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Into the Light
By Maggie Bullock
VLife
June/July, 2005
Despite her next film, Disney's thriller 'Dark Water,' Connelly shows off her lighter side, one she's more than willing to mine for her next (hopefully comedic) role.
For the past year or so, Connelly has been telling the world that her tear ducts are ready for a hiatus. These days, she "wants to be taken less seriously." That's probably something no one ever thought the star of "The Hot Spot" (opposite Don Johnson in 1990) would have to ask for. And its irony isn't lost on her.
Maybe it's the not-a-cloud-in-the-sky April afternoon. Or, it could be the fact that she just belted out a few verses of "Baby Beluga in the Deep Blue Sea" in the car after dropping off her two-year-old son, Stellan, at the park down the block, with seven-year-old Kai set to arrive from school any minute. Whatever her reasons, when Jennifer Connelly strolls (right on time) into Soho's hipper-than-thou hotel, 60 Thompson, in a frayed Jackson Browne T-shirt, loose, wide-legged jeans and ankle-laced wedge sandals--traces of sparkly eye shadow and leftover candied-apple lip gloss the only evidence of the morning's photo shoot--she seems calm, laid-back, comfortable. Who is this porcelain-skinned earth mother? And what has she done with Hollywood's serious, super-focused, Oscar-winning queen of angst?
If it's surprising to see Connelly looking lighthearted, that's because, on the big screen at least, she doe such a convincing job of looking, well, utterly miserable. From her turn as a heart-wrenchingly vulnerable addict in 2000's "Requiem for a Dream" to the Oscar-worthy suffering of Alicia Nash in "A Beautiful Mind" to the homeless, recovering alcoholic Kathy Nicolo in "The House of Sand and Fog," much of Connelly's recent career can be strung together as one long--albeit moving and artfully rendered--crying jag.
True to form, her latest undertaking isn't exactly sunny. Disney's "Dark Water" is Brazilian director Walter Salle's English-language debut, a remake of a Japanese psychological thriller along the lines of two of Connelly's favorite scary movies, "Rosemary's Baby" and "Don't Look Now," (i.e., films less concerned with gore than with suspense and shadowy intrigue). Connelly stars with John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, Dougray Scott and Pete Postlewaite as a single mother who's going through a divorce and has just moved into an apartment with her young daughter. "When things start to go awry, you're never sure if the apartment is haunted, if her husband is trying to make her crack so he can get custody of their daughter, or if she just can't handle the pressure of being out in the world on her own," Connelly says in her crisp, vaguely Brit-inflected voice (no doubt the influence of her English husband, Paul Bettany). In other words, it's a genre film, but one still moving and emotional enough to satisfy Connelly's taste for tormented characters.
Director's Cut
"Dark Water" is the first film Connelly signed onto since taking home her Oscar (she was already attached to U's "Hulk" and DreamWorks' "House of Sand and Fog"). Her decision was based primarily on the opportunity to work with Salles. "Walter is so talented, so smart," she says. "He's annoyingly well-read. I'd come to work at five o'clock in the morning and he already would have read five newspapers." Just the thing to earn the respect of a cerebral, poetry-loving actor like Connelly, who says she trusted Salles implicitly. "Walter would just say, 'I'm thinking there's water on the walls, and there's this stream,' and we would do these really long, improvisational takes together on a handheld camera. It was great."
Front and Center
Long before Salles was even attached to direct "Dark Water," producer Bill Mechanic had just two people on his shortlist for the lead in the film, one of whom was Connelly. Once Salles signed on, the two men zeroed in on their first choice. "I need two things," says Mechanic, "the chops--an actor who could go deep into a character and make her believable and someone you could care about--as well as an actor who wasn't such a big star yet that you would never believe what was happening to her. I wanted someone Oscar-caliber and someone on the cusp. This is the first time Jennifer's front and center in a movie. She is the film."
