Fascinating discourse spurred by actress Renee Zellweger’s shockingly changed appearance. Not especially younger. Just unrecognizable after surgeries, it’s rumored, to widen her narrow eyes and narrow her wide cheeks. I had to stare hard at this picture to find Renee: Oh there she is around the lips and the jut of her chin.
Is this self-mutilation, a la Bruce Jenner? A woman exercising her free will, whether it does or doesn’t please the court of public opinion? Or a response to ageism in Hollywood — which is what Frances McDormand posits in a quote I might have surgically embedded into my own furrowed forehead (with LED lights maybe?): “No one is supposed to age past 45 —sartorially, cosmetically, attitudinally.”
How much cooler Frances looks, sounds, is than the kind of woman she’s never been: “I was often told that I wasn’t a thing,” she said. “ ‘She’s not pretty enough, she’s not tall enough, she’s not thin enough, she’s not fat enough.’ I thought, ‘O.K., someday you’re going to be looking for someone not, not, not, not, and there I’ll be.’ ”
She is, in my opinion, what 57 should look like and, more important, act like.
DIANE di COSTANZO 