The Great and
Terrible Garofalo

Projection Booth by Will Leitch

Go ahead and ask 10 women on the street, ask who would play them if a movie were made of their life. You’re likely to get one person who will say Julia Roberts because she’s the only movie star they know (or at least the first one who comes to mind), someone will say “me” because they’re an idiot, and at least one, likely more, will say Janeane Garofalo. Without fail.

     In a perfect world, Janeane Garofalo would be one of our biggest movie stars because there is clearly no one else like her. That’s because she’s not a movie star; she’s us, except she’s a lot funnier and smarter and cooler, which of course is all we want from our movie stars. Be like us, but better.

     She’s conflicted, self-loathing, bitter, empathetic, sweet, confused and doesn’t look like a model (though, as Hollywood never seems to understand, she is of course quite pretty). There is nothing fake about her, nothing that we don’t recognize as human. She’s honest with herself, which is how she comes across. And she doesn’t take any shit from anybody.

     She’s enormously appealing because of it. Fans love her, and in pretty much every film she’s been in, she’s the most memorable presence (imagine sitting through Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, Clay Pigeons or Mystery Men without her).

     It would seem there’d be no shortage of roles for Garofalo. She’s obviously funny, but she’s also shown surprising range in films as diverse as Cop Land and The Minus Man, in which she was particularly impressive as a naïve, sheepish small-town woman attracted to a handsome stranger who turns out to be a serial killer.

Garofalo should be the one proving the conventional wisdom wrong, showing that an extremely talented woman who looks like a normal human being can make it in Hollywood, that there is an audience for her, that she can thrive the way “normal-looking” male actors can, that she doesn’t have to play the typically boring female roles every actress is offered over and over.

     We know we like her, and we know how we respond to her. She should be ruling the world right now.

     So why, I ask with considerable alarm, does Garofalo, in her new film Steal This Movie! (coming out in August), play a loyal, doting, passive, ineffectual wife and mother who stands by her cheating, unsupportive man and actually says the phrase, “Sometimes, I just need to be held.”

     I mean, seriously. Do you actually want to hear Janeane Garofalo say the words “Sometimes, I just need to be held” with a straight face and not toss out a “Fuck you” after it?

     This is a woman who once, in Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, convincingly (most convincingly, this alleged man feels the need to emphasize) fired off the line, “OK cowboy, I don’t know what your trip is, but if this is some kind of a sick game ... If you fuck with me, in any way, I will rip each and every appendage from your body, starting with your dick. Capice?”

     And there wasn’t a person in the audience who didn’t love her (well, maybe a couple).

     Now here she is, at the age of (sorry, Janeane) 35, playing Anita Hoffman, wife of ‘60s civil rights leader Abbie Hoffman, a sad-sack, tread-upon, belabored housewife who just wants to be loved by her man. It’s the Anne Archer role, Sissy Spacek in JFK, an insulting part written and played straight-up, with no trace of irony. Garofalo gives the role as much spark as she can and infuses Anita with a strength that didn’t show up on the page, but the character, like the film, is obvious, one-dimensional and repetitive.

It’s an insult to any actress ... let alone Garofalo. So, I ask again: Why?

     Well, folks, here’s why ... because the conventional wisdom appears, horrifically, disgustingly, to be true. There simply aren’t any roles for a woman like Garofalo — a real person. Not any good ones anyway.

     A few years ago, Garofalo lost a noticeable amount of weight, and she explained the significant drop on the (otherwise useless) Dennis Miller show on HBO.

     “I (initially) thought it would be important to have, in my image on the screen, where a 14-year-old girl could look it at and say, ‘Hey, you know, she’s 5-foot-1, she weighs 160, that’s cool,’” she told Miller. “But you know what, well, it’s not cool. You just don’t reach this 14-year-old girl, and you don’t get parts, and it doesn’t work. So I lost the weight.

     “I’m not going to lie to anyone and say, ‘I lost weight for health, I did it for me.’ That’s not true. I smoke way more, I’m not healthy, I don’t feel good, and I’m not happier.”

     Argh ... Garofalo hasn’t made it. Someone as blessed with colossal talent and hoards of charm as she is keeps banging her head against a wall because she is trying to succeed in a business that has no idea what to do with her. There are only so many best-friend parts (Reality Bites, Dogma, Bye Bye Love) an actress can take.

     She was close. One of the most sweetly charming and funny romantic comedies in recent years was The Truth About Cats and Dogs, the 57th modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac, in which Garofalo played Dr. Abby Barnes, a veterinarian who hosts a radio show where callers ask her why their pets are so psychologically distressed. She ends up talking to one particularly interesting guy (Ben Chaplin) who likes her so much he asks what she looks like. She lies and says she’s tall and blond, which happens to describe her neighbor, played by Uma Thurman.

You know what happens: Garofalo makes Thurman pretend she’s her, and the unwitting guy falls more and more in love with the real her the more he talks to her on the phone. It’s Cyrano, but with Garofalo as Cyrano. She’s wonderful: charming, self-doubting, instantly likable. It was a movie suited to her strengths, and she knocked it out of the park (rent it ASAP if you haven’t already seen it).

     No more roles like it followed. (It’s somewhat telling that Cats and Dogs was written by a woman; Steal This Movie! clearly isn’t). The hit was never built upon. And time is running short. The peak of Garofalo’s popularity has passed, and she’ll need more than supporting parts and her status as close friend of Ben Stiller to get her back on top. She needs a writer, a script and a director who knows how talented she is and who is devoted to matching her with the right project.

     Sad part is, in Hollywood, there might not be one.