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Diane Freakin' KeatonWhy can't she find better roles?

By Dana StevensUpdated Friday, Feb. 2, 2007, at 6:43 PM ET

Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore in Because I Said SoConfession: I'll watch any movie with Diane Keaton in it. No matter how retro the gender politics, no matter how icky the celebrity pairings (cf. Jack Nicholson's meaty paws on Keaton's gorgeous body in Something's Gotta Give), no matter how many reaction shots involving dogs, I'm buying a box of Red Vines and a ticket.

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What is it about Keaton that keeps me coming back for more even after turgid disappointments like The Family Stone and, now, Because I Said So? It's not just nostalgia for the Annie Hall days. Yes, Keaton is still charmingly goofy, with an inimitable sense of style (the costumes in Because I Said So are by Shay Cunliffe, who also worked with Keaton in The Family Stone and Mrs. Soffel, but you get the impression that Keaton had a big say in her wardrobe choices). But her career hasn't lasted this long on "la-di-da"s and well-cut jackets alone. Keaton is virtually the only American actress of her generation to have aged truly gracefully, both onscreen and off.

For me and, I'd bet, a lot of other women who occupy the unmarked cultural territory somewhere between young and "older" (older than what?), Keaton's un-Botoxed face, unaugmented body, and uncompromised personal life are something of an inspiration. I love that she never married, that she adopted two children in her 50s, and that she continues to pursue interests (directing odd documentaries, publishing books of photographs) that are more than vanity projects. Keaton's enduring appeal isn't that she's stuck in an eternal girlhood, it's that she makes being a grown woman look like so much fun. The problem is, the movies haven't grown up along with her.

In Because I Said So, Keaton plays Daphne Wilder, a single mother of three who's just about to turn 60. What Daphne does for a living is never entirely clear. We see her at one point behind the counter of a bakery, and there's a great deal of recipe talk and fussing over pastries. Whatever her profession, it's garnered Daphne some choice romantic-comedy real estate: a chicly appointed L.A. mansion with a garden view. In fact, Daphne is dauntingly perfect in general, a tightly wound control freak with an enviable vintage wardrobe and a penchant for rearranging her daughters' furniture.

For the offspring of a woman with such vaunted taste, those daughters have curiously matchy first names. Maggie (Lauren Graham) is a psychologist with a husband and child; Mae (Piper Perabo) is an apparently unemployed hottie recently married to a guy who can't keep his hands off her; and Milly (Mandy Moore) is an accident-prone caterer with horrible taste in men. Frustrated with Milly's latest romantic disappointment, Daphne takes out a personal ad online seeking suitors for her daughter. A seemingly endless interview montage finally yields one prospective candidate: a yuppie architect named Jason (Tom Everett Scott). (What is it with the prevalence of architecture as a career for love interests in the movies? If there were that many architects on earth, the sun would long ago have been blocked out by skyscrapers.)

Jason is the ideal mate for Milly, which, of course, in rom-com logic, must mean its own opposite. Not knowing her mother engineered the match, Milly begins to fall for judgmental Jason (nicely underplayed by Scott), but she's also drawn to free-spirited musician Johnny (Gabriel Macht, showcasing his character's free-spiritedness in fedoras and awful vests). Johnny's rightness is further telegraphed by the fact that he lives with his son (Ty Panitz) and his father Joe (Stephen Collins) in a cottage on the Venice Beach canal. The eventual Joe/Daphne match is as inevitable as the one between Milly and Johnny, but harder to root for. Stephen Collins is a likeable enough actor, but come on—kindly Rev. Camden from the TV show 7^th Heaven as a life partner for Diane freakin' Keaton? When is she going to get to end up with someone really hot?

The problem with Because I Said So isn't that it's formulaic and predictable; fans of romantic comedy can get around those qualities, and even appreciate them. It's that the film keeps missing out on its own opportunities for comic gold. Your own mother asking you what an orgasm feels like: What greater setup for a scene of mortifying, please-God-take-me-now embarrassment and stammering prevarication? Instead, in the alternate universe of Because I Said So, Milly launches into an enthusiastic ode to the curling of toes, causing filmgoers everywhere to sink five inches lower in their seats. The Wilder gals' frankness about their bodies, presented as evidence of Sex and the City-style liberation, borders on the incestuously pathological: You half-expect Milly to edify Daphne with a mother-daughter reach-around. Similarly, a scene in which Daphne refuses to leave her daughter's apartment as a date knocks at the door doesn't come off as endearing slapstick—it makes Daphne look like a needy, overbearing jerk.

