Sex in Cinema 2000

This year, the Women are Steamy but the men seem to be otherwise occupied

You will recall that when it came to sex in cinema in 2000, we were in an interesting place. Sex was on everyone's brain. We had Eyes Wide Shut, American Pie, American Beauty, Boys Don't Cry: intelligent, ambitious---though hardly flawless---movies about men in love (all right, one was about a girl who masqueraded as a man in order to be in love). But have things changed. Suddenly a specter is haunting the silver screens of America's multiplexes---the specter of sexually uninterested leading men. Start testing the water in the San Fernando Valley, check for saltpeter in the food at the writers Guild canteens, see if excessive cell phone radiation could be shrinking the testes of Hollywood's not-all-that-ballsy-to-being-with screenwriters, but do something fast. This year, Kevin Spacey isn't making another run for the roses and the (text continued on page 148)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 140) ardent, ebullient, shagadelic cry of "Yeah, baby!" is not to be heard in the land. This year, whether we are discussing gladiators, patriots, croupiers, college boys, cops or car thieves, something has shrunk the libidos of our leading men.

Check out the evidence. In Gladiator, Maximus (played by a stoic Russell Crowe) has just finished pacifying the barbarians at the far ends of the Roman Empire; Lucilla, the emperor's daughter (played by the lovely Connie Nielsen), sidles up and makes it clear her bud could be for him. He demurs, saying all he wants to do is get back home to his wife and son, where apparently what he most wants to do is pet his wheat. It appears that when it comes to sexual yearnings, Maximus is minimus.

Fast-forward 16 centuries to The Patriot, where the seed-spilling days of one of the fathers of our country are on hiatus. Benjamin Martin, played by Mel Gibson, is a widower and a father of seven, so we know he used to play the game. As the picture opens, his romantic urges, such as they are, consist solely of exchanging charged but fleeting glances with his late wife's sister Charlotte, played by the too-seldom-seen Joely Richardson. Of course, then war breaks out, and Benjamin's pent-up testosterone gets channeled into mauling the British. Later, he finally gets to spend some time with Charlotte and work himself up for a kiss, but look at the inspiration he needs to reach for the moment: They are sitting together alone on a beach at sunset, their lives are being threatened by a nasty British officer and they are at a wedding. A sunset, a life-and-death situation and a wedding reception. One of those factors alone would be enough to get a little minuteman to stand up and salute.

Samuel L. Jackson is so cool in Shaft, it looks like he's been carved out of obsidian. But the black private dick who's a sex machine with all the chicks doesn't demonstrate that he's a sex machine with any chick. In 13 Days, Kevin Costner is too interested in saving the world during the Cuban missile crisis to think about girls. In The Perfect Storm, George Clooney is too interested in fishing. In U-571, Matthew McConaughey, Jon Bon Jovi, Harvey Keitel, Bill Paxton and David Keith---chesty, square-jawed Navy men---spend virtually the whole movie riding around in a long, phallus-shaped object that fires somewhat smaller phallus-shaped objects, in the hope that they will penetrate a vessel to explosive results. This must be what they mean by a chick flick. These guys don't even pat one another's fannies. True, in Mission: Impossible 2, Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt has a torrid affair with the heart-stopping Thandie Newton, but think about it: That's part of his assignment. Left completely free to choose how to spend his time, what mission does Mr. Hunt accept? He goes rock climbing---solo!

So forget the action movies. What about films with a little more emotional content? With Return to Me, David Duchovny is restrained in his devotion to the equally inhibited Minnie Driver---an actor who in her best roles, in Good Will Hunting and Grosse Pointe Blank, has displayed a vivid earthiness. So they spend a good part of the movie bowling and playing cards with her grandfather and his cronies. In the male weepie Frequency, Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel play two men so absorbed by their ham radios, the 1969 Mets and solving a string of serial killings that neither has the time to make a pass at anyone.

How about comedies? In Me, Myself and Irene, Charlie is so nice he can't even stand up to an obnoxious neighbor, let alone work up the nerve to woo Irene. In Road Trip, Josh, studying in Ithaca, pledges to remain faithful to his girlfriend in Austin, and is happily celibate until his girlfriend inexplicably stops returning his calls. Only then does he sleep with Beth. She has been throwing herself at him so hard that she makes Pedro Martinez seem like an assembly-line worker in a saloon league. In Boys and Girls, Freddie Prinze Jr., who in earlier roles has been cool, confident and cocksure, and who has one of the winningest grins in pictures, plays a studious, sexually reluctant college student who almost never smiles. For years he fights his powerful attraction to Claire Forlani and feels confused and awkward when he at long last acts on it. I know, I know, it's called acting, but Clint Eastwood could have acted in La Cage Aux Folles, except nobody was stupid enough to cast him.

What about the indies? In Boiler Room, the brash young brokers drink, do coke, gamble and drive their Ferraris fast but don't exhibit much interest in girls (except for Giovanni Ribisi, who, as we know from the beginning, isn't like the others). Groove, the story of a big rave party, has most of the participants content to take drugs, dance and float around, which shows how parties have changed over the years---all that other stuff used to be opening acts for the evening's real entertainment. In Sunshine, an epic that covers 80 years and three generations of a Hungarian family, the men (all played by Ralph Fiennes) have a sluggish interest in sex. The oldest, a judge, and the youngest, a commissar, express sexual feelings only after the women practically use neon signs to announce their availability.

