HOLLYWOOD -- American boxing manager Jackie Kallen is a bold, brassy, big-haired woman who swims with the sharks in a man's world.
American movie star Meg Ryan is a diffident, shy little blond who plays Kallen in the new movie Against The Ropes. She seems more fitted to Finding Nemo.
"You know," says Charles (Rock) Dutton, the actor-director in charge of the made-in-Canada production, "Meg Ryan is the polar opposite of Jackie Kallen. She was also champing at the bit to do something like this. There were some doubters -- 'Meg Ryan as a boxing manager?' -- I never doubted it."
For Dutton, reducing Ryan to the perky sweetheart from the hit romantic comedies is ignoring what actors can do, want to do, should do. It's that old bugaboo, typecasting.
"Listen, as actors you get paid those multimillions to do what sells at the box office. The thing is, the studios then forget that you're an actor and you can do other things. Since they pay you for (the successes), they don't want you to do anything else."
So, at least compared to her biggest hits -- from When Harry Met Sally to Sleepless In Seattle to You've Got Mail -- Ryan is stepping into the void, he says.
"We haven't seen her as this brassy or flashy or trashy in some aspects," says Dutton, who also plays the boxing trainer who works with Kallen to hone the talents of a neophyte boxer.
"But she was excited to do this and she was a doll to work with," Dutton continues. "She admitted, 'Charles, I don't know anything about boxing!' We went to Vegas and saw a lot of fights. We went to boxing gyms. Like a lot of women I know, once she saw people throwing punches, she was, 'Hey, this is fun!' So she got into it."
No kidding. Ryan says boxing was a blast. Both Dutton and Kallen took her to a clutch of fights. Ryan was immersed and hooked on the adrenaline rush. "I really liked it," Ryan says in one of her most animated moments in an otherwise low-key interview ses- sion. "It was really fun."
But playing this character, while a departure from other roles, is hardly groundbreaking, Ryan says. She calls her image as America's sweetheart from the romantic comedies just a media construct that does not reflect her real and varied accomplishments.
"I get in these rooms and you (journalists) all say that. But I've done so many different kinds of things for so long -- and the romantic comedies are the ones that people see or make money and that's great. But I've done different things for a long time."
In her early years, the 42-year-old, Connecticut-born daughter of a casting agent did appear in films such as D.O.A. and The Doors, moving on to Courage Under Fire, Proof Of Life and more recently the controversial In The Cut, in which she did her most graphic nudity and sex scenes.
In The Cut, directed by Jane Campion of The Piano fame, was savaged by many critics after Ryan replaced Nicole Kidman in the role (Kidman retreated because she was traumatized by her divorce proceedings with Tom Cruise; that did not seem to stop Ryan, who broke up with her husband of 10 years, Dennis Quaid, and had a tumultuous affair with her Proof Of Life co-star Russell Crowe).
Ryan says she has no regrets about In The Cut, despite the fuss around it: "Ah, well, that was one of the premier experiences of my life, being around Jane Campion and working on that film. And I think it changed me so utterly as an artist.
"The mixed response? What are you going to do? It was never a movie that was for everybody. No one ever made it to be a blockbuster. It's a personal movie that we made for $7 million on the streets of New York with great actors (including Mark Ruffalo) and a great director and a really, really interesting character. So it was a fantastic experience!"
On playing Kallen, Ryan says, "It's very different from anything I've done. I'm an actor and I like to do different things. I thought it would be really fun. I'm curious about the arc of the character."
In the film, Kallen starts as a tough-talking assistant to a boxing promoter. She decides to strike out on her own and launch a career as a promoter, selecting a diamond-in-the-rough (Omar Epps) as her first fighter. Along the route to the championship, both their egos spin out of control and threaten to wreck their mutual dreams.
Of course, this being Hollywood, very little in the movie has much to do with the real Jackie Kallen, other than her name, her profession as a manager and her fighting spirit. In the movie, Kallen is single, works as an assistant, is based in Detroit and has a big blowup with her first fictional fighter before the championship bout; in life, Kallen was married with two sons (she has since divorced after her husband ran off with a younger woman), worked as a sportswriter and boxing publicist, was based in Cleveland and took six boxers to various world titles.
Kallen says it does not bother her that Hollywood takes licence, as long as "the essence" of her saga makes it to the screen.
"I knew it wasn't a documentary. I knew that this wasn't going to be A to Z factual. The whole essence of the story is being human. This character is very human. I'm very human. I make mistakes. I don't know about the rest of you, but I own up to mine and take responsibility for everything along the way that I didn't do just perfectly."
Ryan says Against The Ropes would not have worked if it had remained faithful to the real Jackie Kallen story.
"I think, a lot of time, movies about real-life characters fail because they don't have an act structure. Lives don't have that and stories are different than lives. If you read a biography, that is a different thing than reading a script. So, in this case, it's the essence of a story. It's a thing that we're hanging our hat on to examine all sorts of things: Being under-estimated, navigating an oppressive male environment, having the thing (sexuality) that gets you in the door also be your worst enemy.
"Essentially, it's a pretty light-hearted movie, really, so it's not a thorough and philosophically deep examination of all those things. It's just a suggestion of those. You don't want to get too high falutin'. I think that would be wrong."
For Meg Ryan, it is just about right the way it is.
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