The New York Times
November 18, 2001
A Modern Cinderella, No Prince Needed
by Joyce Millman
MOST actresses, when a script requires them to run, look like, well,
actresses required to run. But Jennifer Garner, as the C.I.A.
agent-grad student Sydney Bristow in ABC's "Alias," moves with the
concentrated motion of a sprinter. She digs in when she runs, with her
elbows tucked close to her sides, her hands efficiently slicing upward.
Best of all, she remembers to take off her high heels.
Ms. Garner's agile, soulful performance is one of the many pleasures of
this stylish action show. J. J. Abrams, the creator of "Alias," seems
to be simultaneously channeling the delicate college-girl angst of his
WB drama "Felicity" and the mordant spookiness of John Dahl's recent
film "Joy Ride," which he co-wrote. But "Alias" also rides a television
wave of grown-up Cinderella fantasies of empowerment, in which
high-octane heroines don't rely on fairy godmothers or princes for
transformation but on their own nerve, muscle and magic.
The best-known of these heroines is, of course, Buffy the Vampire
Slayer. But there's also Buffy's brainy friend Willow, who has tapped
her own well of inner specialness over the last two seasons, becoming
an ever-more confident and powerful witch. Willow (endearingly played
by Alyson Hannigan) is emerging as the most complicated character on
"Buffy." Her discovery of her supernatural gift was linked to her
lesbian sexual awakening. And since her success at raising Buffy from
the dead this season, the usually sweet Willow has developed a
provocative new edge of arrogance and recklessness, using her magic to
manipulate, not heal.
Besides Buffy, Willow and Sydney, the special-powers sisterhood
includes the three witch siblings of WB's "Charmed," the genetically
engineered superwaif of Fox's "Dark Angel," the cop with the
ancient-female-warrior battle gauntlet of TNT'S "Witchblade" and, one
could argue, Jill Hennessy's angry coroner on NBC's new "Crossing
Jordan," who has a freaky ability to solve murders by going into a
trance while acting out crime scenarios with her ex-cop dad.
Sydney Bristow is caught in a tantalizing web of intrigue, emotional
and otherwise. For seven years, the 26-year-old Sydney has been working
for SD-6, which she thinks is a covert branch of the C.I.A. In the taut
pilot episode (which Mr. Abrams wrote and directed), Sydney learned
that her estranged father, Jack (Victor Garber), whom she thought was
an exporter of airplane parts, was also working for SD-6. However, as
Jack revealed, SD-6 is not a division of the C.I.A.; it's an
organization of rogue agents -- an enemy of the United States. But,
wait, there's more! Heartsick over being used, Sydney took her story to
the C.I.A. and became a mole within SD-6. And in the pilot's final
twist, she found out that her dad was a double agent, too.
When she's not jetting off to assignments in Taiwan or Hamburg at the
pulse of a beeper, Sydney leads a seemingly normal life as a part-time
grad student and full-time junior bank executive -- at least, everybody
thinks she's a junior bank executive. Sydney is kind and exuberant, and
her friends, the motherly Francie (Merrin Dungey) and the smitten Will
(Bradley Cooper), are loyal and protective. After all, Sydney has had
some tough breaks: her mother died when she was young, her father is
cold and distant, and her adorable fiance, Danny, has just been
murdered in a robbery attempt.
What her friends don't know is that Danny was actually killed by SD-6
because of Sydney: she had let him in on her secret life, which is a
big no-no. And gnawing at the back of her mind is the suspicion that
maybe her father had a similar lapse in judgment -- maybe there's more
to her mother's "accidental" death than she has been led to believe.
"Alias," which ABC has picked up for a full season, is a brisk and
involving entertainment that balances action and heart. And Ms.
Garner's Sydney is an appealing heroine who exudes authenticity even
when she's being duplicitous. Her full-lipped mouth, her most
expressive feature, is a mercurial canvas depicting determination,
worry, delight, sorrow, calculation. In contrast to her father, who's
an emotional zombie, Sydney isn't afraid to feel. Emotion is her
greatest weapon: she throws enemies off guard by acting
girly-frightened. Then she overpowers them with some serious kung fu
fighting.
Emotion could also be Sydney's greatest liability as a double agent.
She longs to warn her unwitting partner, Dixon (the grave, steadfast
Carl Lumbly), that SD-6 is not what he thinks it is. Sydney is already
suspect; the loathsome SD-6 director, Sloane (Ron Rifkin), watches her
with a cold, avid gaze. (With his fuzzy beard, he looks like a
malevolent pussycat, and Sydney is the mouse.) And in a parallel story
line, Will is doing some spying of his own, using his reporter's skills
to investigate Sydney's frequent "business trips" and Danny's death.
You might think that, after Sept. 11, a show about a C.I.A.
agent-college girl would seem silly and superfluous. But, oddly, the
current climate of uncertainty and hyper-vigilance only enhances the
show's premise. Sydney's double life -- disarming a nuclear device one
day, taking midterms the next -- seems more credible now that we've
seen the unexpected heroics and sense of duty that ordinary people are
capable of. Sydney is the perfect television heroine for the times.
