Sizzlin' Sherilyn

SPOTLIGHT

like a glamour queen of yore (she resembles Jane Russell on a bed of straw in The Outlaw), Sherilyn Fenn knows how to shift the produce around. Entering a scene in slow reverse, she stops only when she finds a solid backrest. She then pushes out the top shelf, and pouts. In Gary Sinise's neoclassical, hard-knuckled adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (John Malkovich lisps as the excitable Lennie), Fenn does her most petulant lounging to date. As the only woman on a ranch full of sweaty, shirtless men, she leans against doorframes, fence posts, and trees, making each piece of wood feel special. "It's so cool in the barn," she croons, swaying like a breeze. (Malkovich's crossed eyes nearly meet in the middle.) But Fenn isn't a candy cane, as she was on Twin Peaks, where she tied a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue, or the recent Ruby, where she played a high-class stripper chaperoned by a gulping Danny Aiello. Here she's angling not for cheap feels but for conversation of more than one syllable. Young and fresh, she's bored cooped up in the house. She doesn't even have music to soothe the savage breast—her hothead husband done broke all her records. Can't a gal get some attention around here? Until Lennie's big mitts get the best of him, Of Mice and Men is the first movie in which Sherilyn Fenn's pinup appeal is employed as a positive life-force rather than a perverse come-on. She keeps her sunny side up.

JAMES WOLCOTT