Why Can't A Woman Be a Man?

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BABY SITTER. In movies as in life, this is the most traditional woman's role: hearth stirrer, home saver, raising her children and supporting her man. It ! was an emblem, we now realize, of her superiority. Modern man knows that modern woman can do the old, cool-guy stuff -- run a tractor, beat him at poker, light a cigarette in a high wind -- but that he can't manage, so artfully or efficiently, what women have done since the cave days. So there's nothing inherently retrograde about Dying Young, in which Julia Roberts performs bedside therapy on ailing Campbell Scott, or The Doctor, in which the dying Elizabeth Perkins finds the strength to give William Hurt a reason to live (though both films do get terminally sappy). It is just that Hollywood's addiction to fantasy has kept moviegoers away from matters of real life and real death, and that the industry's canonization of the superhero has persuaded viewers that less is at stake when a woman simply, courageously comforts someone else.

A half-century ago, people perked up when Greta Garbo did the nurturing. Man, woman or boy, they were all frail things, dazzled by her strength and glamour; and she caressed every lover as if he were a child with a fever. Garbo made her last film in 1941, when Hollywood was called the Dream Factory; skeptics said it dressed up lies as art. So why -- it can't be only nostalgia -- do those old films, for all their soft focus and happy endings, seem truer than today's? Because the scale was different, smaller, more intimate. Films weren't fairy tales of destruction and salvation. Men weren't all muscle or women all flesh.

This summer, though, Hollywood is serving up empty calories and calling them high fiber. Actresses may have better body tone, but most of their roles are dispiriting to anyone who harbors the hope that American movies will some day grow up.