Paula Zahn is part of larger denial of beauty

WASHINGTON — In the new movie "Monster’s Ball," Halle Berry wears an intermittent scowl, no makeup and the occasional head-rag.

She looks radiant.

"Ball" director Marc Forster’s attempts to obscure Berry’s luminosity make sense. Audiences are supposed to buy this honey-dipped Hollywood blossom as Leticia, a backwater Georgia waitress. We’re supposed to believe she’s the mother of a corpulent, chocolate-skinned child who can’t stop eating. In the scope of human genetics, anything’s possible — but this is a stretch.

Berry’s beauty is like a three-day migraine. It won’t be vanquished.

The movie got me thinking again about beauty. About the magic that happens when a man and a woman mate and somehow — despite the infinite possible combinations of noses and eyes and bone structures offered by their separate DNA — their best physical attributes jell in one beautiful human:

In someone whom it pleases and frustrates us just to look at.

Like money and sex, beauty makes people do strange things. It made newscaster Paula Zahn profess outrage over an admittedly tasteless CNN ad that dared to suggest she’s "sexy." Zahn wants us to know she’s smart and capable, just like millions of professionals who don’t cause triple takes.

But Zahn inspires such reactions. She is sexy, which in any TV gig is a plus. Because she’s a woman, she’s sensitive about appearing to be only that.

But all her protestations don’t change that she’s a hottie. Any more than the considerable power and poignancy of "Monster’s Ball" make us forget that Berry has it going on.

This is a woman whose curvy-slim body is as spectacular as her face, who once inspired one of my female friends to wonder, "Was she genetically engineered or what?"

Yet in "Ball" we’re asked to believe that when Leticia’s car breaks down, she can stroll down a country highway — braless and in a tight skirt — without a dozen men offering her a lift. Evicted from her home, Leticia sits forlornly alongside a city street until she’s rescued by a racist corrections officer (Billy Bob Thornton).

No one offers this knockout a hand? A wedding band?

Berry’s beauty nearly subverts the movie. When Thornton’s character is drawn to Leticia, you have to wonder: Who wouldn’t be? "Ball" might have benefited from this average-looking bigot being transformed by loving a black woman as physically unremarkable as he.

But Berry fought for the part — and could earn an Oscar. The actress, who’s frank about her insecurities, knows as well as anyone that beauty takes away even as it bestows. Beautiful men and women — forbidden to acknowledge that they’ve received this amazing gift — often work overtime to convince us they’re just like us.

Hollywood asks us to share in the lie. Though many stars’ beauty is unmistakable, filmmakers routinely ask us to pretend that J.Lo, Ashley Judd and Denzel would have the same problems as Rosie O’Donnell and Robin Williams.

And we buy it. We always have. Considering how essential beauty is to theater’s and cinema’s appeal, few films or plays acknowledge its power.

When the sexiness of Marisa Tomei’s character inspires lust, envy and even tragedy in "In the Bedroom," the movie wisely acknowledges the fact. Other exceptions: "Erin Brockovich," whose heroine unashamedly "works it"; the classic "Picnic"; and the sublimely awful "The Mirror Has Two Faces," in which "plain" Barbra Streisand asks mom Lauren Bacall how it felt, being young and beautiful.

"Wonderful," admits Mom. You believe her.

Because ravishing people mustn’t ever acknowledge their beauty, I promised a stunning journalist pal not to identify her if she answered Streisand’s question:

"What’s it like being beautiful?"

It’s feeling "incredibly sad" when a buddy says she avoids walking with you because her "ego can’t take it." It’s watching even toddlers throw themselves at you. It’s having people "be much more likely to listen to your opinion."

It’s having men get "so flustered, so silly," she says. "I’ve had a lot of unwanted attention in my personal and professional life.

"But I try not to climb on a soapbox because it is a gift."

All this over something that’s unasked for and unearned. Beauty "isn’t fair," she says. "I had nothing whatsoever to do with this outer shell."

A light-skinned African American, she’s "had a lot of black people accuse me of thinking I’m beautiful because of my light skin. … But I come from a long line of women — some fair-skinned, some not — who felt being attractive was a wonderful thing. My mother and my aunts would say, ‘Stand up straight, smile, show your beauty.’ "

But in the outside world, "I learned early on, you’re never supposed to acknowledge it."

So she’ll keep pretending she’s normal. And we’ll keep pretending not to be as affected as we are by beauty. On the street. At work.

And especially in darkened theaters.

Donna Britt can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.