Hannah from Heaven

SPOTLIGHT

though it's been five years since she swam to stardom as the displaced mermaid in Splash, Daryl Hannah still has the aura of someone used to moving in another element. Perhaps it's the big, dose-set eyes, which lend the radiant face an expression of mild perplexity; or the powerful, stunningly protracted physique, which never seems quite at home in street clothes. But whether playing the acrobatic punk android in Blade Runner, the Cro-Magnon girl among Neanderthals in Clan of the Cave Bear, or the spooky performance artist tangled in red tape in Legal Eagles, Daryl Hannah always registered as a visitor from the heavens, game but unsure of the new rules. (Had Spielberg opted to cast E.T. with a human in the title role, she probably would have landed the part.) Her nimbus of sweet uncertainty gave her an edge on the other dazzling blondes bidding for marquee status in the eighties, and when she memorably devoured a lobster, shell and all, in a decorous Manhattan restaurant in Splash, she emerged triumphant as a new screen prototype: the love goddess as geek.

In the opening scenes of the current Steel Magnolias, Herbert Ross's celebration of female star power, she's unrecognizable beneath cafs-eye glasses, drab-brown teased hair, and amorphous clothes. But while the incandescent beauty is disguised, she remains ineffably herself. As Annelle DuPuy Desoto— the ungainly "glamour technician" who finds refuge in a small-town Louisiana beauty parlor—she's once again the outsider in search of a niche, and she tentatively tries on an assortment of identities, from party girl to Fundamentalist. None of them quite fits her, of course. For those of us who fell in love with her as the eternal alien, this comes as a relief. —BEN BRANTLEY

BEN BRANTLEY