There are three ways that serious actresses show skin in American films, and all are on display this holiday season.
In ascending order of bareness, they are the PG panty flash (exhibited by Rachel McAdams in Morning Glory); discreet A-list nudity (Anne Hathaway in Love and Other Drugs); and flat-out indie naked (Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine).
It's a given that an actress will appear unclothed on screen at some point in her career. But these delicate calibrations of when and how much can determine whether a woman ascends to Streephood or plummets to Lohanville.
Take McAdams. The Canadian-born actress famously walked out of the cover shoot for Vanity Fair's March 2006 issue because no one had warned her that she, Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson were expected to pose nude. The other two went ahead without her, along with a fully clothed Tom Ford. But McAdams's career hasn't been burning as brightly as people had predicted.
So while I wouldn't go quite as far as Frank Bruni did in an October essay in The New York Times - "If a young female performer with a relatively strait-laced image wants to take full charge of her brightest future," he wrote, "she apparently has to do some time on the pole" - I will say that McAdams's judicious bum-baring as a perky TV producer in Morning Glory was well-timed.
Though the rest of her love scenes with co-star Patrick Wilson play out behind closed doors, we get just enough of a gander to confirm that McAdams's derriere is as darling as the rest of her. And so what if it threw me right out of the movie, as I wondered how many hundreds of squats she did to prepare for those few moments? It worked - it moves McAdams, um, firmly into the babe territory already staked out by other actresses who undertook similar moon shots.
These include Jessica Biel in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (which forever erased her goody-goody image from the TV show Seventh Heaven), Johansson in Lost in Translation (which said, "I sure have grown up since The Horse Whisperer"), and Natalie Portman in Closer (which paved the way for her current Oscar bid in Black Swan). The contemporary fairy godhottie of all these is, of course, Julia Roberts, who by allowing a long pan across her underpants to open Pretty Woman, announced, "Playing a hooker can make me a star, as long as it's in a Disney film."
At the other end of the spectrum, there is nothing cute about Williams's nudity in Blue Valentine. As a woman falling into and then out of love with her husband (Ryan Gosling), she gives a no-holds-barred, brush-burns-included performance that could (deservedly) net her an Oscar nomination. Even on the tame TV show Dawson's Creek, Williams was a riveting actress, and all of her choices since then have confirmed her talent and ambition. She gravitates toward tiny, tough indies ( The Hawk is Dying; Synecdoche, New York; Wendy and Lucy), or works with name directors on their riskier fare (Ang Lee in Brokeback Mountain, Todd Haynes in I'm Not There, Martin Scorsese in Shutter Island), and seems genuinely more concerned with art than commerce.
Williams's raw, unadorned nakedness in Blue Valentine is no stunt; it's appropriate to the emotional nakedness of the movie. Other actresses have gone this route before her, including her Dawson's Creek co-star Katie Holmes in Thank You for Smoking; Amanda Seyfried in Chloe and Jennifer's Body; and Dakota Fanning in The Runaways. I call it the "I may be naked, but I'm dead serious" school of thought, and it does confer credibility on those who dare it.
(I couldn't help but notice, though, that Blue Valentine's writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, lets the camera linger a whole lot more thoroughly on Williams's naked body than on Gosling's. More men may be feeling pressured to develop six-pack abs to stay in the game - witness Ryan Reynolds, People mag's latest Sexiest Man Alive, and Glee teacher Matthew Morrison on the December cover of Details - but bowing to a higher beefcake standard is not the same thing as baring your privates.)
Hathaway's exposure in Love and Other Drugs - several glimpses of breasts and bum - falls in between McAdams' and Williams'. She plays a barista with impending Parkinson's who tries (and adorably fails) to keep her relationship with a pharma rep (Jake Gyllenhaal) purely sexual. It's co-writer/director Ed Zwick's attempt to goose the romantic comedy with some Apatow-style frankness, and it's Hathaway's next step down the road of adult roles that started with her Oscar-nominated turn in Rachel Getting Married. (Speaking of Oscar, Hathaway is co-hosting the awards show this February with James Franco. There's a good chance both will be nominees.)
It's too bad, however, that Hathaway is floating the kind of "Oops - how did that happen?" coyness deployed so memorably by Sharon Stone after her crotch shot in Basic Instinct. In an interview in The New York Times, Hathaway demurred, "Let me put it this way. I didn't have a call into my agent saying, 'Find me a part where I can take my clothes off.' " And in last week's Entertainment Weekly, she tells the story of how in one take, Gyllenhaal accidentally pulled the sheet off her, and wouldn't you know it, that was the take they used. She also maintains that the poster shot, of her and Gyllenhaal in bed, naked but for strategically placed pillows, was supposed to be a private memento, until the studio somehow saw it and decided to use it.
It's the same kind of pseudo tsuris that accompanied Miley Cyrus's semi-nude shots in Vanity Fair, and the Glee cast's recent Lolita shots in GQ: The public exhibits mild outrage, the star appears appropriately chagrined, but the alchemy is accomplished - the girl is transformed into a babe in the minds of ticket buyers. It would be more believable if Vanity Fair hadn't been offering photo approval to its subjects for years now, or if I hadn't myself sat with many an actress while she plowed through movie stills and promo shots, all of which required her okay before they could be used.
And Hathaway would sound a lot more credible if she and Gyllenhaal hadn't posed topless wrapped in each other's arms for the cover shot that accompanied the EW article. Yet however disingenuous her strategy may be, it's safe to say that no one will be calling Hathaway "adorkable" - as she referred to herself in a 2008 interview with me - any more.
There's also a recent, parallel phenomenon of older actresses who resisted getting naked early in their careers, but are now dropping trou, from Meryl Streep under the covers in the poster for It's Complicated, through Diane Keaton's frontal nudity in Something's Gotta Give, all the way to Julianne Moore's ultra-naked romp with Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are All Right. They conform to the same three levels of showing skin that I mentioned earlier, but with a twist: These actresses are doing it to add a frisson to their third act, rather than kick-start their second. It's more "Why the hell not?" than "I have to."
It's ironic that one of this holiday season's least naked movies is the one called Burlesque. Co-star Kristen Bell may be trying to sex up her image, to finally graduate from her TV persona, Veronica Mars. But headliner Christina Aguilera's music career, slippery with hits such as "Dirrty," has already thoroughly distanced her from her Mickey Mouse Club roots. She's in the unique position of playing a stripper to clean up her image.