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It's okay to have mixed feelings when one of your favourite under-the-radar celebrities suddenly breaks out with a major role. On the one hand, you feel gratified that the rest of the world has caught on to what you've known about him all along: that he's cute, talented, brilliant all around. On the other hand, you remember when there was room enough on the bandwagon to put your feet up, and now you're lucky if you can find a seat at all. Damn all you Johnny-come-latelys! Yeah, that's right: I was here first!
I really have been on the Topher Grace bandwagon for a long time. I even have proof! (And believe me, I took a lot of shit for picking Grace over Elijah Wood in that match-up once the Lord of the Rings movies came out.) But...I'm just saying, that story is four years old. I've been a Grace partisan since back when That '70s Show was still watchable, and not a showcase for character-breaking and stuntcasting. Since Ashton Kutcher was that show's big heartthrob, and not Demi Moore's chew toy. Since before Grace was displaced temporarily as America's favourite skinny geek boy by Adam Brody -- since, in other words, before we all realized that Adam Brody was a douchebag poseur one weekend at the Viper Room away from forming his own vanity rock group. I've been loving Grace, in other words, long enough for several lsser young actors to be presented to us, make four flops, and slink back to gay porn.
So this is now Topher Grace's moment to seduce the rest of North America with all the adorableness we've appreciated for years, and his progress in this project has been admirable. He actually kickd off his 2004 media assault back in '03, as the genial (if too little seen) fiancé and eventually husband to Julia Stiles's nascent feminist in Mona Lisa Smile (a role which must not have been much of a challenge for him, given that he'd already fictionally squired Stiles's cookie-faced doppelgänger in Traffic, his very first film role). Mere weeks later, Grace moved on to pining after the bland, duck-mouthed fake hayseed Kate Bosworth in Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! -- and it was at this point that we at Fametracker first audited his fame, finding that there was a very real danger Grace might be on the wrong path. The movie might have been okay had Bosworth's Rosie displayed any personality traits to make her the tiniest bit interesting, never mind desirable; trust us, she really was just awful -- and it's a shame, because other than Sean Hayes, Nathan Lane, and her, the movie's cast is bursting with very charming performers (Gary Cole, Josh Duhamel, and Grace's real-life girlfriend Ginnifer Goodwin) who do the very best they can with the extremely thin material they're given to work with. (Now that it's playing on the movie networks, you can make your own less objectionable director's cut by TiVo-ing it and fast-forwarding through Bosworth-heavy scenes or muting her insufferably lispy line readings.) You can see how his part in Hamilton! might alarm us enough that we'd suggest a course correction.
Fortunately, those early fame-expansion sallies were nothing compared to the frontal assault Grace effected in 2004 Q4: a well-reviewed romantic lead role -- with sex scene! -- opposite Laura Linney in P.S.; the winkily fictionalized version of himself in Ocean's Twelve; and his biggest and best role yet in the Weitz brothers' hype-living-up-to In Good Company. (Don't let Scarlett Johansson's dull Quaalude voice and disturbingly flat affect keep you away: she's bad, but she's not in it that much, and she's definitely no Kate Bosworth. Grace is also married, in the film, to Selma Blair, so while we're on the subject, can someone please give Grace another Laura Linney to play off -- a love interest who doesn't bug the crap out of us?)
It's inevitable to compare the film careers of Grace and his '70s co-star Ashton Kutcher. Both were nobodies before the sitcom premiered. Attention lavished on the show's cast was split between Kutcher and Grace -- Kutcher as teenaged girls' likeliest crush object, and Grace as its most subtle comic talent. Both parlayed their '70s fame into movie roles in 2000 -- Kutcher playing a contemporary Kelso in the stoner comedy Dude, Where's My Car?, and Grace playing completely against type as a rich, craven hard drug user in Traffic. And then, their paths really diverge: let's just say it's fitting that, in 2000, Kutcher also co-starred with Ben Affleck in Reindeer Games, since he seems to have emulated Affleck's policy of accepting every role in every bad movie that he's physically able to cram onto his schedule: Texas Rangers, Just Married, My Boss's Daughter, Cheaper By The Dozen, and The Butterfly Effect probably comprise the docket for Hell's film festival. (Bad line-up, but at least it's warmer than Park City.)
As for Grace...well, Hamilton! isn't necessarily anything for him to be proud of, but we can imagine that it looked good on paper, had the real Hollywood satired focus-grouped out of it, and might have been a lot more palatable with a decent female lead. Mona Lisa Smile was another picture that was poorly executed, but gave him the opportunity to work with the director of Four Weddings and a Funeral and the single biggest female star making movies right now. Then P.S. which, though just a wee little indie, was well-regarded. And now In Good Company. Grace has half the credits to his name that Kutcher has, and the percentage of Grace's movies worth seeing more than once is a lot higher than Kutcher's, which suggests that Grace has worked less due not to a lack of offers, but to choosiness. But then, Kutcher could stand to be a little more discriminating in so many aspects of his life, really.
The story Grace's very busy publicist has been pushing with regard to Grace's role in Company is that it's made him an adult star and redeemed him for his having started in a sitcom, much as Big finally did for Tom Hanks. It is the sort of role that Hanks did well when he was young -- seemingly callow and smart-mouthed, but with hidden emotional depths. And Grace would probably be very happy, as any young actor would, to have the sort of career Hanks has had, what with the flipping back and forth between drama and comedy, and the getting to work with some of the world's best directors, and the back-to-back Best Actor Oscars, and the riches and fame and nice-guy reputation. The only problem is that if he graduates from little one-page magazine profiles to multiple covers, and starts getting the whole hour when he goes on Ellen, and then adopts some group of veterans as his pet cause (has anyone put dibs on Grenada yet?), then everyone in the world will know who Topher Grace is and start expecting all his movies to be life-changing works of art that inevitably disappoint us, instead of having no expectations for his movies that his performances make them exceed. We're not greedy; we don't have any illusions that Grace will, or should, become the single biggest male star making movies, or your default leading man. For him to be an excellent character actor who surprises and delights us when he pops up in movies -- like the William Fichtner to whom we compared him, waaaaay back in that 2 Stars 1 Slot story -- would be just perfect.
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