Kate Beckinsale’s Vacancies

Friday, April 27, 2007

British actress Kate Beckinsale can’t seem to win.  The 33-year-old plays a variety of roles to avoid typecasting, and some critics complain that she only suits whatever type of movie they first saw her in.  The genre-tweaking films she tends to star in are liked or loathed by critics, and her subtle acting gets the same response.  Her recently released film “Vacancy” also falls prey to these problems, the film’s title describing the status of the theater seats.

Many critics bemoan “Vacancy” as morbid and cliché even for a horror flick.  Some happily relate that it succeeds where many horror flicks fail because it makes us actually care about the characters involved.  Beckinsale plays the wife in a marriage about to end in divorce from incompatible methods of coping, though they still love each other.  Their 3-year-old son died in a wreck when his mother was driving, so she can’t bear to speak of him, but the father wants to talk of him daily.  The twosome realize they’re trapped in the seedy suite of a hotel that makes its money by snuff films, recording the gruesome deaths of their tenants.  Both elements of the film build the tension.

Some might say Kate Beckinsale herself suffered from a slight mental “Vacancy” earlier this week when she called the anorexic the nice girl’s version of a crack slut (though she didn’t put it even that politely).  Anorexia, like drug abuse and alcoholism, were more the fault of parents and not media images, she claimed.  Parents of anorexics are furious, insulted by what they call Beckinsale’s uneducated remarks.

But Beckinsale was an anorexic herself for a few months at age fifteen.  She insists the incident has been overplayed by the media, true, but if her experience suggests anorexia stemmed from a home issue, perhaps mothers of anorexics might want to do more than ridicule her.