LOS ANGELES

A FEW years ago, I saw a film like none I had seen before or have seen since. The movie, which I cannot name for reasons that will soon become clear, stars a legendary European beauty and was directed by a well-regarded filmmaker. It was a period piece, handsomely photographed but achingly dull, and it seized my attention only after the star was flung on her back for a torrid love scene, causing her hair to fall from her face like an opened curtain. But it wasn't the passion of the actress that transfixed me; it was the fresh surgical scars alongside her ear.

Later, when a colleague who had gasped along with me asked the film's director about the scars, he simply said, "Oh, it is not a finished print." The implication being that, like the wires that support Hong Kong martial arts actors when they fly through the air, the scars would be erased before the film opened in theaters. The surgery had removed evidence of this beautiful woman's submission to time and nature, and her subsequent fight against them. The postproduction wizards would just finish the job for her.

Acting always involves an element of plasticity. Lon Chaney, the silent star known as the "Man of a Thousand Faces," bound his legs behind his body to play a legless man and wore heavy weights to play Quasimodo. But while we admire actors who build hard muscle, pack on the pounds and downsize to skin and bone, no such glory awaits those who publicly admit to plastic surgery. Beauty in Hollywood is rarely natural, but it is highly prized, fetishized. Sharon Stone recently sued a surgeon, saying he falsely claimed to have given her a face-lift, and the suit puts a great deal of emphasis on the star's "natural beauty," as in "Sharon Stone prides herself not only on her acting ability and other talents, but also on her natural physical appearance" (hair dye and Pilates notwithstanding).

Movie stars have always been put on diets, and had their hair and teeth straightened and bleached. Rita Hayworth's hairline was raised through electrolysis and imperfections were erased from Marilyn Monroe's chin. Noses have been bobbed, breasts enlarged, tummies tucked. But these alterations mostly remain the stuff of slander and innuendo, and certainly not serious film conversation. For the most part it's only trashy entertainment outlets that tackle the subject and lower-tier celebrities, like Patricia Heaton of "Everybody Loves Raymond," who admit to having had work done. Physical perfection is an illusion most stars cannot afford to shatter; for most it's easier, and certainly better publicity, to announce you're drying out in rehab than going in for an eyelid lift.

Yet today plastic surgery seems inescapable, inevitable. Our screens are crowded with freakishly plumped lips and breasts so round they look drawn by protractors. Easiest to spot are the plastic-surgery casualties: the character actor with misaligned ears, the actress who looks permanently stuck in a wind tunnel. These are surgery's cautionary tales, the waning careers and lost souls who, in attempting to hang onto fame, become grotesques. The bigger the star the better the surgery. But even when you look at the best face money can buy, something seems wrong with the picture. Take the star with a face like a mask: I wonder what she sees in the mirror? Does she see what I see on screen: a face without lines, but also without affect, history, life?

I see a lot of preternaturally swollen lips and un-furrowed brows as a film critic; I also see a lot because I live in Los Angeles, where it sometimes seems as if every other face has been surgically smoothed. The effects of this radical realignment - bodies nipped, tucked and lipo-sucked - are on magazine covers, nitwit talk shows, sober news programs, daytime soaps, nighttime dramas and every type of movie. For the most part, these overtly plasticized personalities are a matter of curiosity and some distaste. I find plastic surgery neither morally nor politically objectionable; what bothers me are the aesthetics, the cavalcade of look-alike noses, stretched cheeks and bulbous breasts. And it is, I find, becoming increasingly difficult to see the actors - and the acting - for the plastic surgery.

One of the pleasures of steady moviegoing is that if a performer has lasting power, you can grow up and then older along with them. That's true of stars you discover when they're young adults and even more so for those you follow from childhood, like Elizabeth Taylor and Winona Ryder. There is something satisfying about that first encounter with such actors, which becomes a marker by which to view the past, both theirs and yours. One such performer is Jennifer Jason Leigh, whom I first encountered when she was 19 in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982), rediscovered in her 20's as an exuberant sexpot in "Miami Blues" (1990), and then found once more as a lushly, unmistakably adult woman in Jane Campion's "In the Cut" (2003).

Ms. Leigh looks like a real person, though more beautiful. By vivid contrast, consider a different, only somewhat older beautiful actress - again, someone I can't name - who when filmed in close-up barely seems able to move her face. Her forehead and cheeks are lustrously polished, almost glazed, like a pebble smoothed by centuries of pounding surf. When she cries on camera sound pours from her mouth - and yet something is missing, a crinkle of pain around the eyes, a furrow of worry grooved between her manicured eyebrows. She looks like an exotic aristocrat, a porcelain figurine, a creature from another planet (think Hollywood). But she does not look like herself, at least that self I remember with fondness, the one who could put across a scene with feeling so honest it made you weep, too.

