Drew Barrymore: American Treasure

By Sara Freeman

Drew Barrymore made her screen debut when she was eleven months old as the precocious star of a dog food commercial, a role she landed in pure Drew Barrymore style. When she was auditioning, her canine co-star took a bite out of Drew’s baby nose and the producers braced themselves for a tearful impact. Instead, they got laughter. And a new child star.

In an age where the media thrives on seeing famous women implode with the likes of shaved heads, drug spirals, and sex tapes, Drew Barrymore has gone to hell and back and done the unthinkable by surviving and thriving. By the age of fifteen she had lived out the typical Hollywood downfall: became a great star, got addicted to drugs and alcohol, attempted suicide, went to rehab, and, most tragically, endured the effects of a fizzled out career. Realistically speaking, Drew’s artistic life should have ended before 1990.

However, like a phoenix that emerged from the ashes of excess, Drew Barrymore has since become a staple of cinema culture and made her creative mark as an author, model, ambassador, actress, producer, and director. With her eternal grace (or lack thereof), steadfast sense of humor, and trademark optimism, Barrymore has, most importantly, also transformed into a positive female role model and iconic women’s picture heroine by appearing in empowering, often feminist-minded films like Riding in Cars with Boys and Whip It. And in mostly comedies, no less! She’s definitely not Josie Grossie anymore. Now the only tragedy in Barrymore’s life is that she’s not appreciated on nearly the level she should be. Drew Barrymore is an American treasure and we should all be grateful to have her around.

But that change obviously didn’t happen over night. Barrymore’s reboot took nearly fifteen years of hard work and perseverance to get to her glorious small and big screen 2009 trifecta of He‘s Just Not That Into You, Grey Gardens, and Whip It. After getting out of rehab and writing her autobiography, Little Girl Lost, Barrymore spent most of the ‘90s rebuilding her career by appearing in twenty-five different productions. Following a string of wacky, surprisingly violent flicks like Poison Ivy, Doppelganger,

and Guncrazy, Barrymore got a career boost doing supporting roles in Boys on the Side, Everyone Says I Love You, and, most famously, her terrifying Marion Crane-ish turn in Scream. The Wes Craven horror flick might not seem as scary as it once did, but the opening with Barrymore’s Casey being stalked, harassed, and mangled while talking on the phone to her killer stands as one of the scariest moments in horror because of her desperate, fleeting hunger for survival. It still blows my mind that Casey didn’t make it out of the opening scene and Sidney Prescott survived three movies. Ah, well. The blonde always dies before the brunette.

By 1998, Barrymore’s popularity was firmly cemented within the teen movie scene. She appeared opposite Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer and melted our hearts as the sunny, albeit conflicted waitress torn between the jerk she’s engaged to and Sandler’s troubled wedding singer. After that became a hit, she appeared in one of my personal Drew Barrymore favorites, EverAfter: A Cinderella Story, which updates the classic fairytale with a bit of feminism and honors the Cinderella films of the past like Now, Voyager with its sincere spirit and mature storytelling. As Danielle De Barbarac, Barrymore became a warrior princess - a fiery, free spirited damsel not in distress whose intelligence, strong will, and justice seeking attitude landed her the man of her dreams and got her the hell away from her wicked step mother and sister. Part Errol Flynn, part Bette Davis, Barrymore’s Cinderella is the type of gal the famous character should have been all along.

1999 is known as a golden year for cinema. Most people attribute this to the sterling quality of films released that year. It was the year of The Ninth Gate, Boys Don’t Cry, The Insider, All About My Mother, and The 13th Warrior after all. I also consider it to be bright and golden because that’s the year Drew Barrymore’s very own production company released its first film. In 1994, Barrymore was introduced to Nancy Juvonen on the set of Mad Love. They became fast friends, decided to start a production company together called Flower Films, and worked like the dickens over the next five years to produce their debut flick, Never Been Kissed.

In that film, Barrymore plays Josie Gellar, a geeky, loveless twenty-five year old newspaper copywriter who goes undercover as a high school student to try and receive the popular high school experience she never had. On paper,

Never Been Kissed seems like its cinematic morals might be questionable - an ugly duckling gets a makeover, becomes ravishingly beautiful, and then meets the love of her life. And, while that might be the basic plot of the movie, Barrymore turns it into so much more than that. One of her greatest gifts as a performer and creator is her ability to infect everything around her with sincerity and heart. She elevates even the silliest of stories (hello, 50 First Dates) to new levels because she believes in them so much. In Never Been Kissed, she crafts Josie into a well-rounded ugly duckling turned lovely swan. Josie’s career, friends and family, and self confidence are just as important to her as finding a special guy to love. Lesser, more Katherine Heigl-esque films would have floundered in the face of such soulful storytelling.

Throughout the ‘00s, Barrymore and Juvonen produced seven different films, most of which were box office successes and starred Drew. Their first millennium endeavor was the ass kicking revamp of Charlie’s Angels. Barrymore appeared opposite her gal pals Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu in the often hilarious girl power romp that is just way more fun than it has any right to be. She also produced the cult hit Donnie Darko, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (and is hard at work on a new TV series based on the show), Duplex with Ben Stiller, and the Farrelly brothers’ Fever Pitch. While her decade wasn’t cram packed like it was in the ‘90s, Barrymore’s cinematic contributions in the 2000’s were of much higher quality and more bona fide Barrymore.

