It's part of an actor's job to change appearances. And it has long been part of the star's job to undergo a little surgical correction, a nip here, a tuck there. That said, and Stone notwithstanding, the mania for increasingly youthful-looking faces seems fundamentally different from the old-fashioned ruse in which the Broadway actress temporarily pulls her loose skin back with some tape. For one thing, the tape comes off. For another, unlike the film actor, the stage performer doesn't have to navigate the close-ups that inevi-tably betray every secret, no matter how artfully hidden.
The last few decades have been calamitous for American film actresses (of any age), who have been increasingly marginalized by the very industry they helped build. It would be wrong to put all the blame for Stone's appearance and performance in Basic Instinct 2 on the industry; greed and vanity surely played a part, as did behind-the-scenes wrangling. To judge by the unflattering lighting and camera angles, Caton-Jones had no particular love for his star. He wasn't about to save her from herself and indeed seems to have decided that the best way into or maybe around the material was to divide it into two films: one, a fairly somnolent procedural with British actors; the other, a hysterically pitched Hollywood star vehicle.
For amusement's sake, it is possible to read Basic Instinct 2 as a metaphor for contemporary American-British political relations (a psychotic Yank lures a decent Brit into a web of deceit and murder), but this is a poor reward for two hours of drift and sludge. The camp pleasures fleetingly promised by the crazy opener and the first few minutes of Stone's vamping soon give way to boredom and time to contemplate, yet once more, just how brutal it is to be an actress in Hollywood. Last year, Stone delivered a gem of a performance in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, reconfirming that her work in films like Casino was not an aberration. She was luminous and touching in Jarmusch's film partly because the role called for her to act her age, and she happily complied.
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