As we live through this Britney-Lindsay-Pammy-Jessica moment in pop culture, let's pause a moment and thank the Lord for Natalie Portman. A woman so truly beautiful that upon meeting her, one goes deaf and mute for a moment while the eyes try to take her in, she is also brainy as hell, and fully engaged in the life of the mind.
"I've been thinking lately about the widening gap between physical and emotional intimacy, which is just strengthened by computers, communicating all day through a mechanical intermediary," Portman will say.
Or, "I've been reading about the Bedouins and why there were so few deaths in their wars to establish the Islamic empire" -- not to prepare for a part, mind you, but simply because she's interested.
Portman graduated from Harvard in 2003 with a degree in psychology, and it's pretty obvious that she actually read the books on her syllabi. "I was especially fascinated by memory studies," she says. "There was one that requested people's good and bad memories, and then checked them for content.
More Arts Stories
"But non-pathological people, people who maintain a happy, healthy brain, couldn't provide negative memories. They'd say, 'But I learned this from the experience;' they'd turn their negative memories into positive ones."
Compare that with Paris Hilton's so-called signature line, "That's hot," and you see what I mean.
On screen, men commit to Portman instantly and irrevocably. By merely standing next to her, they feel better about being alive.
She demonstrates to Timothy Hutton what "welcome home" really means in Beautiful Girls; she cures Zach Braff's lifelong depression in Garden State; she is the only definition of family Al Pacino has in Heat; and when she succumbs to the atrocities of the Civil War in Cold Mountain, Jude Law loses all faith in mankind. (Seriously, it's worth renting the film for that one scene, just to see the look in his eyes.) So you know that when Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker makes Portman's Padme Amidala cry in the new Star Wars instalment, Revenge of the Sith, that Anakin is a really bad guy. Anyone who can turn his back on her is going to the dark side and not coming back.
Portman being Portman, she treated the Star Wars saga as one more learning experience: "You learn after your first blue-screen movie, and more after your second, the extent to which you have to prepare. You have to come up with the scenery, the characters, the whole world, as well as what's going on with you. You're often talking to a tape mark instead of a character, and you have to project what they might be thinking, what's going on, how they're treating you.
"You have to imagine what the chair you're sitting on or the animal that you're riding looks like. Because literally everything is blue and you're sitting on a box. We usually have pieces of stuff. I don't want to diminish the set builders; there is a lot of construction and design. But 99 per cent of the shots have some blue screen in them.
"That's a lot of external imagining, and it's challenging. I enjoy it because it requires you to go back to something childlike. Where you can take the box that the TV came in and pretend it's a city, you know?"
Her thoughts on costumes also go way beyond "How 'bout those Amidala hairdos?"
"Another psych study I read put anonymous men and women in a dark room," Portman says. "And they were all filthy, they were just going at each other sexually when they had the opportunity to be in the dark. That's why every religion and culture has its costume holiday and tradition of masquerades. All the Shakespeare stuff about how people are liberated by dressing up as the opposite sex. There's so much freedom in anonymity; it allows you to leave the rules of society.
But if it becomes pervasive, as I fear it's becoming with the Internet -- if you're allowed to be anonymous all day long, that can only have an effect of the disintegration of intimacy and humanity, and your sense of yourself as a responsible being in the world."
Despite starring in a digital film for a director who's one of the world's leading advocates for digital film, Portman agrees "with Walter Murch's theory that digital will never have the emotional or visual power of regular film, because audiences respond to absences."
For her, "regular film has a split second of blank screen between each shot, which the audience's brain has to automatically fill in.
Digital doesn't have that, so it doesn't engage the audience in the same ways. In all modernist literature, the most present thing is what's absent. Like the opening of The Sound and the Fury, where they're looking between the fence. Or in Closer" -- the film for which Portman received an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award -- "the most important parts, the relationships, are missing and have to be filled in by the audience. Absences are crucial."
I wonder if Mary-Kate and Ashley have gotten to The Sound and the Fury yet at NYU?
37