That (Thirty) Million Dollar Smile

by Eric Peterson

Thirteen years ago, archeologists in Bulgaria uncovered a female skeleton that turned out to be 9,000 years old. That’s a find under any circumstances, but what made this discovery particularly extraordinary was the skeleton’s perfectly straight, perfectly shiny teeth. The scientists named their discovery “Julia Roberts.”

If right now, someone asked you to close your eyes and picture Julia Roberts, and you followed along (go ahead and try it, right now), she might have blonde hair or auburn, she might be formally or casually dressed, but chances are she’d be sporting her trademark smile – warm, generous, full of joy, existing for no other reason than that its wearer feels authentically, buoyantly happy.

Rumor has it that Julia Roberts has insured her smile for thirty million dollars, and it’s easy to see why. If something – anything – were to happen to those precious chompers, it would greatly inhibit Julia’s ability to work, or at least to get the twenty million dollar paychecks she received for some of her biggest hits.

Stacey and I recently devoted an entire show to Julia Roberts’ career, and of course we talked about the smile – that iconic moment in Pretty Woman when Richard Gere snapped a jewelry box just as she was reaching toward it, causing a spontaneous moment of laughter (you know the one), and what it feels like to be denied the smile, in a serious film like Mary Reilly.

When Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly reviewed Mary Reilly in 1996, he didn’t much care for it – using EW’s “letter grade” system, the film earned a C-minus. In his review – in the very first paragraph of his review, in fact – he writes, “Anyone eager for a glimpse of the famous Roberts smile — those luscious wax lips come to life — had better look elsewhere. In Mary Reilly, the lips are taut and nervous, drawn into a stoic line of woe. Her eyes gleam with trepidation.”

The moviegoing public didn’t much care for Mary Reilly either, or at least most of them didn’t buy a ticket. It cost $47 million to make the film, and it made only $12.3 million worldwide.

As I mentioned on the show, I remember seeing a line chart in a copy of Entertainment Weekly after the film’s release (I searched online when preparing this blog entry, but couldn’t find it) detailing the correlation between the number of times that Julia Roberts flashed her multi-million dollar smile in some of her more notable films and the amount of money each film made – and there was a direct correlation. More smiles, more money. At least in the eighties and nineties, no one was interested in a Julia Roberts that was somber or scared.

Nearly twenty years later, Julia made August: Osage County with Meryl Streep, Margo Martindale, Julianne Nicholson, Ewan McGregor, Juliette Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, and more. In it, Julia doesn’t smile much either. The film didn’t break any box office records, but it did make a profit, and it fared better critically (a 64% score on “Rotten Tomatoes” compared to 26% for Mary Reilly). The world, it seems, is finally ready for a Julia Roberts that is something other than a bundle of joy – her performance as Barbara in August: Osage County is a study in a woman’s anger; in fact, it’s difficult to even call it anger; rather, she’s ROYALLY PISSED OFF in almost every scene.

Perhaps it’s because she’s no longer an ingénue. If I were optimistic, I’d suggest that perhaps our society is becoming less sexist and is finally allowing women to express emotions that might threaten or shock people. And while I’d like that to be true, I somehow doubt it. Whatever the reason, it’s entirely possible that what lies ahead for Julia Roberts the actor might be twice as exciting as what we’ve previously witnessed in the career of Julia Roberts the movie star.

And all the same, if we remember her 9,000 years from now, we’ll probably still be picturing that iconic smile. And maybe that’s okay, too.