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Before any of her most crazed fans email us to tell us so, let us just say it right up front: we know that our antipathy toward Drew Barrymore indicates that we are bad people. (Not that we'd really expect a crazed Drew Barrymore fan to be conversant with the word "antipathy." Or the word "indicate," for that matter.)
It's true: this assessment is completely subjective. We just don't like Drew Barrymore. But it's also true that our dislike of her sometimes makes us wonder if there's something wrong with us. After all, she loves us -- or she would if she knew us; so she gives us to believe in every magazine profile and talk-show appearance. Drew Barrymore loves every living creature, and many dead creatures and inanimate objects to boot: she even loved Tom Green for a while! And Barrymore's all-encompassing love for everything the universe contains is all the more special and remarkable when you consider everything she's gone through in her life. Her divorce from her mother, battle with drug abuse, and role in 2000 Malibu Road could have hardened her into a coarse, bitter showbiz casualty -- a Susan Olsen or God forbid a Dana Plato; certainly, every story about Barrymore insists that Barrymore's having "survived" her tough childhood and grown up into an apparently functional adult is a singular, miraculous achievement as opposed to being exactly what the rest of us have managed to do without getting a fucking medal for it.
Seriously, now -- what is the big deal about Drew Barrymore? Does she sweat some kind of pixie-dust-infused saline solution that bewitches magazine journalists who get a whiff of it into thinking she's some kind of magical fairy? Because from where we sit, it just doesn't seem like she's so special -- or, at least, not nearly as special as we are continually bludgeoned into believing she is. She's not that pretty. There's no evidence that she's very smart. She is absolutely not a great actor. Though she has an appealing screen presence -- she's so twinkly, and more eager to please than a floppy-eared puppy -- she's not exactly brimming with star quality. She's been in a lot of bad movies, and is often the worst thing about the few good movies she's lucked into. (She very well may have made her Confessions of a Dangerous Mind co-star Sam Rockwell feel like his "cock is 10 feet long," as he announced in Barrymore's Vanity Fair profile last month, but for the rest of us, the only things she seemed to lengthen were the scenes she was in -- stretching on and on, further into the horizon. It was especially embarrassing for the audience to watch Barrymore playing a ditzy dilettante of a character, lisping malapropisms and flitting through every social movement from the early '60s on, when it seemed like the odds were even that Barrymore wasn't in on the jokes the script played on her character.)
But let us return to our lead, up top: is it our fundamental deficiencies as human beings that render us unable to appreciate such a sunny, positive, life-affirming personage as Barrymore? Maybe. Or maybe what we object to in Barrymore's apparently limitless capacity for cheer is that normal people are not that cheerful. Occasionally, they get pissed off or sad or bored or grumpy, and when you see Barrymore on Letterman, she seems to be straining so hard to convince us that no, for real, she really is a relentless optimist with a grin at the ready 24/7, that we can't help thinking how she does it. Maybe she already used up her life's quota of bad days when she was all coked up and shit (age twelve). Maybe she's so dumb that she doesn't know any better than to be happy all the time. Or maybe her chipper routine proves that she's a much better actor than we give her credit for -- in other words, maybe she's a giant phony.
This last possibility seems a lot more probable now -- in the midst of the Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle publicity blitz -- than it might have at some other point in Barrymore's career. We can't count how many times we've read or heard, in the past two weeks, what great friends Barrymore is with her fellow big-screen Angels, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu. It's not that it's unlikely that they all really are friends -- and God bless them if they are. It's just that the more they insist upon it, the more it seems like they're all talk. (The cover profile cum slumber party in Entertainment Weekly a couple of weeks back was particularly annoying. If you all are friends, can't you be friends the way other grownup ladies are?)
And on Letterman this week, Barrymore struck this commentator as being especially disingenuous. Yes, one could argue that Letterman himself didn't have to keep harping on that time she appeared on his show on his birthday and flashed her boobies at him. On the other hand, don't do the crime if you can't do the time -- and really, really don't keep fake-modestly calling Dave "a dirty bird" every time he mentions it. We all saw you in Playboy, so save it.
