Over the last few years, Sharon Stone found her stride as a middle-aged but sexy actress. Then she had a really, really bad idea and made Basic Instinct 2.
Let me immediately confess that I am not qualified to write an article about Sharon Stone. Last weekend I planned on seeing her newest movie, Basic Instinct 2, but I never got around to it, mainly because I couldn’t persuade anyone to go with me. Like me, they had all read the scathing reviews posted earlier in the week. Unlike me, they had not committed to writing an article about Sharon Stone, so they didn't feel compelled to go. Truth be told, even the editor of the fine web publication you are presently reading had his doubts about my ability to handle it. When I wrote him about this article, his cryptic reply was, “Good luck watching that movie.”
All that aside, there is no denying I’d be in a much better position to comment on Sharon Stone and her new movie if I’d actually seen it. Since I chickened out, I will not remark on Stone’s performance, nor will I comment on the quality of the movie itself, though I will point out that Basic Instinct 2 was technically a “bomb,” bringing in just over $3 million its opening weekend. That’s a scientific fact, not an opinion.
An opinion would be more along the lines of, “Basic Instinct 2, the long-gestating follow-up to Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 blip on the zeitgeist screen, is a disaster of the highest or perhaps lowest order.” Another opinion would be that Basic Instinct 2 is a “prime object lesson in the degradation that can face Hollywood actresses, especially those over 40.”
Those are not my opinions, of course, but instead the highly qualified opinions of someone who has actually suffered through a viewing of the movie: Manohla Dargis from the New York Times. While I have about as much respect for those who spend their efforts writing long-winded reviews of obviously shitty movies as I do for those shitty movies themselves, I must say Dargis brings up an interesting point: age. More specifically, Sharon Stone’s age.
Most of the articles and interviews I read about the actress spend a great deal of time discussing her age. These articles suggest she is unique among Hollywood actresses for graciously accepting the aging process instead of rushing to the Botox lab or the surgeon’s scalpel. In an interview about her role in Catwoman, Stone says, “I’m not particularly interested in pretending to be 35 for seven years, but now I think there has been an evolution where you can be 45 and work in film, where you can actually say you’re 45 and still have an interesting career.”
Maybe she’s right. In her mid-to-late 30s and early 40s, she made terrible movies. The one standout was Casino, for which she won a Golden Globe. Besides that, it was duds like Sliver, The Quick and the Dead, Sphere, and Last Dance. But at 45, Sharon Stone had a comeback. It started with her guest appearances on the TV show The Practice as a brilliant, sexy, and delusional lawyer. Not only did she have cool spiky hair, but she was a lot of fun to watch. In fact, after she left the show, I stopped watching it.
A year later she starred in Catwoman as an over-the-hill model who goes psycho trying to protect the secret of an age-reversing face cream which happens to be toxic. While that was a bad, bad movie (I went to that one alone), I thought she did a good job and I appreciated her self-referential and mocking portrayal. Following that was her small but extremely satisfying part in Broken Flowers, as a middle-aged (but still sexy) mother to a teenage sex-pot named Lolita.
So far so good. It looks like at 45 a woman in Hollywood can still have an interesting career, as Sharon Stone postulates in her interview. But the interviewer forgot to ask her about the years post-45. What happens at 48? Well, apparently an actress has a mid-life crises, losers her nerve, and runs shrieking back to the virtual womb, hoping to find that happy place where her career was born.
Let us go back to that place with her. It’s 1992. After struggling for over a decade in bit parts and B movies, 34-year-old Sharon Stone finally gets a role that earns her the recognition, fame, and salary she has always dreamed of. Basic Instinct is a phenomenal success, earning over $350 million worldwide. Not only is Sharon Stone famous, she is actually immortalized for the scene where . . . well, we all know which one I’m referring to.
Fast-forward 14 years. Basic Instinct 2 is not a phenomenal success, but a phenomenal failure. And Sharon Stone, at the ripe old age of 48, trying to recapture the dangerous sex appeal she had a decade and a half earlier, is hardly doing much to support her theory that an actress can have an interesting career in her mid-40s. I want to call her and ask her what was going through her mind when she decided to make this movie. Does she realize how pathetic she seems, or does she truly believe she is celebrating her sexuality as an older woman?
Sharon Stone is not stupid, you know. Her IQ is 154 and she is a member of Mensa. Considering this, it is next to impossible for me to believe she is not fully aware of the public spectacle she is making of herself. She must have her reasons. Perhaps this whole thing is part of a long-term strategy to reach an end goal that I am unable to comprehend.
Whatever the case, I hope the strategy takes a different course for her next few movies. If not, then I fear we can expect to see a 62-year-old Sharon Stone baring it all in Basic Instinct 3 -- and I doubt even staunch New York Times movie reviewers will be able to stomach that.
