Nearly every year brings news of a comeback or return-to-form for a major film actor. Last year’s Birdman brought renewed appreciation and a long-overdue Oscar nomination to Michael Keaton. Bruce Dern got a late-career highlight the year before with Nebraska. The past decade has seen career revivals for Mickey Rourke, Alec Baldwin, Robert Downey, Jr., and Matthew McConaughey. Each of these performers is more than deserving of their comebacks, but one can’t help but gripe that few actresses are joining them.
Sure, Jennifer Jason Leigh will co-star with Dern in the new Tarantino film The Hateful Eight, and Patricia Arquette just won an Oscar and the lead on a new TV procedural, but their cases are far and few between. Actresses are rarely afforded the same opportunities for longevity as men, unless their last names are “Streep,” or, on television, “Lange.” Amy Schumer even parodied the media’s institutional ageism and sexism on the most recent episode of “Inside Amy Schumer,” pointing out the all-too-clear reality that top female stars of decades past are left sexless, negligible roles after a certain age. Never mind how joyous it would be to see resurgences for Geena Davis or Holly Hunter. The performer most deserving of a comeback, though? Michelle Pfeiffer.
No actress can stay as emotionally open on screen while closing themselves off from other characters the way Pfeiffer can. No actress is as vulnerable when guarded. And few actresses can compare to Pfeiffer’s long and storied career of fervently feminist material, lack of vanity, and continuous ability to steal scenes or whole films from the charismatic likes of Kurt Russell, Al Pacino, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Keaton, and Daniel Day-Lewis without seeming like she’s just showing off.
Pfeiffer burst onto the scene after a few false starts and TV movies with two films in 1983: Grease 2 and Scarface. The former tries to counteract the original Grease’s sexism while failing miserably to match its songs, dance numbers, ensemble, or technical facility. The latter is a delightfully gaudy epic remake headlined by one of Pacino’s most enjoyably ludicrous performances. Both demonstrated not only Pfeiffer’s star power, but her ability to take underwritten roles and make them sing. Grease 2 is all clumsy noble intentions and lousy songs when Pfeiffer’s off screen, but it feels infinitely more watchable whenever she’s the center of attention. In Scarface, meanwhile, she plays Robert Loggia’s and, later, Pacino’s trophy wife with an I-don’t-give-a-fuck demeanor that makes even the eternally cocksure Tony Montana seem small.
Since then, Pfeiffer has made a career of playing women whose situations or past lives have forced them to be cagey, lest they be hurt again. In the otherwise lighthearted The Witches of Eastwick (1987), she’s abandoned by her husband because of her advanced fertility, and her good-humored nature can’t quite hide her dissatisfaction. In Robert Towne’s underrated Tequila Sunrise (1988), she’s torn between a cop with ulterior motives (Russell) and an honest ex-drug dealer (Gibson), and smart enough to know that she could be easily hurt by either or both of them. In her sublimely campy performance in Batman Returns (1992), the mousy secretary becomes femininity’s avenging angel against misogynists, all while falling for (and fighting) Keaton’s own haunted hero.
Pfeiffer earned a trio of Oscar nominations in her golden age, starting with the 1988 adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, where her reasonable suspicions of John Malkovich’s wolfish count fall by the wayside. She’s heartbreaking there, but a year later brought a more assured, “cool” damaged character with her work as singer Susie Diamond in The Fabulous Baker Boys. Her glamorous, sexy renditions of “Makin’ Whoopee” and “More Than You Know” give way to world-weariness offstage as she talks candidly about her past as an escort, knowing that Jeff Bridges’ self-destructive drunk is no good for her even as she falls in love with him (all without losing her frankness: “You look good.” “You look like shit. “I mean it, you look good.” “I mean it, too. You look like shit.”). Even the mediocre Love Field (1992), for which she earned her third nomination, is elevated by her mixture of flamboyance and hidden grace.
Pfeiffer’s finest films from this period make her past, her relationship, and her need to reconcile the two the whole of the film. Jonathan Demme’s delightful Married to the Mob (1988) sees her ex-mob wife Angela reinventing herself as an independent working-class woman and shaking off the macho creeps that have plagued her (Baldwin, Dean Stockwell) for a warmer, kinder man (Matthew Modine, not quite up to task as an eccentric FBI agent). The film’s true climax is not the violent shootout but rather Modine apologizing for deceiving her, with her remarking that “everybody deserves a second chance…even you.” Married to the Mob works because neither Demme nor Pfeiffer condescend to Angela, making her a smart, good-natured woman who has every reason to be reserved with her emotions. It makes the film’s happy ending all the more hard-won.
The hidden treasure of Pfeiffer’s golden age is 1991’s Frankie and Johnny, an uncharacteristically mature film from Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall, based on the play “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune” by Terrence Rafferty. Pfeiffer’s casting was criticized at the time for putting a beautiful movie star in a role originated by Kathy Bates, but Frankie is defined more by her emotional baggage than her looks. It’s one of Pfeiffer’s most charming yet reticent performances, her chilliness towards Pacino’s sweet and playful ex-con becoming clearer and more painful as she slowly warms to him and discloses her past. The film’s final scene, a quiet coming-to-terms moment set to Debussy’s “Claire de Lune,” is among the most elegant in a modern romantic comedy, a sequence of tiny gestures and grasps for shared moments that demonstrates how expressive both stars can be with just the slightest shifts. Again, it’s a hard-won romantic ending, a love borne from understanding and healing.
