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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
Forget Carrie, Samantha and Miranda. Kristin Davis' deceptively sweet "Sex and the City" character has turned out to be the most intriguing -- and sexiest -- one of all.
Feb 19, 2004 | Being part of an ensemble on a show like "Sex and the City" can't be easy. Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie is, of course, the star, and don't you forget it. She certainly hasn't, clattering around in her impractically spindly shoes and haute-bag-lady outfits, playing a character who used to be dazzlingly offbeat but who is now something much stiffer and duller: a preening, posing, self-made icon. Over the past few seasons, both Cynthia Nixon's Miranda (the bright, sensible mother and lawyer who has trouble expressing emotion) and Kim Cattrall's Samantha (the freethinking, sexually open, slinky beauty) have proven to be far more interesting characters than Carrie, maybe because they're allowed to make sloppier mistakes with much more surprising, and often pleasurable, consequences. (Every time Carrie learns a lesson about life or love, Parker makes a little moue with her mouth and changes into yet another freakazoid ensemble. Parker, who used to be a supremely likable comic actress, no longer has to act at all -- she could just lip-sync her role from across a crowded room.)
But what about Charlotte York Goldenblatt, the dreamily romantic former WASP who always wears delicate cardigans and full, floaty skirts whether Prada is showing them that season or not? The one who, fearlessly, has been known to leave her Upper East Side apartment in a velvet headband that -- miracle of miracles -- actually looks nice on her? Of the four women on "Sex and the City," Charlotte has always been treated as the whipped cream on the sundae. She's light and charming, but she doesn't wear the same readily identifiable character tags the others do: Carrie is the (alleged) wit, Miranda's got the knife-edged smarts, Samantha's sex drive is a force of nature. Charlotte is simply sweet.
But only if you haven't really been paying attention. As "Sex and the City" rounds the bend toward its last episode ever, this Sunday, I've become convinced that the unsung hero of the show, and the one who has almost single-handedly saved its final season, is its most overlooked actress: Kristin Davis.
While the other actresses have all been praised, rightly, for their comic timing (in the show's early years, Parker may even have been the best of them), Charlotte is the one who's more often deemed simply adequate, when anybody bothers to take notice at all. That may be because most of us think we know, or may even be, a person like Charlotte -- an essentially sweet-natured woman who likes her job well enough, but who harbors romantic dreams of marrying a nice, preferably rich guy and having beautiful children, and who believes there's one "right" person out there for everyone.
On paper, Charlotte seems ordinary enough to be a clichi. But Davis has always played her with no-frills, no-nonsense determination, a kind of Yankee thriftiness that actually clears more room for complexities rather than less. There may be a springtime crispness to Charlotte's skirts, but there's a jumble of old clothes in her heart, an apparent contradiction that Davis has always played with ease. She's the show's stealth actress, and the one whose character demands the utmost compassion and openness from us. Face it: Who wants to admit that Junior League types are people too?
Davis is gifted in a different way from the others. She has a knack for stylized farce that's both broader than what the others do and yet subtler and much harder to pull off. She'd be perfectly at home wrestling down the wriggly charms of elegant '30s romantic comedies. Her face, with its delicately chiseled nose and alert brown eyes, is 100 percent high-society, but her smile has the fresh earnestness of a farm girl, and she seems to know it: She plays uptown and out-of-town against each other as if there were no difference between them.
And her timing catches you like a cartoon cloud of perfume -- it may be brightly colored, but the fragrance is subtle and delicate. A few Charlotte moments from an earlier season prove it perfectly: Charlotte finds herself strangely attracted to her divorce lawyer, Harry Goldenblatt (the marvelous Evan Handler, Prince Charming-owitz), a bald, stocky regular joe who wears loud ties and sweats a lot. He's mad for her -- he will, of course, eventually marry her -- but for now, she doesn't know what to make of him, even though whatever it is he's got has already gone to work on her, subconsciously at least.
He's just helped her finalize her divorce. She's thinking of moving out of the palatial apartment she's won in the settlement, and, eager to help her further, Harry is showing her around a leather-and-chrome bachelor pad belonging to a friend of his, which is available for rent. This very pretty girl and extremely nervous boy are having a look at the tacky bachelor bedroom when Harry lets it rip: He's so attracted to Charlotte he can't think of anyone or anything else. It drives him crazy to look at her. He wants her desperately.
Charlotte, standing there in her spectacles and one of her trademark girly-girl flared dresses, is taken aback. "Harry," she stammers, flustered and flattered in equal measures, "don't be ridiculous -- I'm wearing my glasses!"
That peculiar Charlotte logic is what makes the character so much frothier, and yet so much more intriguing, than the other women on the show. In her own way, Charlotte is sexier even than the oversexed Samantha. Later, after she has tumbled into bed with Harry (and has also had, as she states unequivocally, the best sex of her life), she offers a friend a perfectly viable explanation of why Harry can't possibly become her steady boyfriend: "He's not very attractive. He's sweaty and pushy. No, no, I could never date him." Her eyes gleam, her brow furrows; she waits a beat. "But maybe just for the sex. How does that work, exactly?"
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