scripts and had little time to read them properly. She explained that she had honed her skill for recognising quality projects while working as a script-reader for a year after graduating. At that point Wygant interjected again to ask if her father ever asked her to read scripts for him; Sorvino politely laughed, and remarked, ‘No, I don’t have enough time to read over mine!’

Wygant was therefore eager to ask both Holly and Sorvino about their careers – indeed, more so than their male co-stars, with whom she focused more on Beautiful Girls itself – but in a particularly gendered way that centred on questions of workload, in Holly’s case on the question of work-life balance, and in both cases framed their careers in relation to high-profile male actors in their lives. (She did also ask Demme about his uncle, the director Jonathan Demme, and his influence on Ted’s development as a filmmaker).

Watching these interviews back made me think about the role of intergenerational relationships between women – even those who have forged or are forging successful careers – in unintentionally maintaining patriarchal structures within industries: in setting expectations as to how to women ought to think and talk about work and its place in their lives; in blurring lines between the professional and the personal; in situating their aspirations and achievements as dependent upon men in the sector.

It was therefore interesting to consider Wygant’s line of questioning of Holly and Sorvino in relation to interviews conducted with Wygant in 2016 by students at the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism, as part of the ‘Women with Words’ oral history project on women journalists in the Dallas-Fort Worth. In the first and second of these conversations, Wygant reflected on various aspects of working in journalism as a woman, emphasising the strains involved in working in such a demanding profession, and how fortunate it was for her marriage that she and her husband were both in television and had an appreciation of each other’s workloads. She espoused a certain gender-blindness, insisting on the meritocracy of recruitment and working practices in television journalism:

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever experienced any kind of harassment in your career from any male people, men, or any fellow women, or whatnot?

WYGANT: I don’t know if I know what you mean by harassment.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, you know, like if they told you this isn’t a job for a woman, or had they commented on your appearance or, you know, sexist things like saying that you shouldn’t be here because you’re a woman, and blah blah blah.

WYGANT: Oh, you know, probably there were things like that. You know when you’re in the public eye, I don’t care you who are, you’re going to get that fringe of society that isn’t going to like anybody or anything. So you just know that’s going to happen and there will be complaints about the way you look, and wear your hair, and why did you say this and why don’t you do that. You just can’t let that stuff penetrate. You just gotta let that stuff wash over you.

This paradoxical concern for the strains of a career in media on women and learned indifference to, though hardly ignorance of, sexism in the industry both echoed through her interviews with Holly, Sorvino, and the others.

‘Because some people are sitting out there suspicious of everything’

One of the key subplots in Beautiful Girls is Willie’s growing fascination with Marty, which he confides in Mo about; Mo is clearly slightly troubled by this revelation, though Willie insists on there being nothing ‘sexual’ to his feelings. Nonetheless, Willie is subsequently clearly himself slightly perturbed when he encounters Marty while she is skating, and she precociously states her own affection for him (the unease is further heightened by a shot of Mo, himself out skating with his children, looking over concernedly). Willie ultimately defuses the situation:

WILLIE: So, um...So what do we do?

MARTY: Alas, poor Romeo, we can’t do diddly. You’ll go to penitentiary; I’ll be the laughing stock of the Brownies. But if your feelings for me are true, you’ll wait.

WILLIE: Wait?

MARTY: Yep. Wait five years. I’ll be 18, and we can walk through this world together.

WILLIE: In five years, you won’t remember me.

MARTY: William.

WILLIE: I’m formed, and you’re not. You have changes to go through. You’ll change. And I’ll be Winnie The Pooh to your Christopher Robin.

MARTY: No literary reference left unturned. How do you figure Pooh?

WILLIE: Christopher Robin outgrew Pooh. That’s how it ended. He had Pooh when he was a child. When he matured, he didn’t need him any more.

MARTY: That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.

