Once upon a time, model and actress Gretchen Mol was supposed to be the next big thing. Vanity Fair put her on the cover of their magazine, declaring her the "It Girl of the '90s" despite not yet having done much to earn the title. That cover kind of fucked her career in a couple of ways: first, it made audiences resentful that this gorgeous blonde ingenue was being foisted on them pre-packaged as the "It Girl" when they had never heard of her. Second, it created completely unrealistic expectations around her career and every one of her performances; instead of being able to slowly build a body of work the way most actors do, she was expected to arrive fully formed and prove her "It Girl" status with every movie, a task to which no actor could live up.
Instead of shrinking away from the challenge, though, Mol has spent the last 25 years building up an impressive filmography, always doing good work even when she found herself typecast almost from the outset. Her perseverance and talent deserves to be recognized with this 24-hour marathon of her movies!
Thank you to Adam Riske for the pun title.
10 am - Rounders (1998, dir. John Dahl).jpg)
Kicking things off with Gretchen Mol's first high-profile role in John Dahl's gambling drama because it was right around the time that magazine covers were calling her Hollywood's new "It Girl." She's fine in a thankless role -- the placeholder of "disapproving girlfriend" -- that would prove to be a sign of things to come for much of her career. I like Rounders quite a bit despite disliking a lot of gambling movies (I can't handle watching people get out out of control or self-destruct), probably because this one at least has spoilers a sort-of happy ending. I'm glad Mol didn't get too locked in with Miramax early on knowing what we know about Harvey Weinstein and actresses (though there were persistent rumors that she slept with him for a career, because fuck everyone), but doing a high-profile drama at the studio's height certainly helped give her some cred. In a better and more just world, she could have had the same career as, say, Gwyneth Paltrow. Also, don't splash the pot.
10 am - Rounders (1998, dir. John Dahl)
.jpg)
Noon - Music from Another Room (1998, dir. Charlie Peters)
Our second film is a truly insane romantic comedy from Gretchen Mol's first real year of movie stardom when she was still trying to figure out what kind of actor she wanted to be and what kinds of movies she wanted to make. A little boy helps deliver a baby girl in graphic (verbal) detail and immediately nnounces he's going to marry her; jump ahead 25 years as he grows up to be Jude Law and she grows up to be Mol. Law ingratiates himself with her family (including blind sister Jennifer Tilley, asshole brother Jeremy Piven, and sarcastic sister Martha Plimpton) and proceeds to act out in stalkery ways that would get him canceled in 2025 but which in 1998 were mean to be interpreted as "hopelessly romantic" and "quirky." This movie is too quirky by half, up to and including the title, a tortured metaphor for what it feels like to be in love. Mol isn't given a character so much as she is positioned as the ideal woman, an indicator early in her career that something was amiss. Despite a good cast, this went straight to video in 1998 possibly because Jude Law and Gretchen Mol were not yet big enough names to open a movie theatrically.
2 pm - Get Carter (2000, dir. Stephen Kay)
Gretchen Mol has nothing more than an uncredited cameo in Stephen Kay's remake of the classic British gangster thriller Get Carter, but because I like this movie I'll take her participation as an excuse to program it here. Sylvester Stallone steps into the role originated by Michael Caine (who also appears here), playing a Vegas mob enforcer who returns home to Seattle when his brother is killed. Mol briefly appears as a gangster's girlfriend, just one of many welcome faces in a cast that includes Miranda Richardson, John C. McGinley, Rachael Leigh Cook, Mickey Rourke, and Rhona Mitra. I know it's blasphemy to like this movie when the original is is so beloved (believe it or not, I've still never seen it), but I've always dug it as part action movie, part gritty character piece. The energy will help break up the day.
4 pm - Attraction (2000, dir. Russell DeGrazier)
Here's a movie I hadn't thought about for 25 years until doing research for this marathon despite the fact that Erika and I definitely saw it at our local AMC theater when it was one of the only theaters in the country showing it for like a one-week engagement back in 2000. At the time, that was reason enough to go see it -- plus the fact that it starred Mol as the ex-girlfriend of a pretty boy radio host (Matthew Settle) who's stalking her until he starts a relationship with her best friend, played by Samantha Mathis in a series of unfortunate wigs. Tom Everett Scott also has a supporting role as the pretty boy's buddy. On paper it should work just because of three-fourths of its cast, but this four-way relationship thriller is fairly soggy and underserving of its stars. It's also another movie in which Mol plays a kind of idealized woman, a role in which she was typecast early on and was asked to repeat far too often.
6 pm - Laggies (2014, dir. Lynn Shelton)
Programming this one for no other reason than because it stars both Mol and Keira Knightley, another actor deserving of her own 24-hour marathon. That it's maybe my least favorite Lynn Shelton movie (at least on first viewing; it's been years) is of little consequence.
8 pm - 3:10 to Yuma (2007, dir. James Mangold)
She may have only a supporting role in director James Mangold's excellent remake of 3:10 to Yuma, but Mol's participation means we get to program a western in the Primetime slot so that's what I'm doing. She's given another thankless wife role in an ensemble full of men who have better parts, including Russell Crowe as a charismatic outlaw and Christian Bale as the rancher hired to bring him to justice. I've never been much of a Bale guy, but he's fine at being stoic and decent; much more exciting is Russell Crowe's fantastic turn in the Glenn Ford role as the worst son of a bitch who ever lived who also happens to be totally charming and likable. It's clear that Mangold is a filmmaker who's good in just about any genre, but between this and Logan is seems like he's particularly well-suited for westerns. Mol has an old-fashioned quality to her, part Grace Kelly and part Myrna Loy, that puts her right at home in movies like this.
