Sandra Bullock has two movies coming out this year: The Proposal, where she’s a well-to-do Canadian ad-exec in New York about to be deported unless she gets married and All About Steve where she’s an odd-ball crossword puzzle editor who obsesses over a CNN camera man. What’s notable about these two movies is that Bullock, who’s just a month shy of her 45th birthday, is playing the rom-com role usually reserved for women fifteen to twenty years her junior.
Judging by the trailers the issue of her age isn’t brought up except for the usual “I want grandkids/you’re post-pubescent you should be married already” braying from parental figures that applies regardless of the lead’s actual age. In this case, however, the issue that Bullock might not even be able to have kids anymore seems to not come up. This is in an era where Cameron Diaz (eight years Bullock’s junior) is playing a woman who has teenage children (My Sister’s Keeper) and Jennifer Aniston (five years Bullock’s junior) is playing a desperate 40-year-old who is trying to get pregnant by any means possible before it’s too late (Baster).
What are we seeing here? Is it a turn on of the regular Hollywood barriers that don’t allow women of a certain age into many roles, a Hollywood power player getting roles she doesn’t really deserve because of behind the camera clout or just a woman using the fact that she looks younger than she actually is to her advantage? I’m not really sure.
(P.S. I’m perfectly aware that men of the same age face no such bias against working in these types of movies. I don’t think anyone is going to argue that the double standard isn’t sexist.)