The Little Gold Man
The same night that Halle Berry, trembling with emotional overload, took home her historic "Monster's Ball" best-actress Oscar, an extremely lean, pale Jennifer Connelly--dressed in a column of flesh-toned (fashion-savvy but not particularly cheerful) Balenciaga--accepted her best-supporting-actress Oscar. Her win was applauded by the critics, but her speech, which (in sharp contrast to Berry's) seemed chilly and remote, caused some ripples. Connelly says that what came across as aloofness was actually just shell shock. Thinking there would be a podium to stand behind, she got onstage to find just a microphone with nowhere to stash her "big, huge" piece of paper. "That was supposed to be my security blanket. When I get stressed and emotional, I tend to get really quiet." Besides, she says, "It's a really strange phenomenon having a loaded experience happen live in front of millions and millions of people, especially for someone who's not terribly comfortable being publicly demonstrative."
Leone and Bowie
On the advice of a family friend, Connelly started modelling at age 10. At 11, she joined Robert De Niro, Elizabeth McGovern and James Woods in Italy to shoot a rather auspicious first film, Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America." Connelly says she "was never a movie kid, never a film buff." Acting was an adventure she fell into. It meant midnight mass on the Spanish Steps and traipsing through the streets of Rome. Of her megawatt co-stars, she says, "I think I was vaguely aware that Robert De Niro was something rather cool, though I can't imagine which of his films I would have seen at that age." The magnitude of the experience was "way, way" over her head. "Sergio was a really intriguing big bear of a guy with octagonal-shaped glasses who would shout on a bullhorn in Italian to this diminutive d.p. up on a crane. ... There would be these massive fights," she remembers. "Everything just seemed bigger than life and extraordinary." At 14, shooting TriStar's "Labyrinth" with David Bowie, she was more impressed by the daily milk deliveries where she was staying in the middle of London's Hampstead Heath than by the rock god with whom she was sharing top billing. (She finally "got" the Bowie phenomenon the following year, when she and the rest of her generation dove headfirst into The Cure and The Smiths.)
A Beautiful Mind
Being a child star wasn't all that exceptional at St. Ann's, the progressive New York private school Connelly attended from kindergarten through high school. She was reading classics by the fourth grade, and was in good company. "The kids I went to school with were going to Juilliard and performing at Lincoln Center. They were writing poetry and getting published," she remembers. "They were doing much more extraordinary extracurricular things than I was."
'Death Grip'
"I'm compulsive," says Connelly very matter of factly. "I've always worked really hard, almost to a fault." As a child, much of that striving was for the wrong things: "trying not to let anyone down, to be there on time, to never get tired." At Stanford (which she attended after two years at Yale for a college degree that she never finished), she was a runner with the same dogged intensity. Nicknamed "Death Grip," she has been known to call running her "addiction." These days, such passion and perfectionism takes its toll. "Middle-ground decisions where the outcome could go a bunch of different ways are a nightmare. I have to weigh every option," she says. "When it comes to, say, home furnishings, it's really a bummer. We've lived in the same house for a year and a half, and we still don't have a couch. We're still staring at paint swatches. It can be a bit tedious."
The Deep End
"Requiem for a Dream," Darren Aronofky's exploration of drug addiction, marked a major turning point in Connelly's career reformation--the film took her straight to the deep end of the dark, difficult roles she has since perfected. "I was totally engrossed in that film. There were so many opportunities to explore," she says. Connelly pursued the role, auditioning several times. When she won it, she became obsessed with developing her character, Marion Silver. She was fascinated with Marion's wardrobe and began sewing clothes for her and finding all the bracelets, necklaces and little touches that defined her look. She also spent time with a man who had recovered from a serious heroin habit, going to meetings with him and talking about addiction. "The film isn't really so much about heroin. We never really mention the name of the drug in it," she says. "It's about addiction and how we fill that hole; the way we have difficulty trusting one another, unreconciled relationships, and how all of that leads us to these crutches."
What Reviews?
Connelly has been a critical darling ever since "Requiem," of which Elvis Mitchell wrote in the New York Times: "It's (Connelly's) performance that gives the movie weight, since her fall is the most precipitous. ... Ms. Connelly has never before done anything to prepare us for how good she is here." Her despair in "House of Sand and Fog" caused the New Yorker's David Denby to wax poetic about her "eyes that could melt a statue." However, even bad reviews are couched in admiration for the actress' talents. Of "House of Sand and Fog," A.O. Scott wrote that Connelly seemed "a little blank, as if she were suppressing her smartness and agility to play a woman of greater passivity and lesser intelligence." Of course, Connelly probably doesn't know about any of this. She doesn't read her own press. "I get too anxious. I ask people to tell me if there's anything bad, so usually I just know the bad things people say about me."
