Christina Ricci made her feature film debut as Winona Ryder's little sister. The year was 1990 and Ricci was ten. Two years before, Ryder had struck a lasting image it took quite a while to shake off: Lydia, the spooky little girl in the haunted house down the road in Beetlejuice. But just a year after Mermaids, li'l sis out-gothed Ryder's Lydia with her unforgettable performance as Wednesday in The Addams Family.
What other 11-year-old could so self-assuredly instruct her brother Pugsley to sit in an electric chair because they're about to play a game. "What game?"
"It's called, 'Is There a God?'"
Or, when asking for the salt at the dinner table, she's asked by her mother, Morticia, "And what do we say?"
"Now."
When it came to the sequel, for all the intertwining subplots, director Barry Sonnenfeld and crew practically built the movie with Ricci's Wednesday as its foundation. The Addams kids are shuffled off to camp, "hilarity ensues," naturally, but the finest moment of the otherwise rather lame and misguided Addams Family Values is Wednesday's deadpan hijacking of the traditional Thanksgiving play:
Wait. We can not break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims. And especially do not trust Sarah Miller. For all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.
The Addams Family films were meant to be comedic blockbusters, of course, and not scary at all, but there was something chilling, even thrilling, in hearing such cold frankness about sex and death, politics and torture coming from a little girl who quite clearly knew exactly what she was talking about.
Both Ryder and Ricci have tried to shake the clichéd roles that their dark looming eyes set in pale faces originally blessed -- or cursed -- them with, but in very different and telling ways. Ryder held her own for a while, particularly in Heathers, and when Tim Burton needed a love interest for his spooky Johnny Depp-as-a-blank-slate vehicle, Edward Scissorhands, Ryder was the obvious choice (though, why he bleached her hair blonde is one of those quirky mysteries of cinematic history).
Lydia and Wednesday.
But then Ryder's career went all lace and period, first in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula (where she's the victim, not the threat), then in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (where she's the one Daniel Day-Lewis isn't in love with). She reprised the Gen X spokesperson role in Reality Bites, but then seemed to be fleeing from something, over to roles in safe and quiet movies like Little Women and How to Make an American Quilt. By the end of the decade, it was Autumn in New York, and now... well.
Even in her fiercest performances -- Corky, for example, in Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth -- there's a vulnerability in Ryder we'd later learn is all too real. From the back seat of Corky's taxi, Gena Rowlands peers right through her.
There's hardly a trace of that vulnerability in Ricci. Oh, there was Casper, sure, but she grew up fast. When a role calls for it, which is pretty rare -- in The Ice Storm, say -- that's when you can tell she's acting. It's when she's pulling the strings of the world around her to get exactly what she wants that we seem to be looking at the real Christina Ricci. Little Wednesday matured into a sometimes cruelly manipulative (and irresistibly watchable) creature, as in The Opposite of Sex, where she makes the most of her newly discovered auroral sexuality and lures even a gay man into her web.
Even so, she hasn't completely shaken her Gothic roots. When Tim Burton needed another love interest for another spooky Johnny Depp-as-a-blank-slate vehicle -- Sleepy Hollow -- he turned this time to Christina Ricci. And dyed her blonde, too. Whatever.
Instead of playing the Gen X card, Ricci began hanging with the indie set, becoming a regular at Sundance and taking on such diverse, low budget projects as Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66, John Waters's Pecker, Anjelica Huston's Bastard Out of Carolina... the list goes on. She's got films in the can we haven't even seen yet.
The Gathering, for example, currently floating out there somewhere in distribution limbo. Director Brian Gilbert set out to make a supernatural thriller in the British tradition of The Omen and The Wicker Man. Ricci plays an American tourist who travels to the Glastonbury Music Festival, gets hit by a car, loses her memory (an all too common ailment these days) and ends up in Ashby Wake, one of those delightfully eerie villages on the British Isles with ancient churches and legends and, quite possibly, ghosts.
The movie was a Granada Films production, but Granada went under shortly after completion. Not, fortunately enough, though, before Miramax picked it up for US distribution. Miramax is probably holding it while it figures out how to release Prozac Nation, based on the bestselling memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel and with Ricci in the starring role she's evidently most pleased with.
Now, on top of having just wrapped Woody Allen's next feature, Anything Else, and building up her own production company, she's preparing to direct her first feature, Speed Queen. But first: Borgia.
This could be the Christina Ricci performance. Lucrezia Borgia. I, for one, can hardly wait. Neil Jordan is shooting in Rome, Ewan McGregor is her brother, Cesare, Antonio Banderas and Jean Reno are on board and -- get this -- John Malkovich plays Machiavelli.
This summer in Cannes, where The Gathering had its world premiere, Ricci sat down with around half a dozen journalists from as many countries and Nina Rehfeld was one of them. Ricci burst in complaining about her legs and hips, having just completed a six-mile run. Where? Well, inside on a treadmill, of course. "Can you imagine if I went running in Cannes?"
She may run six miles a day, but she still smokes. "Yeah, but it's good if I smoke and exercise. 'Cause then my lungs will be extra strong."
It was a rambunctious half-hour, peppered with outbursts of laughter from all sides as Ricci freely interrupted, changed the subject and let loose any number of her strongly worded opinions. On the high level of security at Cannes this year, for example: "Bombing the film industry is not going to achieve much. Like when they had the Emmys and they kept postponing it, I was like, 'I really don't think the Taliban cares about NBC.'"
What follows are the highlights of that lively session.
[dwhudson.]
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