Dig At Sarandon Sums Up The Plight Of Many Middle-Aged Actresses

In humor, there is often truth. So let’s examine the cruel joke from the all-marionette Team America: World Police, which satirizes Susan Sarandon, 58, as an actress whose talent is dwindling as she ages. Ouch!

It’s not unheard-of for people to lose their fire as the years creep by. Has it happened to Sarandon?

First consider that older actresses have a hard time of it. If you remember Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in their horror-movie humiliations of the ’60s, perhaps you’ll forgive Sarandon for Rugrats 2. Steady work isn’t necessarily memorable work.

Other actresses have faded away or disappeared. Annette Bening, 46, only recently returned from a child-raising hiatus to star in Being Julia, about an older actress who trumps an All About Eve-like newcomer. Bening’s movie says talent marinates over time.

There’s marinade, and then there’s rust. An ill-advised comeback vehicle can cause a hit-and-run, as in Taxi, in which Ann-Margret, 63, plays a drunk.

Where are the actresses of yesteryear? Last we heard of Geena Davis, 48, she had taken up Olympic archery. (OK, she was also in the Stuart Little movies.) She was sunk by the pirate movie Cutthroat Island and has walked a lonely plank ever since.

Debra Winger, 49, stomped off the bandwagon nearly a decade ago, returning in 2001 for Big Bad Love (emphasis on "bad"). She is now better known for inspiring Searching for Debra Winger, Rosanna Arquette’s questing 2002 documentary about the plight of actresses over 40 in an industry that values youth and the Y chromosome.

Sarandon has stayed visible, but some of her choices have been peculiar since the glory days of Thelma and Louise (1991) and Dead Man Walking (1995). Her highest-profile movie since then has been Stepmom. In this melodrama, her character dies nobly (cough! cough!) of a dread disease, which clears the way for Julia Roberts’ character. (It takes the opposite tack to Being Julia.)

Sarandon has two movies this fall: Alfie and Shall We Dance?, both sensible choices. But they’re no Vera Drake, a movie that will undoubtedly bring British actress Imelda Staunton, 48, an Oscar nomination for playing a woman in her 50s. Staunton was so good that writer-director Mike Leigh named his untitled project after her character.

Granted, Vera Drake is a once-in-a-lifetime plum. But not all actresses can count on a director like Leigh to come along. And they can’t all hope for the kind of European sensibility that enables older actresses – like Isabelle Huppert, 51, Fanny Ardant, 55, and Charlotte Rampling, 59 – to thrive.

If middle-aged American actresses want to stay viable, they’ve got to get big roles in small movies, or decent roles in big ones. Kim Basinger, 50, got a second wind with the summer movie Cellular, but she was rarely onscreen with youthful co-star Chris Evans. Cellular played like two movies in one, an increasingly common ploy to attract a mixed-generation audience. (The female draw in Shall We Dance? is not Sarandon, who plays Richard Gere’s oblivious wife, but Jennifer Lopez, who plays his hot mambo instructor.)

The joke in Team America is more pointed. Is the problem that Sarandon is choosing unwisely by making films like the cringe-inducing The Banger Sisters, co-starring with Goldie Hawn (now 58)? Or has acting become merely a paycheck for her? Did Rugrats 2 do her in?

Our best guess – the kindest, anyway – is that there’s a tipping point, after which mediocre roles and competing priorities lead to a lessening of effort over time. And you know what that means – jokes at one’s expense made by marionettes.