Zellweger is aging — how dare she!

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This article was published 25/10/2014 (4355 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s being called Facegate. This week, reports started surfacing that Renée Zellweger had become a completely different woman. “This is not Botox or even surgery,” tweeted one commentator about the movie star, who was snapped at the Elle Women in Hollywood event. “It’s a MISSING PERSON ENQUIRY.”

Some of the Internet chatter about Zellweger’s “new face” involves the kind of ugly snarking that is regularly used to demean women in Hollywood, especially those who have the temerity to be over 30. A quick look at comment boards confirms a predictable amount of anonymous nastiness.

But some fans express genuine puzzlement, which I shared. I didn’t recognize Zellweger at first, and I’m not putting this on. When I clicked on the story, not really knowing what it was about, I had a moment of disconnect. Before I dug into the text, I assumed there must have been a mix-up. Maybe some overworked photo department had put the wrong picture under that Zellweger headline.

My confusion was followed by a lingering sense of loss. Bridget Jones is gone and she’s not coming back. A face I liked for its quirkiness and sweetness had vanished.

Any celebrity-watcher is prepared for faces to be different. Sometimes — OK, rarely — these faces are different because of the natural ebb of age and time. More often they are different because they have been pulled and filled and smoothed and shellacked into Hollywood’s ridiculous 50-is-the-new-30 beauty standards.

Zellweger’s transformation is something else, neither a marked improvement nor an atrocious falling-off. It’s more like something essential about her face has just disappeared. (And I don’t mean youth. Photos taken as recently as 2012 show Zellweger looking perfectly swell and Renée-like.)

Zellweger’s replacement is an attractive 40-something woman, but she is strangely, sadly generic. That round, dimpled face has become longer and leaner, its edges more defined, its proportions standardized. Zellweger seems to have given up being herself — and stars are arguably paid to be themselves, even when they are playing other people — to become a passable imitation of Robin Wright.

It’s no use playing the blame game here. Aging is not allowed for women in Hollywood. Neither is anything else.

A star who chooses plastic surgery is skewered for desperately clutching at youth, mocked as a parody of her former self. Everyone knows Hollywood runs on cosmetic procedures, but anyone who makes an obvious slip-up — who is too puffy, too gaunt, too stretched, too bulgy — will be savaged, a propitiatory offering to the gossip industry.

On the other side of this lose-lose equation, anyone who “lets herself go,” anyone with arm jiggle or a little pouch of fat over the knee or tell-tale blue veins on the back of the hands, will be attacked in the tabloids with accusing yellow arrows and shaming headlines.

Most female celebs try to avoid these outcomes by keeping up rigorous (but subtle!) maintenance regimens, undergoing punishing workouts and following diets in which carbs are only a hazy 20th-century memory. The payoff seems mingy. Hollywood tends to believe that any good parts for women over 45 can easily be covered by Meryl Streep, and the leftovers are mostly sexless mothers, tragic spinsters and worn-out working-class survivors. If you’re lucky, you get to play Mark Wahlberg’s mom (even though you’re only 11 years older than him).

And if the industry is hard on most middle-aged women, it’s ruthless with former sweethearts like Zellweger, who made her breakthrough as an apple-cheeked ingenue in Jerry Maguire. For Zellweger, there is simply no good way to go.

Many commentators have struggled to find an appropriate feminist way to talk about her new face. Should we chastise her for caving to absurd expectations? Should we applaud her choices? Should we just shut up already?

Her face has become a gender issue, and for that reason it needs discussion. It’s ironic the whole frenzy followed a Women in Hollywood event, where presenter Jennifer Garner had pointed out there is no Men in Hollywood event because basically every day is about men in Hollywood.

Warren Beatty attended the event as well, his face proof that male actors also feel the pressure to look young.

But expiry dates for men and women remain decades apart. Tom Cruise, Zellweger’s co-star in Jerry Maguire, can still be seen saving the world while romancing women like Emily Blunt, Olga Kurylenko and Michelle Monaghan. Zellweger seems headed straight to video.

Facegate has us looking back at Zellweger’s career. We should look forward, wondering about women like Jennifer Lawrence. We talk about her as an exception to Hollywood’s merciless turnover in young female stars. We used to talk that way about Zellweger.

Let’s hope that we can start thinking differently about women, age and beauty — at least before Lawrence’s face starts to change.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca