Edition: U.S. / Global

Film; Catherine Keener Makes It Look Easy

Published: January 23, 2000

IT was in 1986 that Catherine Keener decided that sitcom humor might not be her calling. At the time, she had just got her first real break -- making her network debut as the eldest of three daughters in a pilot called ''The Alan King Show.'' Suddenly, she found herself on a CBS soundstage, worrying about how she was going to get a live studio audience to laugh at a lame joke.

''It was something about blue chip cookies for the blue chip crowd,'' said Ms. Keener, who turned to ''Gilligan's Island'' in her time of need. ''I didn't know how to make it funny. So I remember that I kind of clenched my jaw like I was Mrs. Howell or something.'' It didn't work. After the taping, Ms. Keener was ordered to something like sitcom detention. ''Everybody went home and I was there until, like, two in the morning, trying to get it right.''

Given the 40-year-old Ms. Keener's body of work since then, the fact that she held herself, and not the material, accountable sounds like a better joke than the one about the cookies. Whether in a starring role as a helplessly distracted indie starlet in a shoestring production like ''Living In Oblivion'' (1995) or in a glorified supporting turn as a magician's assistant and the ex-wife of an escaped convict in the 1998 crime caper ''Out of Sight,'' Ms. Keener's ability to be effortlessly hilarious is all about appearing as if she's never trying too hard. It's a brand of acting that Spike Jonze, who directed ''Being John Malkovich,'' the dryly surreal hit in which Ms. Keener stars, categorizes as ''un-flashy. Very real, but complicated. Naturalistic. More like you're watching a person as opposed to a character.''

''Being John Malkovich'' is about Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), a puppeteer turned file clerk who discovers a portal that allows people to view the world through the actor John Malkovich's eyes for 15 minutes. In it, Ms. Keener plays Maxine, a co-worker of Craig's who is flip, controlling and smug about her own sex appeal in a way the outspoken but self-doubting 90's women Ms. Keener often plays never are. Around mid-movie, Craig and his housepet-doting, frumpy spouse, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), both become romantically obsessed with Maxine. Mr. Jonze, who credits his wife, Sofia Coppola, for coming up with the idea of hiring Ms. Keener, always felt that Maxine was much trickier than she looked.

''In certain scenes, Maxine barely has any dialogue at all,'' Mr Jonze said. ''And the dialogue she does have is quick and to the bone. To make that kind of character feel not one-dimensional, I thought would be really hard.'' He said Ms. Keener was so convinced she was wrong for the part that she kept proposing she be Lotte and Mr. Jonze give the role of Maxine to Ms. Diaz, her close friend. Once Ms. Keener stopped resisting, though, Mr. Jonze reveled in a leading lady who would come to work, change into sleek Helmut Lang attire and a don't-touch-me demeanor, and do something totally unexpected in every scene.

''In one take, she just slapped Malkovich on top of the head,'' Mr. Jonze said of a scene in which Malkovich and Maxine make love on his apartment sofa. ''It made a loud, smacking sound. She could have prepared that before, but I doubt it. She was just in the moment. Like, Malkovich's bald head was right in front of her and she slapped it. It was just perfect.''

Indeed, Ms. Keener's on-screen vitality often has nothing to do with her line readings. Sometimes, it's all about her well-timed exhalations. One of her most memorable moments in ''Your Friends and Neighbors,'' Neil La Bute's 1998 withering look at modern relationships, comes when she dismisses her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend's weaselly attempts to reconcile with a simple, corrosive pfffftttt. Then there is her gift for physicality, for tweaking a potentially forgettable bit by tilting her head or flashing a smile that seems completely out of context.

''She uses her whole body to play a scene,'' said the writer-director Nicole Holofcener, whose 1995 feature debut, ''Walking and Talking,'' starred Ms. Keener and Anne Heche as childhood best pals struggling to take their friendship into adulthood. ''She does these things that are so lovely and unique. Things you can't write. Things you can't say to an actress, like, 'When you run into the lake, make your arms go up and down like a chicken.' If a director said that to an actress, she'd look at them like they were crazy.''

Ms. Holofcener is currently trailing the writer-director Tom DiCillo by 4 to 1 in the race to cast Ms. Keener in every one of their movies. (Ms. Keener appears in Mr. DiCillo's ''Johnny Suede,'' ''Living in Oblivion,'' ''Box of Moonlight'' and ''The Real Blonde.'') If all goes well, though, Ms. Holofcener will narrow the margin late this spring when she begins shooting her as-yet-untitled second film, in which Ms. Keener will appear as the angriest of three siblings -- a part written with her theatrical strengths in mind.

Don Coscarelli had better get cracking, though. His only film so far with Ms. Keener is ''Survival Quest,'' a 1989 low-budget action-thriller about dueling teams of Outward Bound-ish adventurers. On the other hand, he can lay claim to giving Ms. Keener her first co-starring feature role, albeit one that involved activities she would probably rather not repeat.