By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Mystic praise: lovin' me some Julia!
A couple of gentlemen of Manhattan goo and gah over movie star Julia Roberts and her B’way debut in Richard Greenberg‘s “Three Days of Rain.” Ben Brantley‘s review is charming in its unabashed confessional quality: “[S]he’s stiff with self-consciousness… only glancingly acquainted with the two characters she plays and so deeply, disturbingly beautiful that you don’t want to let her out of your sight… I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic. Ms. Roberts, after all, is one of the few real movie stars—and I mean Movie Stars, like the kind MGM used to mint in the 1930’s—to have come out of Hollywood in the last several decades. Lord knows, she isn’t a versatile film actress… Her range onscreen runs from feisty but vulnerable… to vulnerable but feisty…. Her strength, as far as her public is concerned, is in her sameness, which magnifies everyday human traits to a level of radioactive intensity, and a feral beauty that is too unusual to be called pretty. 
Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.” Meanwhile, David Edelstein coughs up New York’s front cover furball: “The close-up is Julia Roberts’s voodoo. Critics and elite cineastes discuss Julia Roberts with a certain amount of condescension. No one claims she’s not a true movie star, but is she much of an actress?” Edelstein pours on the sop: “On the other hand, Roberts has inspired in this reviewer a fair amount of gush. During my tenure as film critic of Slate, readers made sport of my frequent application of the word “thoroughbred.” I stand by it. It’s not that she’s an icon of glamour. This is a woman who was once married in bare feet, and part of her charm is that she doesn’t move especially gracefully. It’s not that her features are refined, either. They’re outsize, even freaky: that friendly, unpatrician nose with its bumpy slope and large nostrils; that smile that’s wider than most people’s heads… It’s that somehow those clown-princess features coalesce into one of the best faces ever captured on the big screen. She’s plainly gorgeous in still photos, but it’s in motion that the real magic happens. She can entrance you with the tiniest shifts in expression.” But let’s leave it with James Wolcott over at his joint: “The reviews for [Roberts’] impersonation of an upright ironing board in ‘Three Days of Rain’ acknowledge that even as a stationary object she might have tried putting a little more oomph into it. But the same reviewers use the occasion of her Broadway debut to pay slave tribute to her plebian-royal majesty, swooning as if no pair of goggles devised by science is strong enough to shield the eyes from the solar radiance of her beauty whenever she parts those lush lips and gives us one of her heehaw grins.”
