This is a perfectly fine photo of Katie Holmes. But it also, weirdly, looks a bit more like a photo of Katie Holmes playing Jaclyn Smith in a Lifetime movie about the rise of her Kmart clothing brand in the 80s and her subsequent line of wigs. It could also even be a photo of someone else playing Katie Holmes in a Lifetime movie about Katie Holmes, and therein sort of lies the problem with this piece and with Katie Holmes in general: It’s trying REALLY HARD to convince us that she’s compelling and magnetic and a force to be reckoned with, but the part of her story that might actually bear out all those words is the part she will never tell and which they will never mention. We actually kind of NEED a Lifetime movie about how Katie and her dad rescued her from her marriage and from Scientology. That is almost the ENTIRE extent of what I want to know. Not so much about her being in Our Town on Broadway, or the writer’s assertions of her alleged endless staying power in this industry (arguable; she is indeed still PRESENT but I think she’s struggled to make/find good projects and I don’t know how in-demand she’s been on either side of the camera), or insistences that the entire Internet envies her personal style (???). The thing that makes Katie Holmes FASCINATING is the thing she will probably take either to her own grave or at least to Tom’s, and I can’t not think about that every time I read sentences like, “It would be easy, and foolish, to think she’s just this smiley girl, but she’s a powerhouse,” [Alan] Cumming says. “You don’t get to do the things she’s done by being passive.” NO KIDDING, ALAN. TELL ME MORE. Even that cover line about her having “THE LAST LAUGH” doesn’t make sense to me unless we’re talking about You Know What!!! At LEAST announce than in 30 years she’ll be publishing a memoir! I will hang on specifically for that!