TO her friends, Sydney may seem like an average woman, but, inside,
she's special, she's powerful, she's destined for great things. Sydney
may not be a traditional fairytale misfit duckling waiting for the
world to acknowledge her inner swan; save that for "The Princess
Diaries" and every third Julia Roberts movie. But "Alias" does have its
storybook elements. And am I the only one who's amused by the fact that
the actors who play Sydney's two love interests, the dead Danny (Edward
Atterton) and her C.I.A. runner Vaughn (Michael Vartan), also appeared
together as King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, respectively, in TNT's
feminist Camelot tale "The Mists of Avalon"? Sydney's suitors are fit
for a queen.
Intriguingly, Sydney and the heroines of "Charmed," "Dark Angel" and
"Crossing Jordan" are, like classic fairytale princesses, motherless.
(Buffy's powers were well-established before her mother died last
season.) They can only imagine and wonder if they're anything at all
like their mothers, and their secret lives provide them with the sense
of identity they crave.
In the pilot of "Alias," there was a scene in which Danny prattled
ecstatically about how he and Sydney would soon be making babies, and
Sydney suddenly looked stricken. She realized that she was fooling
herself; babies and motherhood aren't part of the equation for her. So
she made the fateful decision to tell Danny the truth, explaining how
she had been recruited by the C.I.A. (or so she thought) as a lonely
undergrad. "I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere," she told him.
"Since my mother died, I always hoped I'd find someone to give my life
meaning. That person is you. I just met the Agency first. I can't quit."
The churning irony of "Alias" is how easily Sydney moves between her
three lives. In one witty scene, she has a cellphone chat with Francie
about boyfriend troubles while she's being rigged out for a covert
operation half a world away. Sydney needs to keep juggling, needs to
keep running, because her secret life is all that connects her to her
father, and without that connection, she has no hope of understanding
how her mother lived and died.
But it's also clear that Sydney stays in the spy game because she digs
the thrill and the risk. When she's on assignment, tailing a terrorist
through a Moroccan bazaar dressed in hippie-tourist garb, or sneaking
away from a foreign embassy party to photograph classified documents in
a sparkly red dress, Sydney works the play-acting aspect of espionage
like a supermodel on a catwalk. "Alias" is really about a woman
unraveling the mystery of herself by trying on and discarding
personalities, learning how much of her strength and courage is for
show and how much is the real thing. Sydney is refracted, but
paradoxically, she's one of the most together women in prime time.
You appreciate the juicy escapism of "Alias" even more after you've
watched some of those dreary working-women dramas that slouch through
prime-time like wilted wallflowers. You know the premise: exhausted
single women tangle endlessly with on-the-job sexism, difficult parents
and kids and manipulative ex's. Steven Bochco's ABC legal drama,
"Philly," is the most obvious new example of the genre, but there's
also "Judging Amy" on CBS and the mother of them all, NBC's
"Providence." Rigorously adhering to post-feminist pessimism, the
independent and miserable heroines of these shows (I'd toss "Ally
McBeal" in with this lot, even though it's a comedy) don't dare to
presume they could have it all.
In the depressing pilot of "Philly," the idealistic, newly minted
defense attorney Kathleen Maguire (Kim Delaney, formerly of "N.Y.P.D.
Blue") was heaped with so much adversity and abuse, it bordered on
sadism. First, her law partner had a breast-flashing breakdown in
court, coming unhinged over not being young, thin or desirable. (What
an execrable scene, humiliating to the character and the wonderful
actress, Joanna Cassidy, who portrayed her.) Next, a piggy judge jailed
Kathleen for contempt of court, then made her write him an apology. As
she leaned over a desk to sign her name, he looked up her skirt; soon,
the news that Kathleen preferred thong underwear spread through the
courthouse. Then, her ex-husband (Kyle Secor), an ambitious assistant
district attorney, patronized and mocked her and tried to win their
son's affections with hockey tickets on a school night.
At this point, it seemed that Mr. Bochco and the show's co-creator
Alison Cross, who wrote the pilot episode together, couldn't possibly
stack the deck any higher against poor Kathleen. But no. They couldn't
resist one last moldy display of sexism: a male police officer
confronted Kathleen outside the courtroom and called her a bitch.
At the end of her rotten day, Kathleen came home to a dark house, fell
into her kid's empty bed, hugged his teddy bear and wept. Is this a
modern heroine? Oh, please! Mr. Abrams gave Sydney more dignity under
torture in the "Alias" pilot than Mr. Bochco and Ms. Cross allow
Kathleen on "Philly." At least on "Alias," Sydney faced down her
pliers-brandishing nemesis and sneered, "Start with the teeth in the
back, if you don't mind." (He started with the teeth in the back.) But
on shows like "Philly" (and "Judging Amy" and "Ally McBeal"), so-called
independent women are forever getting emotionally beaten up. The
dispiriting message of these shows is, "It's so hard to be tough,
because we're so soft inside." And, "Accept it, girls -- this is as
good as it gets."
What woman watching the show could possibly be enchanted by the
drudgery of Kathleen's life, when Sydney is out there saving the free
world? With "Alias," Mr. Abrams (clearly a man who understands women's
fantasy lives) encourages women to dream big, hang tough and embrace
the Superwoman within.
© The New York Times Company 2003
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