how a deepfake Catherine Keener dishonors an icon of the 90s.

This post contains spoilers for Project Adam.

The villain in Netflix’s The Adam Project should look like a familiar face, but there’s something fundamentally wrong with him, especially his face. In a new time travel thriller, Ryan Reynolds travels back to the early 21st century to stop the invention of a technology that will eventually destroy the world. The problem is not the technology itself, which was invented by his late father shortly before his death. The problem lies in the unscrupulous hands he ends up in—the hands of his father’s ruthless business partner, Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener). In the future, she is the mistress of science fiction, wrapped in a black cloak draped over her like a shroud. But when the plot rewinds to 2018, we see Maya as a young woman, a smart businesswoman in shimmery blouses and a businesslike ponytail. The film’s casual approach to time paradox allows the two Maya to come face to face, and the same rejuvenation technology deployed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe allows Keener to play both versions of the Maya. But having grown up watching—and, let’s be honest, swooning over—Kiner’s performances in the 1990s, Project Adam’s deepfake feels unnerving.

It’s not just like a lot of viewers marked online over the weekend after The Adam Project debuted that the effects are lousy and Keener’s dialogue is out of sync with the younger Maya’s movements – or even that the computer version doesn’t match enough photos of what Catherine Keener actually looked like. at her thirty. Softly embellished, smooth as plastic, Maya seems like a rebuke to Keener’s idiosyncratic screen self, a low-key desecration of one of independent film’s most important icons.

Watching American independent cinema 30 years ago meant being in love with or wanting to be Catherine Keener. I first met Keener in 1996’s Walk and Talk, the first of five films she made with writer/director Nicole Holofcener. When she is introduced, Keener is sitting alone in a coffee shop writing on a notepad when her childhood friend (Anne Heche) jumps in to join her. Heche’s character is barely seated when the waiter offers her coffee, which prompts Keener to clear her throat and add that she’d like some too – her tone hints at the long-rehearsed ease of being overshadowed by her more confident blonde companion. But although she is presented as a soft-spoken woman, with tousled hair and a loose T-shirt casually tucked into jeans, there is no risk of Keener melting into woodwork: from the first moment, she exudes a sharp mind and a fiercely active mind. When the waiter reluctantly takes her order, Keener gives him a quick smile of thanks for noticing, and when he turns his back, she sticks her tongue out and gasps like a dog. Maybe she’s mocking her own desperation or his stupidity, or maybe she’s just throwing out excess nervous energy to keep her head from exploding. But it is a moment of pure oneness with the camera, passing by so quickly and imperceptibly that you would miss it if you were looking anywhere else. (You were not.)

Keener was not just a sex symbol of a thinking person. She was your smartest friend, your kindest ex, the person you could trust to tell you straight, even if you might not like what you heard.

Especially in the films she made with Holofcener, Keener’s characters always look like they’re enjoying a personal joke, even if the joke didn’t start that way. She begins the cycle as the epitome of Generation X: too skilled for her menial jobs, but too suspicious of success to aspire to anything better. In Lovely & Amazing, the character Keener runs into an old classmate and expresses shock that her childhood friend is already a pediatrician. A confused friend says, “We’re 36,” and Keener replies, “Yes, but not 36 36.” In Holofcener’s later films, she finds a professional niche, whether it’s scriptwriting or running a vintage furniture boutique, but her professional growth doesn’t give her a firmer sense of security. She is always drifting, restless, insecure, a problem in the world or in herself. Happiness is for the simple-minded, not for those who can always foresee the next crisis coming around the corner.

In another era, Keener’s husky voice and deadpan demeanor could have made her a Hollywood star, a natural version of what Howard Hawks turned Lauren Bacall into in The Big Dream. But Keener wasn’t interested in going down that path, often refusing to give interviews or be the subject of profiles, leaving Entertainment Weekly to give her an ambiguous compliment praising her “extraordinary beauty.” In fact, she has always been beautiful, which Holofcener acknowledged in Lovely and Amazing, making the struggling amateur artist Keener a former homecoming queen. But her characters rarely seemed to take it to heart, too preoccupied with their inner flaws to appreciate, let alone use their outer radiance. “You’re very pretty,” Kevin Corrigan, a video store salesman, tells her in Walk and Talk. Sounds like you need to hear it.

Spike Jonze’s 1999 Being John Malkovich is one of those rare cases where the Keener character is in full command of his magnetism. When John Cusack’s bumbling professional puppeteer, who works in the same dreary office building as Keener, makes a stuttering attempt to ask her out, she responds with a cringing, do it with me.” But it is clear that this is the role she plays; she enters him in the same way that the characters of a film are briefly introduced into the body of an award-winning movie star. Keener’s costumes here – usually all black or white with sparse monochrome details – suggest that the film wants us to see her archetypally: an unattainable angel or a sexy siren. But in any case, she is irresistible. In the end, Cusack gives up his own bodily existence just to be able to keep looking at her.

Catherine Keener in Being John Malkovich. Focus Features

In the 1990s, Keener was not just a sex symbol of a thinking person, although she was quite often called that. She was your smartest friend, your kindest ex, the person you could trust to tell you straight, even if you might not like what you heard. She stood her ground even when, as often happened, it meant being alone, and she never fooled herself into thinking that the world was a better place just because her place in it improved. And it’s because of what she meant back then that it seems like the last decade has made her so messy.

Keener, who turned 40 in 2000, continued to receive plum parts into the new millennium; she was the woman Steve Carell puts all his shit together for in The 40 Year Old Virgin and was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Harper Lee Capote. But things began to change with 2013’s Captain Phillips, a film that helped to better fulfill Tom Hanks’ career but gave Keener his glorified nondescript wife, a role so conventional and functional that even she couldn’t make it interesting. In the 2017 film Get Out, Jordan Peele perfectly (and deftly) portrayed her as a wealthy liberal whose outward benevolence can quickly turn icy. (In “Please Give,” she is so riddled with privileged guilt that she offers the leftovers of her restaurant to a black man on the street; it turns out he’s just waiting for his table.) – Voiced by a wealthy tech mogul, so consumed by his resentment of superheroes that he’s ready to commit mass murder to discredit them.

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Maya from Project Adam is a similarly embittered old maid. The future Maya, played by the average 62-year-old Keener, is a domineering ruler with a legion of anonymous warriors under her command, but her dominance has not brought her happiness. When she goes back in time to instruct her younger self on how to illegally seize control of a company, she doesn’t even bother to hide her disdain for the naive 30-year-old who still thinks she can make a career and live in the same time. “Where are you going?” The older Maya scoffs, and the Younger Maya tries to interrupt their conversation. “Seeing someone? No, it’s not. You’re too busy. The thing is, you always will. This company is all you’ll ever have. It’s your private life. It’s your family.” (Unnecessarily to say that in “Project Adam” male characters are not represented by the same binary code. Future traveler Ryan Reynolds remembers his scientist father as an absent father, but he turned out to be wrong: the old man may have worked too hard, but he always found time to play ball.)

Fake Maya doesn’t look like a young Catherine Keener at all, but more importantly, she doesn’t look like her. There is no thought crackle in her eyes, nothing that distinguishes her from the crowd of identically dressed tech geniuses who would be laughed at by one of her characters of the 90s as they raced past a coffee shop on their way to work (or, worse, in gym). ). Gen X ambivalence is epitomized by the smoothly controlled robot of success, every erroneous thought, every melancholy half-smile is discarded by a program designed to create the illusion of life. She is not an unusual beauty, but an ordinary one. And, as it turns out, the digitally perfected Catherine Keener is not Catherine Keener at all.