Baring flesh after 50 is no news flash

I’ve heard so much lately about Diane Keaton getting naked that I halfway expect her to show up in my inbox, just like Paris Hilton, in one of those e-mails that reads, in the medium’s distinctive language, “W@tch Diane Keaton XXX!” or “Diane Keaton (S)ex tape!!!”

Keaton’s (S)ex tape is the major motion picture release “Something’s Gotta Give,” in which she appears without clothes for about a nanosecond of its 124-minute running time. This brief nude scene would be unremarkable but for the apparently shocking fact that Keaton turned 58 last week, an age at which women, it seems, should shed garments only when medically necessary.

One naked Baby Boomer might be dismissed as a mere curiosity. But, by coincidence, this film landed at the local theater at the same time as “Calendar Girls,” a movie about a group of middle-age British women who pose in the buff to raise money for charity. Throw in the indelible image of Kathy Bates plopping into a hot tub in 2002’s “About Schmidt” and, yeehaw, you’ve got a media-ordained cultural revolution.

As one recent headline put it: “Older actresses baring it all on the big screen.”

To read reports, you would think this pseudo-phenomenon was some sort of breakthrough for the female gender on par with, say, the disappearance of the wage gap. One writer even declared it “the biggest trend in the movies.” And I thought the biggest trend in the movies was Tom Cruise’s increasingly luminescent teeth.

Monitoring the breathless accounts of Hollywood’s “ode to the older woman” made me wonder if the state of entertainment writing is so pathetic that this ranks as news or the state of popular film so pathetic that this actually is news.

Worse, I suspected that seeing postmenopausal celebrities get naked was going to be a lot like seeing premenopausal celebrities get pregnant. Thanks to their plastic surgery and personal trainers and magazine cover airbrush artists, we are presented with expectations that are virtually impossible for normal women to meet. Elizabeth Hurley can shrink back to a size 2 months after giving birth, so why are you still wearing your maternity jeans two years postdelivery? Now we’re supposed to look hot at 57?

So, I went to see the movie.

The scene in question occurs when Keaton, who plays a famous playwright forced to care for her daughter’s 63-year-old boyfriend after his heart attack, encounters him as she undresses in her bedroom. What follows is more glimpse than gawk. As Jack Nicholson, who plays the boyfriend, later insists, “I really didn’t see all that much.”

It was even harder to see what the fuss is about. I’ve been exposed to more flesh at a Wisconsin water park. Far more mind-boggling was Keanu Reeves’ attempt to play a doctor. I thought he was going to tell Nicholson, “Whoa, dude, you’ve got a clogged artery.”

As for Keaton, what you could see of her looks good. And in a fairly normal way, not in a molded-plastic Goldie Hawn way. The bodies in “Calendar Girls” seem real, too. Should you be so inclined, you can detect actual jiggle and sag.

But a jiggle or two does not a cultural trend make. Neither film seems entirely convinced that mature women are attractive. Despite the incessant instruction in “Calendar Girls” that the women are like flowers, “the last phase is the most glorious,” the enterprise seems more cute than sexy. In “Something’s Gotta Give,” the sight of Keaton naked so shocks Nicholson that he screams and staggers back into a wall. Only when she has won him over with her wit and charm does he concede she is beautiful.

If there is a revolution, it will come when everyone doesn’t have to work so hard to believe it exists. Maybe when Keanu Reeves can kiss Diane Keaton without making someone in the audience laugh, which happened when I saw the movie. (No one laughed when the twentysomething played by Amanda Peet straddled Nicholson’s ample belly in her underwear.)

Or maybe when the inbox e-mails start reading, “W@tch h(o)t mature action!!!”

Umm, or maybe not.

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Columns by Tribune staff reporters Steve Johnson and Louise Kiernan ([email protected]), who are husband and wife, appear in this space on alternating weeks.