| By Fred Topel
In Theaters April 15
|
Remember when Ellen Barkin was the hot sexpot of thrillers like Sea of Love and comedies like Switch? Yeah, those were the days. Now instead of sexing up Al Pacino or Lawrence Fishburne, Barkin plays misguided mother in a film dealing with teenage sex, among other issues. Todd Solondz’ Palindromes is Barkin’s first starring role in five years.
“I guess that at a certain point in life, first of all, priorities change,” Barkin said. “I guess if you're lucky enough not to have to pay your rent basically, then you or I take much more seriously the kind of work that I do. What it takes for me to leave two teenagers of my own and six stepchildren and a husband and four grandchildren [increases]. So I don't know. Nothing appealed to me over the last five years. There were certainly offers, but nothing was either challenging enough as a role or there were no actors that I got excited about it or directors and to be honest, I think that with the state of movie making being the way it is I can't say that I saw a whole lot of movies over the last five years that I would've left home for. I know that when I saw Being Julia, I thought, 'Ah, my God, someone, some grown up has a job to do.'”
Barkin plays Joyce Victor, whose daughter wants to have a baby. When she gets pregnant, mom takes her to an abortion clinic where they destroy her uterus.
“I think that she's certainly not a selfless mother. I think that you have to think when a twelve year old, a thirteen year old so desperately wants a baby, what she's looking for is the kind of unconditional love a child gives a mother and a mother gives a child. So clearly she doesn't have that. Obviously in that way she's certainly not a good mother. And I mean, look, quite frankly, I have a twelve and a half-year-old daughter. If she got pregnant now or any time in the next I don't know how many years, several, there wouldn't be a whole lot of discussion as to whether or not she wanted to have her baby. But certainly I would handle it much differently. I think that was her mistake. Hopefully I won't have a daughter that feels the need for a baby. I mean, this is not a kid that wanted to act out and take drugs or have sex. This was a kid who just specifically who wanted a baby, and that's where the shaky mothering comes in, I guess.”
The daughter is played by eight different actresses over the course of the film. The span of the film is not more than one year, but the device is to keep changing the actress.
“If I'm someone's mother like when I played Leonardo DiCaprio's mother, they liked that Leo had very hooded eyes and a rounded nose with a ball. They said, 'They look like they could be mother and son.' And I think that what Todd did was he cast those girls almost like an emotional family and all of the material kind of came up from a similar well. Most of them never met each other until after the movie was over, at the premiere. There was no rehearsal because it's a low budget movie. So they never heard each other talk. I mean, even the grownups, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Sharon Wilkins, they didn't listen to tapes. And yet if you listen to their voices they all have the same cadence. They all are in the same kind of range. Sometimes I close my eyes when I watch the movie and try to think about it. I go, 'Okay, I'm going to close my eyes for a little while and I'm going to try and see if they switch and if I know.' And you don't. So when I was acting with them, to me I was just acting with the same person all of the time.”
Despite the positive experience of working on Palindromes, don’t expect to see a lot more of Ellen Barkin on screen. “If Todd Solondz made movies three hundred and sixty days of the year I would be very happy to go to work. But he doesn't. I'd like to play a couple or three maybe great roles before I pack it in.”
However, if you’re studying the craft, Barkin might become your mentor. “After I did this movie I started to teach because I realized that what I liked about it was that I liked being able to guide these young actors and help them. I'm a big believer in the fact that I'm Actor's Studio trained and I guess that I studied acting for ten years before I even auditioned for anything. I kept up my studying throughout my working. So I'm a big believer in it. So I started to teach. That was good. I teach at the graduate program at the new school. The Actor's Studio has a graduate program now. It's good because they're grownups and they have to audition to get in and they're focused and they pretty much know that they want to do this.”
Barkin may also move behind the scenes to continue working in Hollywood. “My brother is a writer and he and I optioned a book last year called The Easter Parade by a man named Richard Yates. We optioned that and my brother is writing it and I started to think after doing this movie that we would produce it. And then I thought that I see my friends who are filmmakers, someone like Todd, and I see this country where there are no more Todds. There are two or three of them. They can't get financing no matter how low the budget is, it's subject to material and Time Warner is approving the material or this garment company is approving the material. Then now they need a huge star in their little indie movie. And so my brother and I started to talk about the idea of just having a small production company where I feel it's different from others in that first of all, I'm not looking for acting jobs. [It’s] just to more give a home to ten directors who, say, don't need to compromise their work for another hundred thousand dollars if they've got a $2 million budget. So we've been working on that.”
See one of Ellen Barkin’s final film performances in Palindromes starting April 15. |