Indifferent, passive, uninterested, reluctant, nice. Gosh, were there no male characters interested in sex? Well, there was Hank in Me, Myself and Irene. But Hank was a psycho. There was Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan) in the terrific digital-era Hamlet. But Claudius was a murderer. There was Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) in American Psycho, who had a keen interest in the opposite sex. Of course, he was a serial murderer. There was Steven Grlscz, played by Jude Law, in The Wisdom of Crocodiles. He's very interested in sex, but he's a homicidal vampire. And then there's Buck in Chuck and Buck, who wants to resume in adulthood the touchy-pokey games he and his pal Chuck played as lads. But Buck is a stalker with a heavy case of arrested development. And then there are the guys in Whipped, who are of course whipped. Gentlemen, pick your role model. Maybe it's Harrison Ford in What Lies Beneath, a good father, loving husband and upright man who gets soundly spanked for his one episode of unfaithfulness.

OK, so we're pushing the point a bit---otherwise, how would we end up with the people in the pictures accompanying this article? Mopey as he was, John Cusack was certainly interested in sex in High Fidelity, and Harvey Keitel fell hard for Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke (perhaps not since Glenda Jackson has a serious actress undressed more readily on the screen). Jason Biggs got all goo-goo for his fellow American Pie graduate Mena Suvari in Loser, all of Rio de Janeiro seemed lit up by the possibility of romance in Bossa Nova and Ben Affleck didn't have to use one of his lifelines to figure out what to do with Charlize Theron in Reindeer Games. And to be fair, maybe the leading men in the previously mentioned movies would have felt freer to muse on sensual matters if they weren't so dang busy sublimating their dreams and desires and yearnings in order to create a country or save an empire or win World War II or stave off nuclear annihilation.

And yet in the year of rectitudinous men, of high-minded men, of dutiful men---and of passive, indifferent and altogether too nice men---we've had no shortage of sexually vibrant, sexually confident, sexually aggressive women. We've already noted a number of movies in which the woman initiates the sexplay, but there are more. In Love and Sex, the beauteous Famke Janssen (concluded on page 163)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 148) is quite comfortable with a sexual history that consists of 14 lovers; as she puts it, correctly, "It's not so many, over the years." It's her boyfriend, Jon Favreau, who's unhappy that he's had only two. Island headmistress Tilda Swinton takes Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach (woman on top, of course) and then cautions him not to mention their encounter to her beau. "It was sex," she tells Leo at the end of her warning, tersely, firmly, rather as one might imagine Margaret Thatcher intoning it, and you can see that Leonardo feels emotionally sniffy at being used. In Bedazzled, mild-mannered Brendan Fraser---playing a character so invisible that the girl of his dreams doesn't recognize him, despite the fact that they have worked together for four years---is putty in the hands of Elizabeth Hurley, the vroomiest woman in movies today. In Live Virgin, Mena Suvari coolly arranges an Internet broadcast of her deflowering for big bucks; she's rational and nonchalant, while the men in her life---her ex-boyfriend, her father and her business partner---are all in a froth. In Whipped, Amanda Peet, who is destined to become the Girl Most Likely to Get Sick of Being Called the Next Julia Roberts, has all the guys whipped. Not even Grandma Klump has trouble going after what she wants.

In Coyote Ugly, an array of audacious bartenders---extraordinarily beautiful, skimpily dressed, somewhat out of control---attain a kind of goddesshood from which they reduce a saloonful of men into sex-stupefied semicultists whose brains get fried in their backed-up jism. Female sexuality can have that effect on men, female beauty can have that power. The girls are showing it this year, but the boys are keeping theirs on the shelf.

Here's the prime example: Erin Brockovich is a film that, a few months from now, has a good chance of making Oscar history, when Julia Roberts gets nominated for best performance by an actress, and her breasts get nominated for best performance in a supporting role.

Movies are our fantasies. Looking at them writ large, we see that they are maps to what we are thinking. Thirty years after the feminist revolution, there has been an abundance of discussion about women and women's roles and women's sexuality, enough so that we feel we are comfortable seeing sexually powerful, even sexually manipulative female characters in a supportive context (though let's see how happy we are with the Erin Brockovich model five years down the road). But clearly we are still confused about how we want our men to be. This year, many of them have behaved quite honorably, and then moped around, waiting for a girl to call.

Oddly, the sexiest movie of the year may turn out to be the funniest. Scary Movie is a cheerfully, anarchistically vulgar movie---Airplane with a dirty mind. In structure a send-up of teen-slasher pictures, it gets far more mileage out of sexual practices and insecurities. Breast implants, small penises, latent homosexuality, thick pubic hair, swallowing, orgasmic noises and other matters that lurk in our skulls yet seldom get mentioned are vigorously barbecued here. Men and women alike exit the theater laughing, which is why this is such a sexy movie, for what is more of an aphrodisiac than laughter? Moreover, despite the gushing libido of its characters, Scary Movie supports our central argument. One of the killers, as it turns out, is Bobby, the not-abnormally sex-mad boyfriend of the virginal, resistant Cindy. "Lack of sex," Bobby emphatically explains to her at the climax, "can cause serious deviant behavior!" Yes! Exactly! It's good we had all these high-minded fellows this year, but don't they deserve a chance to get down?