Shifting Gears
Connelly says her quantum leap from B-list babe to Oscar darling wasn't about hiring a dream team--in fact, she's been with the same agent, ICM's Risa Shapiro, since she was 15 years old--rather, it was the result of serious soul-searching after the birth of Kai when she was 27. "When I was younger, I was just fielding stuff. I took whatever came my way," she says. "The films I was doing didn't allow me to express anything or create anything or play and get really involved. There was good work in between, like 'Inventing the Abbotts,' but generally I felt embarrassed and humiliated and frustrated by the films I was doing, by the final products. I just thought the cost was too great." It was at that point, after questioning whether she should be acting at all, that Connelly says she "re-chose" acting, approaching her career with new focus and determination. "I decided to try and get myself involved in the kinds of films that I would want to see. I decided not to do films that I couldn't feel comfortable with, films I couldn't really get behind."
Her Inner Businesswoman
Success has not made Connelly embrace her inner businesswoman; in fact, she says in that respect she is still fairly underdeveloped. As for the ever-present issue of box-office draw, she cares about it only in that she is unavoidably aware that her own bankability can be the force that gets a project she wants to do off the ground. Luckily, she's got "A Beautiful Mind" on her side, which earned more than $170 million domestically, and even "Hulk," which was critically panned but went on to clear $130 million in the U.S. Even "Dark Water" has the advantage of a built-in audience, the kind that has garnered even mediocre Japanese-inspired horror flicks--Sony's "The Grudge," Dream-Works' "The Ring 2"--decent box office this year. Still, Connelly says, "I just do my work and go home to the kids. I never really think about it."
Love and Marriage
Connelly met Stellan's father, actor Paul Bettany ("Wimbledon"), while filming "A Beautiful Mind." Technically, since they shared no scenes, they've never acted together. But it's something she's keen to do. The two were married, both in black, in the candlelit music room of the Scottish estate Gilmerton House in 2002. They now choose their roles so that they work one on, one off.
Brooklyn Bound
Undoubtedly part of Connelly's appeal is that she is so determinedly separate from the Hollywood lifestyle--choosing to live in relatively celeb-free Brooklyn. She and Bettany are raising the kids in a 19 th century townhouse not far from where she grew up, in a slightly lefty, family-friendly neighborhood that's literally crawling with kids.
All Set
When it's time to go back to work, she brings the crew with her; sons Kai and Stellan and husband Bettany were all regulars on the set of "Dark Water," which was shot partly in New York. What do the kids think of being on mom's movie set? "It's fun in small doses. There are always fun things to get into, lots of big trucks and things to make art projects out of," she says. "But I confess that having them there is more for me than for them."
The Lighter Side
For the past year or so, Connelly has been telling the world that her tear ducts are ready for a hiatus. These days, she "wants to be taken less seriously." That's probably something no one ever thought the star of "The Hot Spot" (opposite Don Johnson in 1990) would have to ask for. And its irony isn't lost on her. "For years, I struggled to get into dramas," she says. "And now that I've finally achieved that, I feel like the next struggle is to get people to see that I want to do other things as well. I would love to play someone funny and quirky. But I'd rather do a drama that I thought was worthwhile than, a) not work or b) do a really cheesy comedy. I don't want to make that leap with the wrong film and have people say, 'See? We told you. She's only good at playing neurotic, suicidal people. Put her back in a drama, quick!'"
What She Brings
"One of the rare qualities she has is the ability to hold the screen," says "Dark Water" producer Mechanic. "And still, despite her beauty, women like her--of course, men obviously do, too. She has a bit of that girl-next door quality."
Up Next
The funny side of Connelly will remain under wraps a little while longer. She's just signed on to star alongside Kate Winslet in New Line's Todd Fields-helmed "Little Children," which is based on "Election" novelist Tom Perrotta's dark, disturbing and satirical book about the suburban angst of a gang of thirtysomethings.
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