As we'll no doubt be reminded again in a few weeks, when Michelle Pfeiffer plays an "older" woman in love with a younger man (Paul Rudd) in I Could Never Be Your Woman (why not? Be his woman, Michelle!), Hollywood is still grappling with the fact that American women now outlive their fertility (and often, their men) by 30 years or more. In this shameful last act of their lives, actresses are allowed to be mothers (especially of the meddling, empty-nest sort Keaton embodies here) or wise and twinkling grandmothers (witness the recent career of the great Gena Rowlands). They can also cautiously get their grooves back with younger men before settling down with Rev. Camden or Randle McMurphy. What they don't seem to have the space to do is to grow into people like the real-life Diane Keaton: smart, curious, independent women you would actually want to know.

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Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Back in 1971 or so, there was this TV commercial on all the time, for ladies' deodorant. This cute, pert but slightly ditzy young woman wore a tank top and track shorts and pushed a shopping cart around while talking about how doing her kids' errands required a track suit and strong deodorant.

That was Diane Keaton, and I remember it took a bit of work to shake off the "track suit girl with B.O." image from Keaton as she exploded into stardom a year or so later with the one-two punch of "The Godfather" and Woody Allen's "Play It Again, Sam," which were Paramount Pictures released within a few months of each other and which -- if you had a whole day to give to it -- were re-released together as a DOUBLE-BILL in 1973.

Keaton had been in one key film prior to all this, "Lovers and Other Strangers" (1970), in which she was cute enough and good enough to attract the attention of both Allen and Francis Coppola (who also cast Richard Castellano for Clemenza based on HIS breakout performance in "Lovers and Other Strangers," with the now-forgotten catchphrase, "What's the story?")

The 70's were starved for female stars. Streisand and Fonda were very picky; Faye Dunaway ended up cast in everything,and Candice Bergen got the roles even Dunaway wouldn't take.

But Diane Keaton was right there with them.

Problem was, Woody "co-opted" her for awhile: "Sleeper," "Love and Death," and climactically, "Annie Hall."

Keaton won a well-deserved Oscar for Annie Hall,a character evidently based by Allen ON Keaton,from wacky mannish clothes to flibbergibbet talking pattern to Orange County WASP roots.

Keaton did a few more movies with Allen, and then did what Annie Hall did to him: dumped him. Allen shifted Mia Farrow into the Keaton slot, and fans wondered if Keaton would follow the ex-Mrs. Neil Simon (Marsha Mason) into obscurity.

Nope...Warren Beatty was waiting in the wings. Beatty gave Keaton a few years of romance (Keaton seemed to become instantly more sexual and more intellectual in Beatty's presence) and a great movie called "Reds" (in which Keaton REALLY sizzled with a trim, sexy Jack Nicholson for a short bit of storyline.)

Beatty ended and Keaton began the long journey to "mature actress-hood", holding on and hanging in there until she arrived at the comfortable paycheck land of "lovely mother roles" -- principally "Father of the Bride" and the dramatic ones, about good sisters and other mothers, or whatever.

I think what's most funny about Diane Keaton was seeing the "Annie Hall" persona disappear almost entirely after Beatty and maturity came along. In retrospect, the Annie Hall performance looks like a beautiful bit of fakery -- not unlike Goldie Hawn's giggling ditz schtick on "Laugh-In", which just disappeared one day (happens with men too -- remember how Steve Martin suddenly WASN'T the wild and crazy guy anymore?)

I liked Keaton in that movie a few years back where she played the most successful and together of three adult sisters, the other two being Meg Ryan and Lisa Kudrow (their father,improbably was Old Walter Matthau, dying on screen in his last role before dying in real life.) Keaton quite successfully projected SUCCESS, and the centered life she's seemed to have for all these years.

Rather like her "husband," Steve Martin, Diane Keaton seems to have decided to take "paycheck movies" that pay for her other more artistic pursuits. Good for her.

Though she certainly did wonders for the cause of mature women everywhere with her sex scene with the now not-so-trim Jack Nicholson in "Somethings Gotta Give as Good as it Gets" or whatever it was called. "Reds" far behind them, these Golden Oldsters got it on, and it was pleasurable to behold, even if the movie wasn't, so much.

Nice career for a gal who started off in a track suit with body odor.

P.S. On the downside, I never thought Keaton really had the "gravitas" for "The Godfathers." She was OK in the first one, playing a gal who needed to be a bit naive to fall for Michael Corleone, but the later editions required some heavy acting chops from Keaton that she didn't really have. (Her reading of the line "This Sicilian THING must end!" was...well, you know.) Here, perhaps, she lucked out from being the best available choice for the role at the time, but not really right for where the role would have to go.

--lucabrasi

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