Everyone loves Tina Fey, and that can be hard. "Everyone" is no exaggeration. At 40, Fey has won seven Emmys, four Screen Actors Guild awards and four Writers Guild prizes. Three times People magazine has listed her in the 100 Most Beautiful People (she's pretty, I know – but does People really search?). She has her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2010, she got the Mark Twain prize for American Humor.
"Everyone"? Well, maybe not Sarah Palin, the object of Fey's sharp impersonations. And yet, perhaps, Palin grins at every cut. Do you sometimes have the horrid feeling that the Fey wit (take that as you like) is only helping to broadcast Palin and play into the sensitivities of those who might vote for her? Doing Palin could become as monstrous a chore as playing Peyton Place for the rest of your life. Satirical television (exemplified for so long in the US by Saturday Night Live) preaches to the converted but unifies the heathen.
It's part of what makes Fey so modern that she doesn't do big things that reveal or declare her. Instead, she does bits and pieces – sketches on Saturday Night Live, her double act with Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock (to be rated among the great screen pairings of the mismatched), voices in movies, like the forthcoming animation Megamind. Her Hollywood Star of Fame (something that once implied movie prowess) has come from very little: a promising script for Mean Girls (2004) and a handful of minor films like Beer League (she's hardly there), Baby Mama and Date Night (with Steve Carell), which was a reasonable hit.
I have the feeling this funny woman is averse to being central, or a target. And there are reasons for seeing that as a measure of her smarts as well as her self-protection. Perhaps big, dramatic roles are from a previous culture. I don't think anyone imagines seeing Fey do Sophie's Choice or Long Day's Journey Into Night – but the idea of a Fey-like intelligence obsessing over those things and talking about them all the time in the course of her daily routine – that is enticing. It is the nature of TV to be fragmented, self-interrupting and disordered and we have adapted to those rules. So Tina Fey could come on every three hours and ask: "Did you see …? Was that weird? Why do they show that?"
Of course, a talent like hers and a personality that stays intriguingly masked can make you wonder, could this be a great comic star? And wouldn't we hope to see her in big things? Well, maybe (so long as it's not quite Sophie's Choice). But maybe not. A friend suggested Fey might be a young Woody Allen in the making. I feel wary. Allen is now old and unresolved and it's hard to avoid his disappointment. If there's anyone Fey reminds me of, it's Elaine May (maybe the funniest woman in America in the early 1960s).
There is a pressure, however, that may urge Tina Fey into bigger things, and the risk of being a target. She may have to let us decide whether she is beautiful or not. There is a project, just undertaken, called Mommy & Me, with Fey and Meryl Streep, and Stanley Tucci directing (Tucci's so good an actor, people miss the films he's directed – try Joe Gould's Secret). I have no idea what Mommy & Me means to be, but the ampersand suggests comedy (with some mother-child angst perhaps – sort of Peyton Placey). I look forward to it, but I might prefer a conversation between Fey and Streep that starts off: "Well, however did you do Sophie's Choice? … I mean, what did you tell your children? … Didn't they want to know which one you'd choose?"
All of which is tribute to the high importance and low fun of Tina Fey: she is part of the end of movies, the renewal of talk and the cultural adoption of dysfunction. She's the smart liberal's ideal email pal, where once movie stars represented the girl next door. That's not bad, but being Tina Fey may get harder.