In 2001, she also acted in one of my favorite Barrymore performances as Beverly Donofrio in Penny Marshall’s Riding in Cars with Boys. In 1965, Beverly gave birth to a child at the age of fifteen. The film chronicles her desperate attempts to become a writer despite being saddled with having a child at such a young age and grappling with her drug addicted husband, played by Steve Zahn. The film is rife with true blue women’s picture themes and its often depressing subject matter is all the more potent because of Barrymore’s troubled past. It’s like a glorious combination of the tragedy of Stella Dallas mixed in with the ambition of My Brilliant Career.

Onto the trifecta. While everyone was gushing over the absolutely terrible Sandra Bullock and the absolutely terrible Blind Side last year, I was too busy following Barrymore’s amazing 2009 output to even fart in Bullock’s

direction. She starred in Everybody’s Fine, produced and starred in He’s Just Not That Into You, starred in the fantastic HBO production of Grey Gardens, and starred, produced, and directed Whip It. While Everybody’s Fine didn’t really make a dent in anyone’s cinematic life, the multi-narrative He’s Just Not That Into You (which I’m not really that into) grossed nearly $200 million worldwide and stayed in the top ten at the box office for nearly two months. It might not be that great of a movie, but it’s hard to fault a successful romcom when it comes along.

Grey Gardens bowled me over the first time I watched it. It bowled me over even more when I watched it two more times that day. The famous Maysles Brothers documentary, The Beales of Grey Gardens, brought two famous ladies into the pop culture lexicon: “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, Jackie O‘s first and second cousins. The reclusive mother and daughter made headlines when their spectacular squalor was broadcasted all across the world in the 1960‘s. The film spans from the 1930’s all the way to the filming of the documentary. While the Maysles certainly captured the magical, nutty essence of the Beales in their film, Michael Sucsy’s narrative take on the mother-daughter duo, played by Barrymore and Jessica Lange, resonates powerfully as a family drama. It’s clear from the get-go that Big Edie and Little Edie only have eyes for each other, but over the thirty year course of the film, their manipulative relationship reads more tragic than loving. Big Edie suffocated Little Edie into staying by her side and Little Edie’s desperate need for love and approval overshadowed her mother’s life as well.

I’m convinced if the film had been a theatrical release instead of a TV movie, Drew Barrymore would have won an Oscar nomination last year. It’s by far her finest performance and she gives Little Edie so many layers of vulnerability, humor, insanity, and passion that it almost makes it hard to watch Little Edie sink into the maddening world of Grey Gardens. Lange, Barrymore, and the film itself received a supreme amount of accolades and nominations, including Emmy awards (the movie and Jessica Lange won), Golden Globe awards (Barrymore and the movie won), and Screen Actors Guild awards (Barrymore won) last year. It’s just not right that actresses like Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock have won Oscars when Drew Barrymore could act them into a frazzle any day of the week.

In the end, though, that’s alright because no one on the planet earth has the privilege of saying they directed Whip It other than Drew Barrymore. Whip It is perfect contemporary genre cinema and truly emblematic of everything that makes Drew Barrymore an icon because every shot, gesture, conversation, etc. breathes thoughtfulness and humanity. So few films made today, especially female-driven ones, are considerate of every single implication and action their characters do. The film is such a welcomed relief after enduring so many tired, clichéd chick flicks over and over again.

Whip It is about awkward teen Bliss Cavendar (starring a delightfully not pregnant Ellen Page) and her desire to both please her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) by competing in beauty pageants and follow her roller derby calling. In addition to jamming for the awesome Austin Hurl Scouts team alongside Smashley Simpsson (Barrymore), Rosa Sparks (Eve), Bloody Holly (Zoë Bell), and Maggie Mayhem (Kristin Wiig), Bliss also works at the Oink Joint restaurant with her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat), and attends high school most of the time. It’s a simple story, true, but its intelligence and earnestness set it apart from every other teen/female driven flick since Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress.

As a director, I full well expect Drew Barrymore to become the female Clint Eastwood. She’s mastered great storytelling in her very first film and I know she’ll continue to make great, modestly budgeted gems for the rest of her days just like Mr. Eastwood. She was attached to direct a sequel to The Wizard of Oz, but now Sam Raimi’s taken over. I hope it’s not a case of the Lynne Ramsay/Peter Jackson Lovely Bones scenario and she actually has something else coming down the pipeline.

In any case, Drew Barrymore is totally in charge of her own destiny and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next. Whether she’s producing, acting, or continuing to join the ranks of the few celebrated female filmmakers out there, I’m sure anything she does in the future will live up to the meaningful, genuine quality standards she and her collaborators have established for themselves. She is nothing but a credit to her gender, profession, and persona and it’s about time we stop taking her for granted because Drew Barrymore deserves to be appreciated for the creator and American treasure she really is.