Michelle Pfeiffer: Sweet Liberty

Revisiting and celebrating the work of Michelle Pfeiffer, the best actress of my lifetime.

Sweet Liberty (1986) is a tough one. I find parts of the film charming—the scenes featuring a certain leading lady, natch—and the rest painfully boring. It's very much in the vein of the melancholy comedy, a genre that was perfected in the 1970s and 1980s. These movies are suffused with a sadness throughout, usually derived from how they portray life and love and aging and grief and everything else we face while desperately trying to avoid growing up.

Sweet Liberty has all of that, but it's also a pretty standard male midlife crisis film. Alan Alda is Michael Burgess, a history professor whose historical novel is being turned into a Hollywood film, and production is taking place in the small North Carolina town where he lives. Michelle Pfeiffer is Faith Healy, a Method actress playing the female lead in the film.

Faith isn't all that well defined, so it's a minor miracle that Pfeiffer does so much with so little here. Instead—and stop me if you've heard this one before!—she seems to exist within the framework of the film simply to shake the sleepwalking Michael out of his midlife stupor. I'll give Alda and the filmmakers credit though: in 1986, if you were looking for a young, female muse to fill this part, you couldn't do any better than Pfeiffer. So, well done on the casting, folks.

I saw this film as a teenager and, beyond enjoying Pfeiffer's subtle charms, it mostly left me cold. I rewatched it last year and, obviously, found the more adult themes a little too relatable now, but it's still a crushingly dull film, overall. It does have a few things going for it. One, it's the sort of film you rarely see anymore, aimed squarely at adults, target demos be damned. Two, it's worth a look just to see a young Pfeiffer—fresh off phenomenal, breakout performances in Scarface (1983) and Into The Night (1985) and right before star-making turns in The Witches of Eastwick (1987) and Dangerous Liaisons (1988)—appearing in a less developed role, but still working wonders with it.

There's a fantastic moment in Faith's apartment, while she's on the phone and Michael drops by. She's young, sure, but she's not naive, and he quickly learns she's also not just a pretty face sent to inspire him (Oy—this trope was worn out even back then). She's a complex assortment of personalities and emotions, and even more jaded than he is. Even the casually fluid way Pfeiffer pushes her hair up off her face is revealing, expressing Faith's world-weariness and maybe also some subtle flirting. It's exciting to watch this scene today, to see hints, in one small moment, of what Pfeiffer would bring to so many other bigger, better roles.