WILLIE: Yeah, but it’s true. You don’t realise it now, but you’ll be doing some changing. And...I can’t be a Pooh.

MARTY: I think I’ll skate away now, Pooh.

WILLIE: All right, Christopher.

Tracey subsequently joins Willie in Knights Ridge, and in an exchange through an upstairs window, Willie redons an air of maturity in letting a clearly disconsolate Marty (who is stowing her sleigh away below) down gently, telling her: ‘I hope we stay in touch. Cos I hope to learn someday about what you’re doing. Cos I think whatever it is, it’ll be amazing. I really do.’ In the film’s final scene, Willie bids her goodbye with a kiss on the cheek, and then a comic line is drawn under the matter when Paul asks Marty if she is ‘the little neighbourhood Lolita’, and Marty replies by asking him if he is ‘the alcoholic, high-school buddy shit-for-brains’.

Beautiful Girls needs to be understood within a broader culture of eroticising teenage girls in 1990s American film and popular culture more generally.³ Yet it is neither interested in actually titillating depictions of teen sexuality, nor especially in questions of child sexualisation, nor in the depravity of and abuses of power in age-inappropriate relationships. In short, it feels like a film slightly inured to the full significances of representing possible romance between a 29-year-old and a 13-year-old, using it primarily as a vehicle for exploring the former’s broader emotional dilemmas about adulthood, albeit while also hinting potentially at some of those more controversial tropes as a way of generating tension along the way.

Demme seemed slightly unnerved when Wygant asked him about his handling of the matter as director:

WYGANT: Casting, uh, Natalie Portman in this role, now, that could be a very delicate balance, that relationship between Natalie and Timothy Hutton…

DEMME: Absolutely.

WYGANT: Uh, was that, uh, a worrisome thing for you? Did you really watch everything very closely?

DEMME: Yeah, for me, probably yeah, in the back of my mind, but I knew how it ended so I always kind of knew, but you know what I wanted to do was for the viewer is maybe make it a little uncomfortable at one or two points and make uh, the viewer wonder ‘Boy, I wonder where they’re going with this, I hope they’re not going where I think they’re going,’ and hopefully we take them down the right path. I mean, stylistically, the thing I did in the film was– I always, uh, put something in between them in the film, when you go and see it for the second time – which I’m sure you’re gonna do, Bob – you know the second, you know– I always put like a fence between them, or a car between them, so they never got really close, they never touched until, uh, at the ice rink when she fell into his arms and got that great reaction from his friend, you know, and at the end when he gave her a kiss on the cheek, so I knew we were going to deal with it in a classy way.

WYGANT: Well, it– it certainly…there was never anything offensive about it to me, but I kept thinking, as the director, you had to be concerned…

DEMME: Sure, absolutely…

WYGANT: …because some people are sitting out there suspicious of everything.

DEMME: Well and guess what, there’s a lot of strange people out there that, you know, probably, you know, whatever (laughing), you know, like would be, yeah, be suspicious, and you know, whatever else awful thoughts came into their mind, but um, you know, I resp– you know, we respect Natalie and Tim, and you know those who, we know we have no problems with any– you know, we knew exactly where we were going with that character.

This rather suggests a desire to play at least lightly on expectations emerging from the wider cultural milieu I outlined above, while externalising any arousal by or disgust at those same implications as the possible product of warped minds within the audience. This despite Portman confirming to Wygant that Demme had encouraged her to audition for the role after seeing her in Léon: The Professional (1994), in which she had played an orphaned 12-year-old who strikes up a similarly ambiguous relationship with a middle-aged hitman who reluctantly takes her in.

Wygant enquired with Portman herself as to any parallels between herself and Marty’s character in the film:

WYGANT: Your character gets a crush on the next door neighbour, who is Timothy Hutton. You’re what now, 14?

PORTMAN: Yes.

WYGANT: …and in in your life now or before, have you ever had a crush on a much older man?

