 Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Chris Cooper, Laura Linney, Gary Cole, Dennis Haysbert
Director: Billy Ray
Year Of Release: 2007
Plot: The FBI believes that one of its agents, Robert Hanssen, has become the biggest security breach in US history, having sold secrets to the Russians for over two decades. Eric O’Neill is assigned to Hanssen to try and help bring the man down, although he’s initially told it’s an investigation into the senior agent’s sexual habits. However can they catch him and why is a seemingly upstanding Christian man like Hanssen selling secrets? |
Breach is a very good movie that deserved far more success than it achieved, especially as it tells an absolutely fascinating true story of the biggest double-agent drama in US history. However what I want to talk about is the movie’s star, Ryan Philippe, and why he hasn’t managed to become a major a-list player. My theory is that it’s because he’s too good looking. Well, sort of. It’s that he doesn’t look unusual enough.
This isn’t actually my theory (well, it is as applied to Ryan Phillippe), but is based on what one of my university professors once said during a lecture about stage performers. His argument was that the so called x-factor that sets some performers apart and catapults them to the top of their profession, isn’t about charm, acting skill or classical beauty, but that the people who become major stage stars may still largely be good looking, but their features are always a little unusual and distinctive (but not too much so), and they aren’t what would traditionally be classed as classically beautiful. This makes sense, because if you’re viewing a bunch of people on stage from a distance, if there’s one person who looks a bit different to everyone else, your eye is drawn to them because they stand out.
It’s something I’ve noticed when I’ve gone to see professional musicals. If you look at the chorus line, it’s often full of stunningly good looking and talented people, however they are all generically attractive, so none of them stands out. The people in the lead roles however always tend look a bit different. Often purely in terms of attractiveness, they aren’t as drop-dead gorgeous as the chorus line, but you notice them more because they stand out on the stage.
I think the same is true of screen stars. While to get into the a-list you need to be good looking, if you actually look hard at most major movie stars, they are actually quite distinctive. The film I normally use an example of this is My Best Friend’s Wedding. Just go and watch that movie again and look at the mouths of the main stars. Right, have you done that? (No? Well, never mind). I cannot watch that film without being amazed at just how big the mouths of Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and Dermot Mulroney are. They are absolutely enormous, and while they’re all attractive people, they’re also very distinctive looking.
I said before when I was writing about The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, that when you see a lot of movie stars in real life, like Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger, they have enormous heads. Again it means that they can still be good looking, while actually being rather unusual and distinctive. Whether it’s a giant head, huge mouth, massive cheekbones, large eyes or something else, there always something about major stars that makes their attractiveness slightly different to most people, whether it’s obvious or not. The result is that they are automatically the place your eye goes to on the screen, no matter what else is happening, which is what makes them a good lead player in a movie
In some ways it’s rather similar to supermodels. Most models are meant to incredibly attractive but generically so, so that they don’t detract from the clothes. However the reason some of them become supermodels is because when they strut their way down the catwalk, they don’t look like all the rest. In a line-up of models, your eye will always be drawn to the likes of Kate Moss or Naomi Campbell, because they’re distinctive.
So that’s what I reckon the problem is with Ryan Phillippe – he’s just too attractive for his own good. He emerged in the late 90s, when he was in his early 20s, setting teenage hearts aflutter in the likes of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cruel Intentions (largely because the makers ensured he spent plenty of time with his shirt off). However while he’s an incredibly good looking man, his beauty isn’t particularly unusual or distinctive, which is what I think has made it more difficult for him to break into the big time. With his ex-wife, Reece Witherspoon, she’s got the all-important giant mouth as well as a voice that you recognise the moment you hear it, but he doesn’t have those things.
My suspicion is that actually Philippe needs to wait until he’s in his 40s, because at that point he may well look distinctive enough to find major Hollywood success, but at the moment he just doesn’t stand out enough visually to give him that x-factor.
He’s not the only one who’s got this problem either. The likes of Jessica Alba and Paul Walker will probably always struggle, not because of their lack of talent (although it sure doesn’t help, but there have been plenty of massive stars who were worse than they are), but that while they are immensely attractive people, they’re not particularly distinctive. You always feel you could remove them halfway through a movie and replace them with somebody else who was generically attractive and it wouldn’t make much different.
I always think Marilyn Monroe is a pretty good example of this theory. If you watch her in a movie, she isn’t actually a particularly good actress. In fact she’s sometimes pretty rubbish and occasionally borders on the incompetent. However in any scene she’s in, your eye is immediately to drawn to her because she doesn’t look like anyone else on the screen, and that, coupled with some sexy charm, has made her an icon.
You might rile at the idea that making it to the top in Hollywood is all about looks, but the fact is, most of the time it is. There’s little doubt that the most talented actors aren’t the ones who get the best roles in the major movies (although it happens sometimes). In fact much of the time, great acting talent doesn’t seem too much of a prerequisite for stardom at all. The look is all important. While you may think it’s pure beauty that gives people a leg up, it’s probably not as helpful as you might think, simply because in Hollywood, if you’re generically good looking there’s little to separate you from thousands of others. You need something unusual, so that you are attractive but you don’t quite look like everyone else. You basically need something to draw people’s eye to you rather than anything else on screen, and for that, pure classical beauty isn’t enough. So sorry Ryan, get a little uglier and then we’ll talk about you a-list status.
However all this is just a theory, and may be wrong (or at least needs refining), but I do think there’s some truth to it.
TIM ISAAC
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