Los Angeles Times

Sunday, September 29, 2002 | Home Edition | Section: Calendar | Page: F-39

Driving Miss Sorvino...

After a Bumpy Post-Oscar Ride, Mellow Mira Mixes it Up With Three New Films

By: HUGH HART | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Memo to studios: Mira Sorvino is ready to do a big fat Hollywood comedy. Anyone who has forgotten how funny Sorvino can be need only see "The Triumph of Love," an 18th century screwball sex farce that opened Wednesday in which she plays a princess bent on seducing a pompous philosopher (Ben Kingsley) and his spinster sister (Fiona Shaw) in order to restore her true love (Jay Rodan) to his rightful place on the throne.

Sorvino's comedic gifts have not been demonstrated much in recent years. Most of the 17 films she's made since 1997's "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion," released a year after she took home the supporting actress Oscar for her role as the helium-voiced hooker in "Mighty Aphrodite," have featured the New Jersey-bred old actress in serious roles.

"Triumph" marks a highly theatrical return to comedic form, and Sorvino says she's ready for more. "I can't predict what's going to come across my desk, but I'd love to do a big comedy."

Given its limited release by Paramount Classics, "Triumph" might not qualify as a "big" movie, but Sorvino's role is super-sized. She drives virtually every scene as the devious, gender-switching Princess. "When I first read the script, I thought, 'Oh God, I can't play this woman, I can't stand her, she's such a monster,'" says Sorvino, sitting down for a bowl of seafood soup at a cafe in Malibu, the community where she's lived for the past few months. "She's this master manipulator who divines each character's true desire, figures out what they really want to hear and then tells it to them."

The appeal of playing Princess/Phocion was elemental, she says. "It's what you'd imagine as a little girl, you know: I got to be a princess, I got to be a boy, and I got to do all these naughty things and it was thrilling." Among the thrills: going toe to toe with Kingsley's Hemocrates, a repressed academic who tries to fend off the Princess' charms. Kingsley likened his scenes with Sorvino to a tennis match at Wimbledon. "The crowd holds their breath when you get two really good tennis players against each other, but at the same time, playing with each other in the same game. We can only hit the ball back as well as it comes at us."

Sorvino was living in Paris two years ago with her boyfriend, actor Olivier Martinez, when she first talked to "Triumph" writer-director Clare Peploe about the role. Peploe recalls Sorvino's impromptu audition. "We went to my apartment, which Roberto Benigni had lent me, and Mira just read me a bit of Phocion seducing Leontine in this flawless British accent, and I felt like Leontine. I was completely seduced."

Once Sorvino clinched the deal after meeting "Triumph" producer Bernardo Bertolucci, the Harvard-educated actress did extensive homework. She read Pierre Marivaux's original 1732 play, in French. She studied 18th century portraits at the Louvre so she could mimic the artificial poses as a "tip of the hat" to the era's preening sensibility. She also borrowed some moves from contemporary figures. "I pulled from a lot of crazy pop culture icons to play the guy. I watched the Albert Finney movie 'Tom Jones,' and Capt. Kirk is in there a little bit to get that larger-than-life, macho, bravura thing.

"It's like 'Twelfth Night,' or any of those plays where you have women masquerading as men. You want the audience to be laughing: 'Well, she doesn't get it quite right, because she's trying a little bit too hard.' "


Before filming "Triumph," Sorvino made "The Grey Zone," a fact-based Holocaust drama slated for an October release. She plays a concentration camp captive tortured for smuggling gun powder to a group of Jewish prisoners planning to blow up the crematoriums at Auschwitz.

When casting "The Grey Zone," writer-director Tim Blake Nelson found Sorvino's performance as a downtrodden Bronx housewife in Spike Lee's 1999 urban drama "Summer of Sam" particularly intriguing. But would she buy into his vision of a deliberately flat, documentary-like film? And would she be easy to work with?

"I encountered none of that difficult attitude others had told me about," Nelson says.

Sorvino has confronted those "difficult" rumors more than once. "When I won the Oscar, my life became a total whirlwind and I got rocketed into doing one film after another very quickly, and no one really tells you how to do it, what the rules are, and how to be the consummate professional.

"You sort of have to learn as you go. Now I know what needs to happen on a movie set and how the actor has to be a team player, which I don't think I really understood before."

Nelson says Sorvino delivered precisely the muted performance the picture required, without "a moment of movie-star antics.... Hers is a lean, entirely unsentimental performance and it takes a lot of guts for an actor to resist the impulse to embellish."


In the wake of "Aphrodite" and "Romy and Michele," Sorvino could have capitalized on her platinum persona by picking more projects in the same vein. That was not an option, she says."I had done 'Mighty Aphrodite' and [the TV movie] 'Norma Jean & Marilyn,' and then I did 'Romy and Michele' and that's sort of three dumb blonds in a row--well, Marilyn Monroe was not a dumb blond but that's how she was perceived--so after that, I did get a lot of offers for dumb blonds, but I wouldn't do them. As Robert Redford said to me when I did 'Quiz Show'"--Sorvino slips into a mock stentorian voice--"he said, 'Beware the sex roles, Mira; they come to a dead end at 35.' And I think that was good advice."

While dating Quentin Tarantino, a fan of horror and action genres, Sorvino followed "Romy and Michele" with "Mimic," in which she played a scientist fighting mutated insects. The sci-fi thriller was praised for Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's stylish visuals but failed to connect at the box office. Sorvino has no regrets."Guillermo is really brilliant and funny so I just said, 'I'm going to try this.' "

Next came "The Replacement Killers," a martial arts feature directed by Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day"). The appeal for Sorvino? "Rather than being a sad character, I wanted to run around and kick and jump and do stunts. It was fun. That was where I was then. I'm not really there anymore."

The decision to make "Free Money" "had nothing to do with any kind of judgment call, any kind of career planning," Sorvino says. "It was like, 'Marlon Brando? Sign me up.' "

Reflecting on her hits and misses, Sorvino, the daughter of actor Paul Sorvino, says, "I think in the past maybe some of my choices were more like 'OK, well this seems fun, let's do it.' But you have to remember, I was just starting out and I was more innocent about the whole thing."


Sorvino moved to Los Angeles last year from New York in part because she simply could not find a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment with southern exposure at a reasonable price. While visiting Los Angeles with her mother, Sorvino spotted a house in Malibu and decided on the spur of the moment to move west. "To think that I was dying for a tiny square foot where I could put a tree, and now I have land and trees and birds and lizards."

There were also show-biz considerations. "In moving here," she says, "I would be committing myself 100% to my career, which I've never really done before."

Sorvino continues to alternate between studio projects, like Warner Bros.' Civil War drama "Gods and Generals," opening in September, and smaller films, including "Between Strangers," an ensemble drama co-starring Sophia Loren, and Sundance entry "Wisegirls," both slated for release later this year.

"I would enjoy doing a bigger movie right now because I think, just in terms of the sequence of things, that would be nice," she says. "But if somebody sent me some brilliant script about the fascinating women living in some fantastic age, I'd have to think twice."

In short, Sorvino, the master seductress in "Triumph of Love," is herself subject to the seductions of a great script, regardless of commercial potential. "It's just a question of what I fall in love with."

"You have to use some kind of instinct meter about it," she adds. "I think I'm getting closer to my instincts now. I don't think there needs to be a plan. I think there needs to be love. I think you need to love what you're doing and then the rest is anybody's guess."

Hugh Hart Is a Regular Contributor to Calendar