I never thought that I’d ever say this, but I’m really warming up to Katherine Heigl. Yes, she’s got a major image problem (not unlike Megan Fox) that was fueled by her own rather expressive mouth, but Katherine has seemed a lot more human by way of her recent essays on marriage and mothering as well. Obviously, I’d still like to burn her entire closet — a feeling that is entirely justified by these photos of her latest outings (over the past month or so) while shopping with her mother.

On a more professional front, people are starting to talk about Katherine’s faltering movie career in terms of reflecting upon women in Hollywood. They might as well call it the “The Katherine Heigl Problem” since it’s expressed in such dire terms. One piece in particular from HuffPo’s Nico Lang is worth exploring in full, but here are some excerpts:

Hollywood is not a nice place for actresses, something even a passing glimpse into the career trajectories of Thora Birch, Jessica Alba or Janeane Garofalo will indicate. If you’re a woman in Tinseltown, the industry is not a space that’s run by you or for you — and any success you have is seen as ancillary, a tie-over to summer tentpole season. When a movie you’re in does well, like Oscar nominees The Help or Bridesmaids, people won’t stop talking about what a huge surprise it was, and if your movie tanks, studio heads will threaten not to cast women as leads anymore. Unless you are Meryl Streep, Judi Dench or Helen Mirren — women known more for being “thespians” than “entertainers” — this treatment intensifies as you get older. Even one time box-office darlings Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon can’t open a movie these days; Witherspoon’s new film, This Means War, counts her third disappointment in a row, and Roberts’ highest-grossing recent film as a lead, Eat Pray Love, failed to come even close to the $100 million success mark — starkly underperforming especially when considering its star power and mega best-selling source material.

This brings us to Katherine Heigl, a woman who went from being the great white hope of women at the box office to not being able to outgross $50 million or even make back her budget. Much has been said, including by me, about how Heigl herself has created the fiasco that has become her career — her alleged difficult behavior on set, her unpopular public statements about the projects she’s involved in, her perceived irritability — but this has more to do with media gender bias than Heigl herself. For instance, Daniel Craig and Matt Damon have recently taken to making increasingly brash public statements about projects they’ve worked on, their personal politics and views on modern society — and no one has criticized them, questioned their box-office viability or used their gender to explain their remarks. Like Sean Penn, they’re men in an industry dominated by men — and unless they’re saying something overtly racist, they can say just about whatever they like, and in the case of Charlie Sheen, they might even be applauded for it.

In fact, I would argue that the male-dominated public backlash about Katherine Heigl’s statements on Knocked Up — in which she called the film “a little sexist” — proved her own point on the film’s sexism. I like most of Judd Apatow’s films, but I don’t think even Apatow would call himself a writer who understands women — as the women in films like Knocked Up are generally mothering figures or unsympathetic — brittle, shallow or unstable. If women are seen as being “cool,” it’s because they’re like “one of the guys.” In Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Funny People, which were, respectively, produced and directed by Apatow, it’s the laid-back, dude-like qualities of the female leads, Mila Kunis and Aubrey Plaza, that attract their male counterparts. When he does create sympathetic women, it’s because he’s leaving the writing of women up to women, as in the case of Bridesmaids, or because he’s writing for a man — but with boobs.

However, the problem with Heigl herself is that she’s good at talking the talk — speaking out about the inherent sexism in the movie industry — but terrible stepping out and doing anything about it, and she seems almost willfully against challenging the norms of gender in cinema that she criticizes. In an interview conducted shortly after Knocked Up made her a star, Heigl criticized the fact that every up-and-coming actress is touted to be the “next Julia Roberts” but mentioned, “There’s not another woman I look at and think, ‘That’s it. That’s whose career I want to have.'” Similar statements on the subject and her subsequent career choices show Heigl doesn’t care about awards; she wants to be a rom-com queen, a genre not exactly known for empowering women. However, what Heigl doesn’t get is that rom-com stars like Roberts got to their A-list positions by taking chances within those genres and pushing the boundaries of what women are allowed to be. Although Pretty Woman wasn’t doing much for equality, Julia Roberts’ best vehicles, My Best Friend’s Wedding and Erin Brockovich, show the lead achieving happiness by not ending up with the guy. Roberts finds herself through her career, getting involved with her community, helping others and becoming a better friend to those around her. She does not need to find a man or become more male to be powerful, and in Erin Brockovich, her femininity is the source of her strength.

In the case of Heigl, it’s her less-than-progressive scripts that present the problem — ones that, as a producer, she has a strong hand in picking for herself. Her best post-Grey’s Anatomy film, 27 Dresses revels in the exact kind of light-hearted fun that Heigl should be having. 27 Dresses doesn’t push boundaries, but it’s a great role to showcase her talents, allowing her to be the magnetic mixture of sassy and sweet that made her Grey’s character so likeable and relatable; however, vehicles like The Ugly Truth, Killers, New Years’ Eve, and One for the Money don’t portray her as spunky and fun; they make her, well, ugly.

[From HuffPo]

I think audiences gave up on Heigl at a certain point after she kept choosing to appear in really crappy movies. All the evidence we need can be found in the fact that One for the Money grossed $28 million worldwide on a $40 million budget. The movie performed that poorly despite the fact that it was based upon a (relatively) beloved book series from Janet Evanovich. The main problem I see isn’t really isn’t Heigl’s tendency to sh-ttalk her projects (although that has hurt her a lot more than when her male counterparts have done the same thing) but that she hasn’t challenged herself at all as an actress. Does she truly possess the talent to do so? Who knows, but she’ll never know if she doesn’t try.

Heigl needs to leave Hollywood for a few years and stop referring to herself as “an artist“ when she appears almost exclusively in romcoms. She’s a fairly talented writer, and I see no reason why she couldn’t write an inventive script that stretches her boundaries and presents women in a more interesting light than merely as “one of the guys” or the token love interest. Then she can come back and prove her detractors wrong.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet