One can be happy for Joey Lauren Adams even though movies still haven’t learned what to do with sex.
Joey is the extremely female, uncommonly sweet and endearingly worldly blond star of “Chasing Amy,” one of the most interesting movies ever made in America about sex, and a film of uncommon frankness.
“Amy” hits video stores next week, after a remarkably successful theatrical run for a low-budget, untouched-by-human-moguls independent flick. It will doubtless scandalize many of the homes whose VCR spools it wends its way onto.
But why the shock? In my youth–the 1950s, when magazines advised girls not to say “darn” because it might lead to swearing–people could pretend to be shocked by the gynecologically-correct nature of “Amy’s” dialogue. In the 1950s, you could be shocked seeing Doris Day in pajamas.
But as Joey informs me, she being 29, times have changed.
“I think definitely people are open to talking about sex this way,” she said, during a phone conversation last week from L.A. “It’s not a taboo subject. It’s okay to talk about it. People are more communicative. There are more outlets for talking about it, especially with the Internet. With our generation, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find a virgin.”
The critics have joyfully seized upon the fact that Joey’s character in “Amy” begins the film as a lesbian. The plot turns on her relationship with a totally accepting young man (Ben Affleck) who falls in love with her anyway.
Political correctness aside this is not what the film’s about. It’s about people in love confronting each other’s pasts–and Joey’s character’s past includes not only pitching woo at other women, but lots of randy heterosexual stuff that the accepting young man can’t accept.
“It’s a hard thing for some people,” Joey said. “I don’t think they realize that experiences are what make people what they are. If you love someone, how can you not love everything about them? But that’s a hard thing to do. So much easier said than done. I think the film was popular because it is so honest, and wasn’t afraid of ruffling feathers.”
We can all be happy for Joey. A native of North Little Rock, Ark., Joey went to L.A. out of high school, kicked around trying to break into the business, ended up going off to Bali with an artist, followed him to New Orleans and somehow survived.
The artist got work there painting pictures used in a Nicholas Cage movie and, hanging around the set and nearby bars, Joey got discovered. Even so, her TV and film work–“Married . . . With Children,” “Return to Hip Hop High,” “Dazed and Confused,” “The Program,” “The Coneheads,” “Sleep With Me”–paid little or, worse, scale, which is all she got for “Chasing Amy.”
Life is now better.
“Now I can pay my rent,” she said.
Will “Chasing Amy,” a film that deals with sex as something to talk about, ultimately make a difference in movieland, which deals with sex as something to make money with (i.e.: Bruce Willis’ anatomically correct frontal self in “The Color of Rage;” his wife Demi’s anatomically adjusted frontal and aftal self in “Striptease.”)?
In Joey’s case, maybe. In her next movie, “A Cool Dry Place,” she plays a Kansas girl who has two love scenes in a pickup truck with her film boyfriend.
“We’re having sex and kissing between hot, heated breaths,” she said. “I hate that kind of stuff. But the director (John N. Smith) was just amazing. He let us have fun with it. We ended up making it comedic. It was great. It was far more interesting, and real. There is humor in sex. It’s not all sexiness. . . . Funny things happen. You get leg cramps.”
Joey hit on something there that movieland still doesn’t understand, something that the late Mary McCarthy, author of “The Group,” noted 40 years ago, saying, “I don’t know how anyone could watch other people making love. It’s either grotesque, or comical.”
And she made this observation without having seen either Bruce or Demi.
