Getting In The Groove

By RICHARD CORLISS

You'll see some prime acting by Angela Bassett in How Stella Got Her Groove Back. She emits her patented hot-coals stare, fondles an engagement-ring box with sweet subtlety, sheds urgent, persuasive tears at sexual climax. She smolders and glows--just what's needed as the heroine of a sudsy upscale romance. But Bassett doesn't need a camera to cue her glamorous art. She can give an Oscar-worthy performance sitting across from a journalist in a suite at Manhattan's St. Regis Hotel.

She is speaking of her admiration for her Stella co-star Whoopi Goldberg, who was kind to Bassett years ago. "You could see the warmth coming from the heart and straight out the eyes," she recalls. "But I've had the other happen too. Not mean, exactly, but, 'Hi, how're you doing?'" Instantly, the room temperature drops to arctic levels as Bassett pretends to stare a hole through someone talking to her. "Then, after I became known, it was, 'Oh, I love you.'" And she swoops down from the chair, practically to her knees, in a deft satire of sycophancy. Drama, pain, comedy--Acting!

Some folks have it, some don't. Bassett does. She animates and elevates her roles with fire, precision, suavity. And she accomplishes her little miracles in showcases that few would mistake for film art. What's Love Got to Do With It, for which Bassett earned an Academy Award nomination as Tina Turner, and Waiting to Exhale, a $67 million hit that forced Hollywood to notice the box office appeal of middle-class black movies, had their value as consciousness-raising exercises for women, but they turned too many characters into cliches. Which makes Bassett's work even more impressive. In the middle of a live-action cartoon, one real, complex human being stands out.

In Stella, Bassett is a successful 40-year-old stockbroker who meets a hunky lad (Taye Diggs), barely half her age, on the Jamaica vacation she's taken with her pal Delilah (Goldberg). Is it love or just great sex? And how will Stella cope not only with the inevitable gibes from her family back home but with the quibbles in her own suspicious heart?

This story, from the Terry McMillan novel that McMillan based on her own affair with a young Jamaican, is the sort of surefire bathos that Hollywood has long loved to dip into; Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson made it float in the 1955 All That Heaven Allows. Stella, directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan, isn't in that league. With its diffuse lighting and teary sex scenes (the camera can't take its eye off Diggs' extravagant muscularity), the film qualifies as soft-pore cornography. But, heck, Bette Davis spent half her career ennobling similar kitsch. Like Davis and other strong actresses, Bassett just has to get used to being better than her movies.

It's enough of an achievement that she gets to star in them. Bassett, who turns 40 next Sunday, was raised in Florida by her mother, a social worker, and a supporting cast of relatives. Her mother was from the old school. "If you wanted a life, you had to keep those studies up," Bassett says. "If you dropped to C's, no cheerleading, no community theater! I got the message." On the advice of a director in a summer-activities program, she was spurred to dream big and apply to the top schools. Presto, she was at Yale. "And who knew! There were people like me."

She got serious about acting and went on to the Yale drama school before enduring the mandatory humiliation of life as a New York City actor. Even in Los Angeles, stardom did not force itself upon her. She got roles like "prostitute at headquarters" (in Doubletake) and "stewardess" (in Kindergarten Cop). Then she won the strong role of Cuba Gooding Jr.'s mom in Boyz N the Hood. The big break came in her 1993 turn as Tina.

Acting, for Bassett, looks easy; getting good acting jobs, as for any woman in movies, is hard. Stella is Bassett's first big role since Waiting to Exhale, but soon you'll be seeing a lot of her: in the Alien-style actioner Supernova, in the drama Wings Against the Wind with Danny Glover and Don Cheadle, and in Cosm, in which she stars with Dustin Hoffman under the direction of Jan de Bont (Speed).

Last year Bassett married actor Courtney B. Vance (The Preacher's Wife); her personal ambitions are "to start a family and work with my husband." She recently tried out for the role of Sean Connery's love interest in the thriller Entrapment. "I met Connery and I was impressed. I thought, 'He is going to take a chance.' But he picked someone else. I was disappointed." As she speaks you can see the regret behind her eyes--and the grit and resolve as this 24-hour-a-day actress adds, "But I look at the big picture."

As long as Hollywood keeps putting Bassett in big pictures, there'll be reason for the rest of us to look at them too.

--Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York