Susan Sarandon’s life and work have an uncanny way of reflecting the complex and changing roles of women in contemporary society. Off screen she is the devoted mother of three children, two born after she entered her 40s. She also is a human-rights activist and the live-in companion of actor Tim Robbins, 12 years her junior and the father of her two sons.
On screen she has made 39 films in 29 years. The range of her parts is remarkable: a monster seducer (“The Rocky Horror Picture Show”), a poetry teacher and baseball fan (“Bull Durham”), a waitress and rape victim (“Thelma & Louise”), the ideal mother (“Little Women”) and a nun (“Dead Man Walking”).
Her working-class women are particularly convincing, but no matter what the social status of her characters, women filmgoers identify with their emotional lives and yearn to emulate their brave strides toward self-realization.
Saturday, she adds another memorable female to her pantheon. Sarandon stars with Stephen Dorff (“Blade”) in “Earthly Possessions,” an adaptation of the Anne Tyler novel. Directed by Broadway’s James Lapine (“Into the Woods”), “Earthly” features the actress as a disillusioned housewife taken hostage by an inept bank robber (Dorff).
This performance proves once again that Sarandon has ripened with age, rather than succumbed to it. Time has deepened the actress, giving her the wisdom and the self-confidence that are nature’s compensation for other losses. Maintaining her allure and defying both Hollywood and society’s prejudice against women over 40, she has inspired hope in untold numbers of middle-aged women.
In person, the actress lives up to her reputation as the thinking man’s sex symbol. Fifty-two years of living haven’t dimmed her seductive aura. The comely figure and the beautiful face combine in a womanly glamor reminiscent of ageless European actresses like Jeanne Moreau. Sarandon adopts a substantive no-nonsense conversational style as she sits down to talk about the HBO movie, the trajectory of her career, mothering, aging, and loving. This is a woman who knows what she thinks.
Speaking to the age difference between the actors in the film’s leading roles — Sarandon is 52, Dorff 25 — she says, “I think that they identify very specific things that they love in each other that have nothing to do with age. There’s a bit of an advantage in the age difference. They can’t respond to one another in a cliched way. I don’t think he’d be able to get what he gets from her from someone younger or his own age.”
This kind of thinking has worked for Sarandon in the past in film romances with an age gap. In “Thelma & Louise” she was 12 years older than actor Michael Madsen, who portrayed her boyfriend; in “White Palace” she was 13 years older than co-star James Spader; and in “Bull Durham” she was 12 years older than Tim Robbins.
Seated on the sofa near her, Dorff nods his head in agreement. “She’s the first person to believe in him and wants to protect him from the mistakes she sees him making,” he says. “It’s a kind of strength he’s never had behind him before. She calms him down and wakes him up to the fact that life’s too precious to throw away. He really grows to care for her, and she cares for him. The love works to his advantage because he becomes a better person.”
In turn, he helps her escape the psychological confines of her existence and claim her independence. “They start to respect themselves in ways they haven’t. They forgive themselves; embrace themselves. Then you’re in a position to have some interesting things happen,” Sarandon says.
Lapine captures the essence of the relationship. “She’s having an affair with a young guy in a way that’s different. It’s an emotional affair, more than a sexual affair. It’s a different kind of love. I think both men and women are going to find it exciting.” Charlotte Emery’s hard-won strength is a quality she shares in common with many of Sarandon’s characters. The actress has summed it up succinctly: “They don’t feel like strong women. They feel like women who finally do something, but it costs them quite a bit, and it’s taken them quite a while to get to that point. They’re always on the edge of some kind of abyss. That’s what interests me.”
There is a comfortable chemistry between Dorff and Sarandon as they converse about the power of love. It’s clear Dorff believes he is sitting at the feet of the master.
“I just followed Susan,” he says. “Whatever she did, I did. I trusted Susan.” The actor serves her tea and takes her lead throughout the conversation. Dorff’s combination of adoration and respect for Sarandon is another example of how she reflects the advancement of women. We simultaneously can be perceived as desirable and as professional role models.
If you ask Sarandon how her life came to mirror women’s progress, she shakes her head in awe, then circles the question approaching it from various directions. She talks of character actors versus stars and the need to create a broad base of roles to ensure longevity. She points to the importance of sometimes renouncing common wisdom: Sarandon started playing mothers against the advice of her agent. Then she focuses on an Interview magazine story.
“I did the cover of Interview magazine when I started out in 1970, and then they ran an interview with me in 1994, almost 25 years later. I felt like Forrest Gump. I’ve attracted watershed films, movies that are very controversial. `Joe,’ my first movie, marked the emergence of the conflict between the hardhats and the hippies. `Pretty Baby’ and `Thelma and Louise’ caused a big stir. They all hit very specific political and social changes that I’ve gone through.
“I’m going to sound like an old hippie now, but I am. I think you choose people and you choose projects to come into your life. And in doing so, in being true to yourself, it reflects what’s going on for a lot of people.”
It’s a risk-taker’s philosophy, but the chances Sarandon took led to a more honest and satisfying delineation of women on screen. Off screen they’ve brought her a rich and full life. It will be interesting to see where her journey takes her next.
