Sydney Sweeney Has a Secret

New York Times

18 hours ago

Those of us with insomnia have shamefully low bars for our late-night television viewing, which is how I justify my acquaintance with 'Echo Valley,' a bonkers new Apple TV+ movie about a mother's sacrifices for her drug-crazed daughter. It requires not so much the suspension of disbelief as the incineration of it. But it gives its actors a lurid excess of opportunities to suffer nobly or scheme nefariously, so it lured A-listers such as Julianne Moore, whom I'll follow into almost any valley, gulch or gorge of her choosing, and Domhnall Gleeson, who'd be riveting reciting a recipe for porridge.
Also Sydney Sweeney, who steals the movie from them both.
She plays the cursed daughter to Moore's mom, though 'plays' doesn't do the performance justice. She reels. Rages. Combusts. During one sequence, as she asks and then terrorizes Moore for money, her desperation metastasizes into a hysteria so raw and so real that I gasped.
Forget Sweeney's 'great jeans.' She has great talent.
Not that anyone would know that from the overwrought, omnipresent, cynically engineered chatter about Sweeney's cheeky ad campaign for American Eagle. Over the past few weeks, Sweeney the actor has been swallowed whole by Sweeney the pitchwoman, Sweeney the provocateur, Sweeney the partisan chew toy, Sweeney the political riddle. I say that not out of sympathy for her — she's obviously a willing, witting participant in at least some of this. I say it out of sadness for the rest of us and for a society in which attention is a greater currency than artistry, professional distinction is too often a mere steppingstone to ambient celebrity and objects of admiration turn into endlessly deconstructed objects of curiosity, both against their wishes and by their own design.
Can't actors just be actors, musicians just musicians and athletes just athletes without conscription into our culture wars? Must they exploit their prominence for maximum profit or be exploited as social media fodder? I barely remember the performances that won Gwyneth Paltrow and Matthew McConaughey their Oscars; those golden moments receded behind the dross of all the merchandising they've done, all the cultural baggage they took on, as they traveled a drearily familiar arc from being celebrated for their artistic achievements to being famous for being famous.
George Clooney — whose suavity has been used to hawk watches, coffee, tequila — won praise for his lead role in the Broadway production of 'Good Night and Good Luck' this year, but I bet more Americans are familiar with the role he played in last year's presidential race, entering the fray by publicly questioning President Joe Biden's cognitive state and beseeching him not to run for re-election. Starring alongside Clooney in the 2024 election was Beyoncé, who blessed the use of her song 'Freedom' as a campaign anthem for Vice President Kamala Harris and took the stage with her at a Houston rally — an appearance that President Trump recently railed against, calling for a criminal investigation into it. Amid such ridiculousness, a person could briefly lose track of Beyoncé's musical genius. And of her own denim evangelizing — for Levi's.
Not all celebrity endeavors and endorsements are created equal. Occasionally they reflect genuine conviction, real caring, altruistic goals. But there's something crass and confusing about so many successful entertainers' readiness to stray into just about any arena of American life. And there's something about the digital age and social media that has mixed their various ventures together more thoroughly than ever before, into a sort of all-purpose dough, a.k.a. brand, that can be stretched, shaped and cooked this way and that, in accordance with a star's appetite for influence and income.
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