Just a girl who can say no

 

 

By Jay Stone

 

Movie Entertainment

October 2007

 

There’s a scene near the end of the 2000 film Requiem for a Dream where a heroin addict named Marion is forced to perform sex acts with another woman as a crowd of drunken young men watches and cheers. It’s a horrifying encounter, partly because the actor who plays Marion, Jennifer Connelly, evokes both the sexual allure of a beautiful woman and the
destroyed innocence of the young girl we can still view inside her.

That combination of the erotic and the fresh have propelled Connelly to a unique place in movies. She can play the sexy mistress (Pollock) or the sexy wife (A Beautiful Mind), and hold her own against the troubled geniuses who desire her. Requiem for a Dream was a tipping point in a career that has gone from childhood fantasy to grown-up drama that carries with it a kind of intelligent appeal that maybe only Jodie Foster can match.

This month, Connelly co-stars in Reservation Road, a thriller about two families coping with the hit-and-run death of a 10-year-old child.

Connelly was born 37 years ago in the Catskill Mountains of New York State and grew up in Brooklyn, where she still lives. She was a child model at 10, although she admits, "I was so shy I really didn’t like getting my picture taken.” At 11, she got her first film role, in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. (She was chosen because her nose matched that of Elizabeth McGovern, who played the character as an adult.) She became a teen actor in horror movies (Creepers) and family epics (Labyrinth) before she decided to restart her career by studying English literature in Yale — like Foster — and then Stanford. She had to prove, she said, “that I was not just a sexual object, and that I could be a really good student.

It was one of several turning points in her life. By 1990, she was grown up enough to do her first nude scene in Dennis Hopper’s The Hot Spot (“It’s not in a sleazy context,” she said at the time). In 1997, she had her first child, Kai, with photographer David Dugan, and remade her career again. “I thought, ‘OK, I really don’t want to make crap films,’ “ she recalled, and three years later, she was in the Keith Gordon film Waking the Dead, “the first film I worked on where whatever I did felt like my own thing.” The same year, she made Requiem for a Dream. She had become a talent to watch.

 “I began working when I hadn’t yet come into my own, when I was this walking puppet,” she recalled of her early career. It was something she said she wouldn’t allow again. Requiem for a Dream “had something to say about hunger and a void.”

The big roles followed: opposite Ed Harris in Pollock, in 2000, and then, the following year, A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe, a turn that won her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (it won her a husband, Paul Bettany, the British actor who also co-starred in the movie. They have a child, Stellan, named after actor Stellan Skarsgaard). In 2003 she played in two movies that showed her range: The Hulk, a comic book adventure, and House of Sand and Fog, a disturbing tragedy. Both took advantage of an undiminished physical appeal combined with an appealing naiveté.

She continues to make unexpected choices: horror (Dark Water), family drama (Little Children), geopolitical adventure (Blood Diamond.) And now it’s back to the dark side in Reservation Road. It’s another challenging role for a woman who has managed to persuade Hollywood she’s not just another pretty face.