Those that can? They can be quite adorable.
Last night I watched The Dink, the pickleball movie, in which 73-year-old Mary Steenburgen plays a potential love interest for 48-year-old Jake Johnson. I say "potential" because, without spoiling anything, it doesn't go down exactly as you might expect. And though they describe it as a 30-year age difference, I suspect that is more the flattery to Johnson of aging him down than aging Steenburgen up.
It reminded me of a similar potential relationship in the movie Hello My Name is Doris between a character played by Sally Field, who was then 68, and a character played by Max Greenfield, who was then 35.
Why did these two potential relationships feel almost plausible?
Because Steenburgen and Field are both actresses who have mostly let their faces do what it's supposed to do when they age, and as a result, have maintained all the expressiveness and all the goofy charm that caused us to find them so appealing when they were ingenues.
People who have lots of work done usually don't maintain the same type of command over their actor's tools, and seem a lot older a lot sooner than these two.
It would be pretty boring if my main reason for writing this post was to say "actresses shouldn't have work done," which is a pretty tired observation and which has sort of come around the bend nowadays to involve actual body shaming. Not only boring, but also a bit problematic.
No, I'm writing it mostly because I hadn't seen Steenburgen in anything in a while and I was amazed to find that she still seems as young and spry as she has for her whole career. And that her aging doesn't seem to be occurring at the pace I thought it should.
Even back when she appeared in Step Brothers in 2008, and I guess would have been 55 at the time, I thought of her as a bit of an adorable senior citizen, remarkably well preserved and as nimble a comedienne as she ever was. I guess I was the one aging her up back then.
Maybe it's just that Steenburgen has always been in roles that were intended for a slightly older actress. I suppose playing the mother to Will Ferrell, who is only 14 years younger than she is, in Step Brothers tended to accentuate that. Even with her being a love interest for Doc Brown way back in 1990 in Back to the Future III, at only age 37,she seemed older then, in part because she was matched up with Christopher Lloyd, who is 15 years older than she is. Not that that sort of age gap is uncommon between a man and a woman in Hollywood.
I think I might be rambling a bit.
The point is, Steenburgen can make us believe that spring chicken Jake Johnson might fall for her because she is still bringing oodles of charm to the screen and is still the sort of person you yourself might fall for, in part because she's just so adorable.
I guess that's enough of a reason to post during a week when I've again been busy and not producing a lot of other interesting observations.
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