In Hollywood, 40 is the new 30 and 50 the new 40, but only, it seems, when that new 40 and 50 have been surgically enhanced. The spectacle of young-looking stars of all ages - or, more accurately, stars without wrinkles, creases, furrows and folds - has become commonplace and hard to ignore. Most of the obviously altered faces are female, which are also the most problematic since female actors are invariably damned for looking old and damned for doing nothing about it. These days, when a 40-plus-year-old actress lands a starring part opposite a 60-plus-year-old actor, such age-appropriate casting seems meaningless because the actress has a face as unlined as a teenage girl's. Hollywood rarely provides older women meaty parts, so it's no wonder that few older actresses look their age.

Anecdotally, plastic surgery has helped some performers and hurt others, turning some actors into cartoons and others into pinups. Throughout movie history, the actor's body has been contested terrain, a site of both symbolic and very real battles. In "The Devil's Candy," her 1991 book about the making of Brian De Palma's "Bonfire of the Vanities," Julie Salamon writes that the film's celebrated cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond complained about Melanie Griffith's appearance. "She doesn't mind those lines around her eyes? Those bags?" asked Mr. Zsigmond. One of the producers joked that they should slather Preparation H on the star to shrink those bags. For her part, Ms. Griffith , then 33, responded with fabulous passive aggression: she had her breasts enlarged, mid-production.

These enhancements, alas, did nothing for Mr. De Palma's movie or Ms. Griffith's career. Big breasts are a dime a dozen in Hollywood. Actually, as of 2003, the most recent year for which such figures are provided by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the average cost for breast enhancement was $3,375, though it's unclear if that is for a single or a double. In any event, the amplitude of a star's breasts rarely merits scrutiny by film critics. Negative comments about actors' bodies are generally considered vulgar, inappropriate, but I am no longer certain polite silence is a good idea. After a decade of living in Los Angeles, for instance, I feel comfortable saying that it is a very bad idea when a woman enhances her breasts so they measure larger than her head.

What is undeniable and increasingly unavoidable is that plastic surgery is altering one of the greatest landscapes in cinema: the human face. Jean Renoir loved the close-ups of the silent era, because of what he believed they revealed "about the inward life of the idealized woman." But close-ups also reveal the outward life of the idealized woman and as such can also betray the ideal. The great silent auteur D. W. Griffith didn't invent the close-up, but he perfected the technique and in doing so gave us the gift of faces like those of Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford. Griffith seemed to know that, and in a 1918 film he softened the edges in the close-ups of Gish because the star, then in her early 20's, was considered old for one of his heroines.

The great Hollywood studios were built on stars and the cults of beauty and youth that rose around them. It's worth noting that the rise of the classical studio star system parallels the increased acceptance and use of the close-up, which was not a popular technique until after the mid-teens. (As Griffith put it, "the feet can't act.") At least one critic has argued that DVD and video have fostered another boom in close-ups, but such real and extended shots seem rare in contemporary Hollywood. Not only because few filmmakers fix on an image for more than a few seconds, but also because many famous faces cannot withstand such detailed attention. These faces suggest that the digital avatars so beloved by cinematic technocrats will be able to replace the human actor more easily than some of us imagined.

There are faces that remain recognizably human, thankfully, like that of Paul Giamatti. Mr. Giamatti, as has been repeated ad nauseam by this critic among others, is not in possession of classic good looks. No matter. In "Sideways," his director, Alexander Payne, affectionately holds the camera on Mr. Giamatti as if the actor were Greta Garbo, taking in each micro-movement flickering across his face. Such discreet fluctuations are impossible with a face shot full of Botox. My second favorite close-up of last year belongs to Julia Roberts, who in "Closer" had the guts to let the camera come in for an intimate appraisal, lines and all. Ms. Roberts has rarely looked more lovely or seemed more touching; not because she looked flawless, but because she did not.

In the recent past, about the only way a layperson could witness breast augmentation or liposuction was on a cable TV surgery program. These days plastic surgery is within the economic reach of the middle class and is part of our pop-culture vernacular. There are reality television shows like "The Swan," in which so-called ordinary women undergo multiple radical surgeries, and the fictional cable drama "Nip/Tuck." In celebrity magazines, stars routinely swear off future surgery and, every so often, insist that they're taking a wait-and-see attitude. A few celebrities confess to surgeries and, when they don't, some magazines employ plastic surgeons who speculate which star might have had surgery and where. Meanwhile, on the Internet the anonymous post before-and-after photographs of the famous and the rest of us click in for a peek.

This is a repellent sport. We have always maintained a love-hate relationship with our stars, but we seem ever more dedicated to tearing them down as fast as we build them up. I am increasingly distracted and alarmed by what plastic surgery is doing to the movies, but I never want to lose sight of the human factor either. There is, it's worth repeating, a person behind that frozen smile. Clearly, part of the blame for the spectacle of the post-human lies with the movie industry and its pernicious sexism; after all, Sean Penn wins awards with a face crosshatched with lines. But while it's easy to blame the industry, the entertainment media, the satellite industries and the stars themselves, let's face it: the other culprit, the faithful keeper of the cults of beauty and youth, is staring out at us in the mirror.