A glaring current example of this is the terribly hackneyed "Entrapment," in which new bombshell on the block Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the eager young acolyte to Sean Connery's worldly wise art thief. Zeta-Jones' only compelling moments come, tellingly enough, when she does an intricate, solo, silent dance to avoid a web of laser rays that lie between her and a million-dollar piece of artwork she's set on swiping. So electric in "The Mask of Zorro," in which she was allowed to sweat and cross swords with the most macho of them, Zeta-Jones fails miserably here at being the pouty young thing suited up in designer clothes. Even the usually unflappable Connery knows it.

Also Today Stealing beauty "Entrapment" is a sexy art-heist thriller -- until it goes for the cash.

Certainly older men have always had a certain cachet with women, and if you hew to the Freudian belief that we're all looking for our fathers, it's a wonder that leading men aren't more overwhelmingly gray-haired than they already are. But I chafe at the cinematic notion that women are not only in search of an ideal lover, they're in search of a sage who can repair their prematurely screwed-up lives merely by exposing them to a vast reservoir of life knowledge. As those of us in the real world know, age does not necessarily confer wisdom, especially when men are concerned.

Filmmakers are doubtless taking some cues from the real-life industry, inspired by matchups like Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, the recently split Michael Douglas and Zeta-Jones, and 80ish Tony Randall and his late-20s wife, with whom he's recently had a baby. Such pairings are hardly new in Hollywood, where marriages of power or social profit know no shame and therefore no boundaries of age (or anything else). But something else is at work, a venerable truism that has been sharpened to a vicious point by the last 30 years of unsparing, overmarketed American youth culture: Nobody wants to be old. Not even the most religious plastic surgery devotee believes he can stop time, but nobody wants to admit that time passing makes a difference. We must be impervious to time, or at least appear to be. That's why you don't see Sean or Clint or Warren on-screen wielding a cane, or shaking out handfuls of vitamin supplements, or dressing in anything less hip than the Gap. Or setting their sights on a woman much older than 30.

The most recent Academy Awards confirmed the new status of older (and flat-out old) as hot property. During a pre-show chatfest, Geena Davis was interviewing James Coburn about his resuscitated career in the wake of the critically acclaimed "Affliction." Davis, 40 or thereabouts, suggested that she and the 70-year-old Coburn "burn up the screen together" at some point, and leered mildly in his direction. Coburn (whose wife is significantly younger than he is) at least had the grace to look startled. He should. He hit his professional stride a bit before the emergence of an intransigent, forever-young '60s generation, whose founding members now seem to be the butt of that great cosmic joke called aging. The movie stars who built their legends during the establishment of the omnipotent youth culture and came to embody it -- Redford, Hoffman, Beatty, Eastwood et al. -- find themselves in the inevitable but highly untenable position of being cast out by that culture. (The exceptions here are Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, in my book. Don't ask. It rubs our sense of democracy the wrong way, but certain privileges are inborn.) So they rage against the dying of the light by making sure the light stays burning in the form of nubile young women.

Coburn and his chronological confreres, like Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Charlton Heston, were perfectly prepared to be old -- sure enough, Coburn plays a vastly embittered old man in "Affliction." But his filmic prominence reads differently in the context of today; his familiar irascible presence telegraphs not so much disappointment and emotional wounds -- clear evidence of age -- but proof that old men will be boys. No matter that he misbehaves, he's still got the stuff. (Used to be that stuff referred to much more than sex appeal; it used to mean bearing and character. Walter Matthau was old when he was fairly young, a prickly Oscar Madison his whole life, and Lemmon was always less virile than prissily intellectual. Of course they're comedians, who tend to be exempt from he-man status, though that's increasingly less true of comedians today. It's stud or nothing.)

The converse has not been true with the depiction of mature women on-screen, even though women were as revolutionized as men by the '60s. The cruel difference is that while everyone expects women to stay looking young, nobody expects them to have much screen value (or social value) past a certain age. Men, of course, are allowed as many wrinkles and neck veins as the cameras can artfully conceal and still get over. Even though Sissy Spacek in "Affliction" was smart and modest and perfectly capable of being without a man -- she finally had to dump ace loser Nick Nolte -- Coburn taunts her across the kitchen table for merely being the age she is: "You're gettin' old, and there ain't a damn thing a woman can do about that," he fairly spits. Of course, this comes in the aftermath of her rejecting his odd, drunken advances, but its mean spirit still stings; even sensible Spacek flushes at the remark. And she's barely 40, slim -- where does that leave the rest of us? The best that a mature actress can do in a lead role (I stress mature, not bona fide old, because since the death of Jessica Tandy, old women haven't existed at all as lead actresses) is lift her chin, grow old gracefully and focus on not corrupting the dignity of the process by pursuing a younger man. When she does she's generally a harpy, a pathetic, self-deluded harridan à la Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Boulevard."

Next page | Hollywood: ALL older women are obsessed with sex