PORTMAN: Much older, no. Like older, yes, because girls, I mean, they mature faster than guys, so of course a younger girl and older guy are gonna have, you know, they’ll be– they’re growing up at the same rate, so, um, it kind of makes sense that, you know, the older guy, younger girl thing, but…um, I’ve never been in love with like a 30-year-old guy like that, but, um, it’s definitely possible like, you know, because when a 30-year-old immature, and a 14-year-old mature– I mean, it just works out.

WYGANT: Balances out…

PORTMAN: Yes.

When Wygant followed up by asking her if there was anything about the role that might have made her ‘nervous as an actress’, assumedly hinting at the same possibly controversy she asked Demme somewhat more directly about, Portman was quickly dismissive:

Not at all, I mean, she’s really, she's like a normal person, she’s going through normal- normal things, and she’s real– she’s like, a real character, and there’s nothing like, you know, scary about it or– it’s just a really fun movie to go see, and there are great people in it, and I got to work with a really great group of people, and it was so much fun.

At the same time, however, Portman was pushing back against her sexualisation as a child actor. She told Kristine McKenna in an interview for the Los Angeles Times the following month that she had gotten director Luc Bessson to remove planned scenes from Léon that she was uncomfortable with, including those featuring nudity; and had also turned down Adrian Lyne’s offer to cast her in his 1997 film adaptation of Lolita on similar grounds. In adulthood, Portman was more openly critical of the series of roles she had been cast in during the 1990s (and the sometimes lewd responses they drew), telling The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone in 2007:

…there’s a surprising preponderance of that kind of role for young girls. Sort of being fantasy objects for men, and especially this idealised purity combined with the fertility of youth, and all this in one.

She added:

…it was definitely interesting to think about – why men write the female characters they do. Just like the way they write the male character. How much is wish-fulfilment fantasy, and why.

Wygant presented the relationship between Willie and Marty much more neutrally in her questioning of Hutton, with the possibly problematic elements of it not touched upon by interviewer or interviewee:

WYGANT: I think one of the most interesting things about the film is the relationship between your character and this young girl next door played by Natalie Portman…

HUTTON: Yuh-huh.

WYGANT: …because this kid is like what, 13 going on 30, I mean, she is so bright, the character, as well as Natalie herself, but I found that so interesting that this kid ultimately is the one who kind of gets your life straightened out.

HUTTON: Yeah that’s what I loved about the script, that this complete stranger, uh, this 13-year-old girl who lives next door to the house he grew up in, um, has this amazing ability to, uh, get him to get to the truth of what’s going on in his life. She will not let him get away with anything, you know, falsely represent his life in any way and she says the most truthful– the most penetrating things to him and– and he takes notice and he becomes completely fascinated by her, becomes almost a child to her parental kind of wisdom, it’s- it’s- it’s an amazing relationship.

The framing of Willie’s relationship with Marty in both Portman’s and Hutton’s interviews with Wygant reiterated the logic of the film: that men and women are inherently different, that for the former growing up is especially hard, and that they need a bit of time to reconcile themselves with settling down with the right one of the latter. This even meant that a girl’s adolescent crush could serve to provide a series of teachable moments for a grown man, however much Willie in the film, and Dutton and Wygant beyond it, put that teenage character on a pedestal – the sort of narrative and casting exploitation Portman herself so astutely pointed a finger at around a decade later.

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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:

1. Cast member Timothy Hutton was also publicly accused in 2020 of the historical rape of a minor in Canada back in 1983, although Canadian authorities ultimately opted not to proceed with the criminal complaint the alleged victim filed against Hutton, who strongly denied the claim throughout.

2. Mira Sorvino did indeed win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her part in Mighty Aphrodite, though Paul Sorvino was not ultimately nominated for his role in Nixon.

3. Karina Longworth dealt with this topic extensively in Episodes 8, 18, and 19 of the ‘Erotic 90s’ series of the You Must Remember This podcast.