Moment of Clarity

Now that the smoke’s cleared from all the bombs Leelee Sobieski dropped on Hollywood last year, we all have time to reflect on just what it was that the critics all saw in Leelee that the rest of the U.S. did not, and why the buzz that surrounded her when Joan of Arc aired has pretty much disappeared.

I think Leelee’s is a case very much like the Monty Python bit in which a student, having been accepted into a prestigious school based on precocious little essay he wrote that delighted all the teachers, rehashes the exact same essay over and over again until he’s caught — not for plagiarizing himself, but for repeating the same grammatical error in each new rehash. Leelee, too, has been caught — her repeated grammatical error was a string of mediocre to bad films, but the real problem is that she’s been doing essentially the same thing in most every one of her films since Joan of Arc, that precocious performance that so delighted the critics. Here on Earth, The Glass House, Joy Ride, Uprising — she gives us the same, sensually grave persona in all of them, and one has to wonder if there is indeed anything else in her actor’s repertoire, and if she’s not simply playing herself over and over. And in any case, the charm of being precocious wears thin the older one gets.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that — playing oneself convincingly isn’t as easy as it sounds — but it might get progressively more difficult to get work with the critics getting tired of her and the public ignoring her films. A few more acting lessons to help expand her range might be in order.