Jennifer Garner Cast As "Elderly Spinster" Miss Marple

 
It's kind of a truism that the older you get, the less likely you are to head out to a movie theater, instead preferring to wait for those moving pictures to arrive in 8mm reel form at the local haberdashery where you can ride your horseless carriage to acquire them. Or something. Anyway, young is in, and if you need any proof of that, get a load of this: Disney is planning to issue a new movie starring Miss Marple, an elderly, spinsterish amateur detective made famous by Agatha Christie in 12 novels, and 70-year-old actress Margaret Rutherford in a series of films in the 60's. Who would you cast in a new film version, if you were Disney? Helen Mirren, perhaps? Dame Judi Dench? Nope, the part has gone to one Jennifer Garner, a 38-year-old American.  
 
Of course, Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed as a man of many ages, from a stately gentleman to a Robert Downey, Jr.-aged 40something, to a, well, young Sherlock Holmes, so it's not hard to imagine that this might work, but Miss Marple seems much more of a piece with her age and social situation: a bit of an old loner who's never been married, which I think we can agree is not to be Jennifer Garner's lot in life.
 
You can't make a film nowadays without a romance angle, so I'm betting that Disney's going to throw Ben Affleck or Will Ferrell in the mix, or something. Regardless, it's a bizarre casting choice. I like Garner more than most seem to; she can play up emotional vulnerability pretty well when she wants to. That's not quite a Marple-ish quality, though...unless Disney wants it to be, I guess.