What went well
Remember the 90s? You didn’t just want to be our glamorous best friend (who can burp!). You were keen to show your worth in other, less well-paid ways. Your scene-stealing turn – and dress – in The Mask was followed by low-budget indies such as The Last Supper and She’s the One and even when you edged close to the A-List, you picked wisely. Your comic finesse was showcased in impressively diverse ways in My Best Friend’s Wedding (uptight, giggly), Being John Malkovich (big hair, pet-obsessed) and There’s Something About Mary (lovable, puts sperm in hair) and your spurned lover was the only good thing about Cameron Crowe’s otherwise shallow Vanilla Sky. You signed on for two franchises, one mostly good (Shrek) and one mostly bad, except if drunk (Charlie’s Angels), yet the latter led you to the big bucks, earning $20m for the sequel.
What went wrong
That meant you appeared to be less concerned with being an actor and more about being a movie star. Your comic appeal, which required a slight helping hand from directors like the Farrelly brothers and Spike Jonze, became annoyingly broad, thanks to the embarrassing “women can be gross too!” comedy The Sweetest Thing and last year’s double whammy of The Other Woman and Sex Tape. You tried to break out of your self-imposed prison of dumb blonde jokes but crashed with forgettable blockbusters such as Knight & Day and The Green Hornet, and struggled as a cheetah-owning sociopath in Ridley Scott’s nonsensical thriller The Counsellor. And that’s without mentioning Gambit, The Box, What to Expect When You’re Expecting and What Happens in Vegas.
What you should do next
Annie shone a light on where you might be going wrong. Despite playing a bitter failed singer in the musical remake or an alcoholic narcissist in Bad Teacher, or a financially strapped housewife with a disfigured foot in The Box, you always looked as if you could step off set and be grinning on the front of Cosmo with a second’s notice. Not that you need to go full Aileen Wuornos any time soon but it would be intriguing to see you play someone that closely resembles a real person. You’re undeniably funny (something we’ve only recently got to see when you host SNL), but you keep picking plane comedies, typified by sitcom scenarios and great lighting. What you need is a comedy based in reality and for that you need either Nicole Holofcener or Noah Baumbach. Both writer/directors have managed to rehabilitate actors stuck in brainless studio fare. Holofcener gave Jennifer Aniston one of her few great roles as an ex-obsessed cleaner in Friends with Money, while Baumbach allowed Ben Stiller to plumb dark, relatively pratfall-free depths in Greenberg and While We’re Young. Allowing you to play a multi-layered woman aware of your age would be a fascinating watch.
More in this series
There’s something about you, Cameron Diaz - here’s how to recapture it
No more directing, Russell Crowe, or going soppy
A titanic Von Trier meltdown could get you back on track, Kate Winslet
Hey, Ryan Gosling, you’ve given girls advice, now let us return the favour
You need discipline, Nicolas Cage. Call Michael Haneke!
