'Hey, it's that actress from Alias, she's married to Matt Damon's friend," says a pedestrian to his pal on a cliffside path overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Far below us, Jennifer Garner, barefoot in a blue sundress, frolics in the sand for a photo crew from In Style magazine. I'm watching the action with Garner's mother, Pat, who looks every inch a grandma - grey-haired and plumpish with a West Virginia twang - but not apparently related to the gazelle cavorting a hundred steps below.
"Jennifer Garner," says the pal. "Married to Ben Affleck." Immediately, both guys start honking like the duck in the Afflack Insurance commercial, "A-ffleck! A-ffleck!" They wander off, still quacking.
"You know," Pat says sweetly, "that happens all the time."
Lucky for Garner, having a husband whose name recalls an annoying ad is probably the worst thing in her life right now; the rest looks pretty great. At 35, she's growing into the angles that make her face so changeable -- solemn and severe when serious, sunny and childlike when smiling. She seems happy with Affleck, whom she married in 2005. She's madly in love with their daughter, Violet, not quite 2. And her next two films showcase what she can do.
Garner can play the chick roles, because women like her. (The second of three girls in her family, she radiates a middle-sister vibe.) In the upcoming Juno, which delighted the critics and won first runner-up for the audience prize at this month's Toronto International Film Festival, she plays an adoptive mom who starts out prissy, but deepens into the emotional linchpin of the movie. "If Jennifer wasn't Jennifer, the film wouldn't work," its director, Jason Reitman, told me at TIFF.
And in The Kingdom, which opened yesterday, she exercises the machisma that wows her male fans, who dig seeing her kick ass in hot costumes (in her undercover-agent TV series Alias, and as a comic-book heroine in 2003's Daredevil, where she met Affleck, and its spinoff, 2005's Elektra). She plays an elite FBI agent whose team, including Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman, investigates a terrorist attack inside a housing compound for Western civilians in Saudi Arabia.
"What it's really about is the futility of violence and revenge," Garner says over breakfast the morning after her photo shoot. "And how there can be a cultural gap that's impossible to overcome, even though on some levels we're all the same. We want our kids to do well, we want our freedoms." She laughs. "But it's going to freak my mom out, because I say the F-word a ton. She's never heard me say it."
"Gosh" seems more Garner's speed. As a toothy, glasses-wearing teenager, she played in her public-high-school band, served coffee at her church and planned activities for the kids she babysat - the type of young woman who glides under the radar until one startling day when she wears something fitted and takes off her glasses, and the boys' knees buckle. At breakfast, she orders oatmeal - the most wholesome thing on the menu - and speaks swooningly about breast-feeding, watching her daughter's language develop and the push-pull of motherhood versus career.
"I've loved every job I've ever had. I get a lot of my identity from being a woman who gets up and goes to work," she says. "I'd always assumed work would continue to be as important to me as it had been, but I don't feel that way at all. Even coming to do this interview this morning, leaving Violet in the high chair going, 'Mama, up, up!' I had to tear myself away."
On the other hand, "I feel lucky just to get a job," she says. "Look at the big movies from last year: Were there any women in Letters from Iwo Jima? Apocalypto had one major woman's role - she spent the movie in a well. The Departed had Vera Farmiga, who made the most of [a smaller part]. In The Kingdom, I'm it. It's a rare pleasure when I get to have scenes with women."