Even when Barrymore told a story that hinted that she might have normal human emotions -- in this case, anger -- she had to temper it with stagey girliness lest we get the notion that she's a twenty-eight-year-old adult woman with occasionally bad feelings and not just an oversized Gertie doll. The anecdote was about her boyfriend, Fabrizio Moretti (of The Strokes) unexpectedly coming to visit her on one of her rare days off. It was the first day in a while that she'd been able to sleep in because she wasn't working, and she was asleep in her bedroom at home, with the bedroom door locked, when someone knocked. Telling the story on Letterman, Barrymore said she responded to the knock by screaming "WHAT?!" at the door. (Obviously, we can't give a good approximation of the scream in print, but it was very loud, quite angry, and really funny.) But then, in the telling, she instantly followed the yell with a childish giggle, all, "Can you imagine, I made a noise like that? Little old me?" I mean, didn't she have to have therapy at the Betty Ford Clinic? And didn't they teach her in therapy that it's okay to own your emotions, even when they're unpleasant? And as an actor, shouldn't Barrymore have a working knowledge of the full range of human feeling and expression?
At the end of the day (or the audit), that may be what bugs us the most about Drew Barrymore. The two biggest movies of her career as a producer -- Charlie's Angels and its sequel -- are all about "ironically" trotting out antiquated images of femininity and female sexiness and "subverting" them by stringing together all these set pieces of clichéd female exploitation, only having them be the set-ups for sequences where the apparently exploited women very fakely fight a bunch of guys and hold their own,even though they're styled to look like supermodels and totter around on their stupid stiletto heels like they're Bambi taking his first steps. We're sure that Barrymore, when she works on attracting female talent to the Angels movies, emphasizes that the characters are sexy girls who also kick ass (as though it's such a gigantic leap for the human mind to make that we need two whole movies just to demonstrate that it's possible for two seemingly opposite qualities to co-exist in the same person). But then we sometimes wonder if McG (or whatever screenwriting software is credited with the Angels screenplays) is coming at it the opposite way -- conceiving the most cheescakey, just-this-side-of-soft-core-porn scenarios and costumes to put his nubile cast in, and then tacking on the kung fu parts just to trick Barrymore et al. into acting them out. And yes, before you send us emails about this, we realize that it's okay for feminists to be pretty and for attractive women to bust people's heads open, but come on. The Angels trio isn't on the cover of Maxim in bikinis biting their fingertips in support of the ERA; the Angels movies make Buffy Summers look like Bella Abzug.
Both as an actor and as a producer, Barrymore is a very powerful person. Attaching her name can get movies greenlit. Even if we don't think (based on the little direct evidence we have) that she's all that smart, we will allow that she must have surrounded herself with smart people -- the kind of people who would want to produce Donnie Darko and turn Olive the Other Reindeer into a very cute TV special. So our question is, why does Barrymore still (publicly, anyway) act like a little girl? It's fine if she's made a conscious choice to be as happy as she possibly can, but does she have to be such a simp?
Given Barrymore's midlife career immolation (you know -- when she was fourteen) and the canny moves she's made to get back onto the A-list -- with movies that, even if we didn't think they were so great, were very successful; not to mention giving the public lots to talk about by flashing late-night talk-show hosts and being briefly married to an itinerant bartender and then a complete freak -- Barrymore is probably about as famous as she should be. But maybe if she gets even a tiny bit more famous -- even a tiny bit more secure in her place as a Hollywood player -- she'll come to understand that while it's all well and good, when you're a little girl, to have the film equivalent of slumber parties with your friends, some things are more important. The world would be a much better place with more Donnie Darkos and fewer Charlie's Angelses, and if Drew Barrymore ever leaves her protracted girlhood behind, maybe she'll use her fame and power in the service of good.
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