Ellen Barkin’s Bite

No one can take a punch like Ellen Barkin. An emotional punch, that is. In her first film, Diner, her husband (Daniel Stern) berates her for filing a James Brown LP under “Rock & Roll” instead of “R&B,” and her tart mask of defiance cracks, her lips press together, and her eyes roll up in a vain attempt to hold her face in line. And in a scene from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, when her husband (David Strathairn) tells her he’s leaving, she winces, and one fears for an Instant that her features will fly to all corners of the room.

That face, with its lopsided grin, wide-set eyes, and crooked nose, has been described many times. It’s a face that has been broken in by life: every emotion seems to twist and buffet it.

To watch that face express pleasure is marvelous. In the wonderfully daft new thriller The Big Easy, Barkin plays a prim, by-the-book assistant district attorney who’s seduced by a cocky New Orleans police lieutenant (Dennis Quaid). Although the film won’t be released until the end of August, their sex scene is already famous:

“I’m not very good at this,” Barkin cries, turning onto her stomach. “I’m nervous. I can’t relax. I’m very embarrassed.”

Quaid grins rakishly, says, “Relax, cher,” and reaches under her skirt.

“Stop that!”

“What?”

“That!!” Holding on to the bedpost, Barkin gasps, her features frozen in astonishment, but after the first shock of his touch wears off, she lets the bliss play over her face; soon she and Quaid are kissing and yanking at each other’s clothing and laughing like children. Little is removed, but it’s one of those rare sex scenes that don’t come off as generalized panting and posing — the giving and receiving of pleasure is palpable. It changes the way we watch the movie, the way we watch Barkin. For the rest of The Big Easy, we’re totally plugged into her.

It would be premature to call Ellen Barkin the best actress in America, but few who have seen her work would argue that she hasn’t the smarts and the talent to be just that, and soon. If Hollywood executives didn’t prefer their actresses to be conventionally, symmetrically beautiful — not to mention compliant (or, at least, less of a pain in the ass for producers than Barkin tends to be) — she’d be working as often as she wanted on whatever kinds of projects she chose.

But Barkin is not conventionally pretty (hers is an eye-of-the-beholder beauty) and certainly not a star, a fact that bothers her not because she wants limos and parties and throngs of screaming fans but because she wants better parts and less hassle once she gets them.

Although she works only every nine months or so, each appearance registers, even in films that don’t. Tender Mercies, Daniel, Buckaroo Banzai, Harry and Son and Desert Bloom didn’t burn up the box office, but Barkin has a shot at a bigger audience with The Big Easy, a thriller that’s closer to the Cary Grant-Rosalind Russell comedy His Girl Friday than to Beverly Hills Cop. In November, she’ll be seen in Mary Lambert’s Siesta, a dreamy, surreal portrait of a daredevil obsessed with her mentor (Gabriel Byrne). It features Julian Sands and Jodie Foster (with cameos by Isabella Rossellini, Martin Sheen and Grace Jones), not to mention Barkin on a tightrope and, for the first time in a movie, Barkin in her birthday suit.

Face to face, Barkin’s features are even more arresting than onscreen, and she’s dressed to show off her lithe, athletic body (she works out a lot). She can also be wickedly funny and candid; donning a pair of thick glasses, she admits she can’t see a thing while she’s making a movie: “Without contact lenses you get this squinty thing going, and everybody thinks you’re concentrating.”

She lives in Greenwich Village, in a cavernous loft divided by curtains instead of walls. The kitchen is well-stocked with health food; she notices me eyeing her grains and says, “Oh, God, am I going to have to read about the bags of millet?” Barkin says she quit drinking (“It makes me look bad”) and doesn’t eat meat, but that doesn’t stop her from taking a sip or Armagnac and sampling some sweetbreads at dinner. “I like anything that’s organ oriented,” she says. “Oh, God, what a quote. I can see it now.”

Barkin moves easily from talking about Henry James and Jane. Austen to a dismissal of the “hip sulkiness” that even good American actors tend to cultivate. She’s hard on all French actresses except Nathalie Baye. “They have no personality, those French girls, no spark,” she says. “You’d think if you stuck them with a pin, they’d maybe pop their lip out a little further.” She’s sharp, all right — even her name suggests noise, defiant self-expression. She has a lot to prove.

Ellen Barkin was born thirty-three years ago in the Bronx. When she was six, her family moved to Queens, but in spirit, she’s never left her first neighborhood; her conversation is both pugnacious and fluid, like that of a Jewish aunt gone punk. In school, where you were either a “hitter” or one who got hit, she was a hitter; deposited in honors classes, she’d ignore her brainy classmates and hang out with what her brother, George, calls “more experienced individuals.”