Wishing Ashley Judd a happy 50th birthday this week. Here's Chris Feil.
Ashley Judd deserves some credit that’s mostly only afforded to television actresses: she’s a pulp queen. It’s like a horror movie scream queen, except for midrange crime thrillers that your dad loves. But when the movie gods dealt her a standard genre exercise she could elevate it to something incredibly watchable, like a femme fatale without all the trappings of a leacherous male gaze.
Judd would eventually riff on the dingiest of pulp for her greatest performance in Bug, but mainstream audiences are more likely to remember her for her cinematic entanglements with the courtroom, espionage, and serial killers...
You could call the likes of High Crimes and Kiss the Girls stodgy and without the addictive gloss of Law and Order proceduralism, but its Judd’s authenticity that makes them come alive. She gets to be both vulnerable and take no prisoners, playing real believable women in one of our guiltiest of genre pleasures.
As one of the first women to speak out against Harvey Weinstein’s actions in solidarity with the Me Too movement, it’s worthwhile to remember that Judd has long been vocal against the bullshit of men both onscreen and off. In Kiss the Girls, she escapes and helps take down a terrifying idolator and murderer of women. In Eye of the Beholder, she’s the serial killer (honestly, when will your Hargitay?). Or take Double Jeopardy, where she schemes to find the husband that framed her for his faked murder and actually do the deed this time. And we root for her to kill the jerk.
Why does the procedural chapter of her career get so ignored despite producing some of Judd’s biggest hits? Does their paperback quality eclipse Judd’s easy magnetism and ability to lift them to supremely watchable fun? Are we just dealing with a genre that has been relegated to television reruns these days? If that’s the case, sign me up for an Ashley Judd cop show, because I am ready to see her pointing guns and throwing the proverbial book at dastardly men once again. A queen of the crime genre deserves her throne and we've thrown Emmys at less.
Sure Judd is no stranger to a wide swath of adaptations and genres: teenpocalypse (Divergent), melodrama (Simon Birch), and other general book club staples (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood). But it’s the scraps of your dad’s section of the bookshelf that gave Judd (and us) some delectable genre gold. Or at least some tough, take-no-crap gunmetal.