That emphasis on kindred spirits finding each other is present in her best film, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), but to a far more devastating effect. Like in Married to the Mob, Pfeiffer plays a woman trying to break free of a constrictive society and an unhappy marriage, but things are complicated when Day-Lewis first advises her not to go through with her divorce and then falls in love with her (complicated further by his engagement to her cousin, played by Winona Ryder). The Age of Innocence is a master class of actors revealing their emotions to the audience while believably masking them from others. Scorsese’s glorious form complements all three leads, especially Pfeiffer, whose introduction is marked by a subtle shift from heavy shadows to light when Day-Lewis first sees her.
It’s with reason: Pfeiffer is at her warmest and most radiant here, an unfettered soul who’s nevertheless bound to the society she rebels against. It’s easy to see how private rebel Day-Lewis falls for her, and difficult to watch as they’re both forced to endure an unhappy life, rarely given the chance to even express their love for each other, hiding their gazes and seeming like they’re about to implode in banked frustration. If it has competition as Pfeiffer’s best performance, it may be the canniest use of her screen persona, a role that pushes her to simultaneously be the most free-spirited person in the room and the one who’s the most successful at hiding what she wants when she needs to, to tear-jerking effect.
The Age of Innocence comes at the end of Pfeiffer’s most fruitful period, but even with her misfires, she continued on the path of making movies about women, for women and giving better performances than many of the films she starred in deserved. Dangerous Minds is a deeply patronizing white savior movie, but Pfeiffer escapes with her dignity intact, never displaying the self-congratulatory qualities that won Sandra Bullock a pat-me-on-the-back Oscar for The Blind Side. Up Close & Personal neutered the story of troubled news anchor Jessica Savitch, but Pfeiffer gives a performance worthy of a smarter movie. A Thousand Acres turns the acclaimed “’King Lear’ on an Iowa farm” novel into a sudsy, simplistic version of the kinds of women’s pictures Pfeiffer made in her prime, but she and Jessica Lange both navigate their characters’ emotional trauma deftly. Even the rare stumbles for Pfeiffer as a performer (I Am Sam, The Story of Us) ultimately lie at the feet of the emotionally fraudulent material she can’t redeem.
There are gems from this middle period, too, especially those that see the middle-age-entering Pfeiffer dealing with motherhood and lifetimes of disappointments. The underrated romantic-comedy One Fine Day is a lighter flipside to Frankie and Johnny, with romance borne out of mutual understanding among divorced single parents Pfeiffer and George Clooney. Robert Zemeckis’ Hitchcockian thriller What Lies Beneath shows Pfeiffer exploring the emotional minefield that is life after kids go to college, with Zemeckis emphasizing her isolation and volatility even before she begins to suspect the neighbor has murdered his wife and has to deal with her own dismissive husband (Harrison Ford, whose natural crotchetiness hasn’t been used half as well since).
Pfeiffer earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for her work in White Oleander, an uneven but powerful adaptation that sees her damaging her teenage daughter (Alison Lohman) by trying to “set her free” (read; keep her bound to her and no one else). The explanation for her own lack of emotional attachment might seem too pat if not for the conviction Pfeiffer brings to her monologue and the way the role twists her caginess and vulnerability into something that could potentially harm others.
Given the lack of bombs attributable to Pfeiffer, what’s with her relatively dimming star? The answer is a mixture of absence and age: she took a four-year break between 2003 and 2007 to spend time with her husband (“Ally McBeal” creator David E. Kelley) and children. It wasn’t that long of a hiatus, but it made a difference. While she gave a pair of enjoyably hammy performances in 2007’s Stardust and Hairspray, her two star vehicles, I Could Never Be Your Woman and Cheri, flopped, with the former going direct-to-DVD and the latter making back less than half of its $23 million budget. She’s since been underutilized or misused in films by collaborators both old (Marshall with New Year’s Eve, Tim Burton with Dark Shadows) and new (Transformers screenwriter Alex Kurtzman with People Like Us, Luc Besson with The Family).
And yet, one could watch any of those films and see that Pfeiffer has still got it. Robert De Niro sleepwalks through The Family, but Pfeiffer does not. People Like Us is a noxious, falsely uplifting dramedy, but a scene between a pot-smoking Pfeiffer and son Chris Pine has an emotional truthfulness and frankness that the rest of the film sorely lacks. And while neither I Could Never Be Your Woman nor Cheri are perfect, both show her willing to explore the concept of being an aging woman, of being paired with younger men, and the difficulties that both circumstances bring that can only be described as brave (Pfeiffer’s phenomenal in both, to boot).
With all of these, there’s no indication of a star who’s slowed down, fallen off, or become complacent. Pfeiffer herself commented in 2012 that she feels “my best performance is still in me” and that “I don’t ever want to lose that fire I have for it.” She may even have a chance for a revival with the morning news-set comedy series that Katie Couric is shopping to a number of networks with her attached to star. Whether it comes with that or something else, there’s only a need for smart producers and directors to realize that Michelle Pfeiffer never stopped being big, it’s just the pictures that got small.
6 thoughts on “Why Michelle Pfeiffer Deserves a Career Comeback”
She is sorely needed for a comeback. She needs to be in something where she could play the kind of roles that Meryl Streep did with The Devil Wears Prada. She’s still very beautiful.
This is so great! Well-written! There’s no way I don’t agree with it! Love Michelle!
Pfabulous article!
MY BIG FAVORITE ACTRESS AND LOVE Michelle!
Her movies are great , it’s the making of different kind of movies, put her in a action movie .now a days movies are for kids and young adults.make a movie of monster high and cast her as the principal.then you’ll see
Thank you. Your article made me rethink Pfeiffer’s career and come to accept the notion that it’s not her beauty alone that makes her worthy of admiration…