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Say goodbye, Lizzie McGuire, say hello, Middle Eastern pop tart. Yep, Hilary Duff is all grown up now, a beautiful 20-year-old, and in her latest film, War, Inc., opening Friday, she makes a big career move. Co-starring with John Cusack and Marisa Tomei, Duff plays Yonica Babyyeah, a foul-mouthed, oversexed and underdressed pop singer so outrageous, she makes Madonna look like a nun. It's a role that might shock her clean-as-driven-snow, teeny-bop fan base, but could also jump-start Duff's mature movie career.
You drop a major expletive quite a few times in this film. That's quite a change for you. What were you thinking?
Not only am I doing that, but I'm smoking, letting boys put their hands ... The character was a bit vulgar. I don't think using the ... word would have bothered me if I had said it once or twice, but it's throughout the whole movie. But I'm just acting.
Are you worried how your longtime fans will react to a role like this?
I think that's the risk that I take. But I'm growing up, and my fans are going to grow up with me. I think there will be a mixed emotion about it. But if I lose fans, well, I don't want to limit myself in my career.
Is that the reason you chose this part?
A lot of people didn't want to give me a chance for a long time, because I was doing movies where I was nice, and I was still a kid. But that put me in a box, and people didn't want to take a chance on me. When I got this script, I flipped over it. I felt ‘I need this, I want this.' It was great just getting to play a character that was so out there and crazy.
You were 13 years old when you first appeared in the hit Disney Channel show Lizzie McGuire. What's it like growing up in public?
It's all I know, really. There are things that were hard, because I was thinking things like, ‘If I say this, someone could take it this way or that way.' I also went through a period where I felt awkward with my body. There were times I would have a meltdown, because you're working hard like an adult. But my mom treated me completely normal. She never said, "Oh, Hilary's famous.” I would get put in my place really fast.
It seems with this movie you have some sort of career plan, a way to move from teen star to adult. Do you?
I do have those conversations, but things change every day. I think, "Hmm, it might be interesting if I did that.” I'm taking a break for a while, and reading scripts. But I'd love to do a big movie, an action movie.
Well, it still seems you're going in a different direction, like in your upcoming film Greta, where you have a relationship with a black guy. Was that interracial angle something deliberate on your part?
I didn't even think about the racial angle. I just have a lot of friends in interracial relationships, and I've never been the type of person to judge that. Growing up in Los Angeles, everything's accepted.
Your mum and dad separated two years ago after being married more than 20 years. You wrote about the pain of this in your hit songs Stranger and Gypsy Woman. How has the breakup affected you personally. Has it also affected your career?
I don't think it has affected my career. I knew people would find out about it, because when I was making that album, it was on my mind. It has changed my life forever, and I wanted my fans to know about it. I was 18 when it happened, and I think growing up in my business, I grew up a little faster. You just never think it will happen to you when you're that age, when your parents have been together for so long. It was a shock, it's tough, and it's still tough every day.
Risk takers
When politics and culture satirise themselves, what is there left for satire to do? This is the problem faced by War, Inc., a broad lampooning of political corruption and war profiteering co-written by John Cusack (who also stars and produces) with novelist Mark Leyner and screenwriter Jeremy Pikser, who deal with it by putting their thinly veiled Dick Cheney stand-in on the toilet and the video phone at the same time.
War, Inc.'s laudable antecedents are many, but then, once upon a time, it was possible to watch a movie like Dr. Strangelove and have an eye-opening, revelatory, even epiphanic experience. Not so much anymore, now that culture and politics are no longer cloaked in a facade of seriousness and unimpeachability.
Doing what they can with a modest budget (which limits War, Inc. in much the same way that its small budget limited Mike Judge's brilliant but buried Idiocracy), Cusack et al. gamely take on a trillion-dollar subject and let their dry, deadpan fury fly. War, Inc. may be fuelled by a galloping sense of outrage but, as you would expect from Cusack, its tone never rises above an inside-voice.
Commercial interests
Cusack plays Hauser, a moody hit man hired by the former vice president of the United States (Dan Aykroyd) to travel to the fictional country of Turaqistan and assassinate a Middle Eastern oil minister named Omar Sharif before he builds a pipeline through the region.
If this measure seems a little drastic it's because in War, Inc. America's only interests are its commercial interests. The government is now a subsidiary of Tamerlane, a corporation headed by the former vice president, and Americans living in Turaqistan (journalists especially) remain inside a protective zone known as Emerald City.
Sound familiar? It's meant to, at least some of it is, although in a writer's statement included in the production notes Leyner expresses a desire for audiences to "see this movie in some sort of context-less, gravity-free environment.”
Soon after arriving in Emerald City, Hauser meets Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei), the lone reporter in the country who has declined having a chip implanted in her neck in order to receive the "implanted journalistic experience,” which is accompanied by a crude virtual reality theme park ride. In one scene, Hauser embarks on a rescue mission to an off-limits town called Felafel, where he encounters frantic American soldiers, shooting at anything that moves, demanding to know who's in charge.
Turaqistan is run by a shadowy figure known only as the Viceroy, whom Hauser meets by going through a bunker fronted by a Popeyes Chicken. Inside the vault-like structure, the Viceroy protects his identity Wizard of Oz style by remaining hidden behind an electronic screen that morphs every few seconds from one pop iconic face to another — Ronald Reagan, Pamela Anderson, John Wayne, a dolphin, the Fonz.
Hit man
While in Turaqistan, Hauser is to pretend that he's an events producer in charge of the trade show Brand USA, which will culminate with the televised wedding of teenage Middle Eastern pop star Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff) and the thuggish yet ridiculously pop gangster-ised son of a warlord. As Hauser falls for Hegalhuzen and valiantly fends off the advances of Yonica (whom he inexplicably considers repellent), he finds it harder to reconcile his beliefs with what he is trying to accomplish. Never mind that he's a CIA hit man. It's what he's a CIA hit man for that's eating him.
As he confesses to the consoling voice on the other end of his GuideStar navigational system, "I feel like a morally inverted character from a Celine novel.” GuideStar empathises. So do I. Somehow, what starts as a series of cheap shots in a barrel develops into something more, thanks largely to warm, engaging performances by Cusack and Tomei. War, Inc. is both right-on and somehow off, but it gets points for trying.
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