10:30 pm - The Shape of Things (2003, dir. Neil Labute)
Mol reunites with her London cast mates for the film adaptation of the Neil Labute play they originated on stage. Paul Rudd plays a schulb who begins "bettering" himself when he gets a girlfriend played by the great Rachel Weisz. While I think I've outgrown Labute's brand of snotty misanthropy, there's still a lot I like in The Shape of Things. It's hard to totally dislike a movie scored entirely to Elvis Costello songs. Mol's role is, per usual, a little thankless -- Weisz gets the really good stuff -- but her casting makes her an interesting counterpart, a kind of anti-Weisz. What begins as yet another "idealized woman" role (she's a friend of Rudd's character who's engaged to mega-douche Fred Weller) gradually gives way to something more flawed and interesting as the story progresses. Not all of the movie works, but at least Gretchen Mol gets to turn some of her usual typecasting on its head.
12:30 am - The Thirteenth Floor (1999, dir. Josef Rosnak)
This is about the weirdest movie I could find in Gretchen Mol's filmography when it came to programming the overnight. It's also the only movie in the lineup I've never seen all the way through! It's about unlikely leading man Craig Bierko entering a VR simulation to solve the murder of his boss; Mol is, of course, his love interest. Released in 1999 in the shadow of other reality benders like The Matrix and Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor is the least remembered and the least regarded of the three, but I'm excited to finally check it out as part of this marathon because, like another movie later in this lineup, it takes advantage of Gretchen Mol's timeless qualities by casting her as both present day and period versions of her character. Also it's a remake of Fassbinder's World on a Wire, another movie I've never seen. How did I not know this?
2:30 am - The Notorious Bettie Page (2008, dir. Mary Harron)
Because Gretchen Mol didn't make much horror (there's a supporting role in 2021's False Positive, but I don't feel like watching that again), we're going to instead make our overnight horny instead of weird. Mol has her best role and her best performance to date in this biopic of Pinup Queen Bettie Page for director Mary Harron and writers Harron and Guinevere Turner, the team behind American Psycho. Bettie Page isn't nearly as subversive as that movie, but it's never trying to be; instead, it wants to give a life and interiority to a woman who has existed for so many years as a two-dimensional image. Mol inhabits not just Page's persona but her bare skin with incredible confidence and comfort, making us understand what it was that made her so special. It's a great performance, one that could have really changed the course of Mol's career if it had come along in the late '90s. By the time it came out in 2008, however, not enough people were paying attention anymore and Mol didn't get the credit she deserves for her work in this one.
4 am - Forever Mine (1999, dir. Paul Schrader)
Continuing our horny overnight, we pivot to Paul Schrader's throwback romance that was unceremoniously dumped to cable and DVD when the financiers filed for bankruptcy before it could receive a theatrical release. Mol is stunning as the wife of a shady businessman (Ray Liotta) who falls in love with the Most Intense Pool Boy Ever (Joseph Fiennes) while on vacation at a beach resort. Things take a dark turn when Liotta discovers the affair and the movie jumps ahead several years so that Fiennes can adopt a ridiculous disguise and plan an elaborate revenge. I get why this was written off in the late '90s/early 2000s -- the second half gets kind of silly -- but I like Schrader's homage to '60s melodrama because of how non-Schrader it feels. I especially like Moll's performance because it turns a character written as something as an object (yet again) into someone who's conflicted and human. This is more a vibes movie than anything else, but I dig the vibes.
6 am - The Ten (2007, dir. David Wain)
Wake up with something funny! I remember feeling a little disappointed by The Ten when we saw it in theaters in 2007 but that's because it was David Wain and his The State cast mates' follow-up to Wet Hot American Summer, one of the funniest and best comedies of the 2000s. Revisiting the movie in 2025, it's much funnier than I gave it credit for being, even if it's a big mess of a sketch movie consisting of ten vignettes (as host Paul Rudd will continually remind us), each representing one of the Ten Commandments. Mol plays an American tourist who has an affair with Jesus Christ (Justin Theroux) during a holiday in Mexico. She pops up again later in the movie in other sketches as the wife of A.D. Miles, and even gets to sing in the film's triumphant closing musical number. There's no better way to shake off the cobwebs of 20 hours of consecutive movies than with a mainline injection of silliness and absurdity. We can watch it as a goof!
8 am - Millers in Marriage (2025, dir. Edward Burns)
Let's close things out with one of Mol's most recent films and the one that made me realize that I missed seeing her in movies. She fits right into writer/director Edward Burns' best ensemble in years, playing a former alternative rock star who gave up music to raise a family, married an alcoholic manager (Patrick Wilson), and now is considering an affair with the journalist (Benjamin Bratt) interviewing her for a retrospective piece. That's just one of the subplots of Millers in Marriage, another of the writer/director's treatises on family dynamics and romantic relationships that also stars Minnie Driver, Campbell Scott, Julianna Margulies, and Morena Baccarin. I know she's been doing interesting TV work for a number of years (I've never watched Boardwalk Empire), but it's nice to see someone like Burns writing Mol an actual adult role in a whole movie about and for adults. Let's hope it's the start of a new act for her career.
No comments:
Post a Comment