Just Two Moments with Paul Newman.

Paul Newman, a legend with a glorious, famously high resistance to fluffery, would’ve most likely preferred we keep our remarks of his death clean and muscular. That’s the brilliance of Newman’s great work anyway, there’s no “brilliance”, no ticks ready-made for critics to tack adjectives onto (unless that was the joke). A Paul Newman performance, even in pictures below him, is one of the great pleasure of cinema of all walks and colors – a Paul Newman performance is a Jean Renoir picture within one – a generous, humane thing that confidently risks passing by unnoticed – providing you’re fool enough not to notice. Paul Newman normally didn’t hide behind his enviable looks with self-conscious bruises or noses (one wishes that Leonardo DiCaprio, a talent, would follow suit) he simply gloriously was, with a remarkably generous empathy with the audience watching him. Many stars, even the great ones, swallow themselves up - allowing their continual struggles for brilliance of truth (or beauty) to dominate their performances. For Newman that was nonsense; he understood that happiness and despair needn’t always manifest themselves in tangible, actor-ly “meanings” and symbols and contortions – they usually took the form of pumping your gas or drinking your coffee, or seeing, fleetingly, the guarded part of a woman you aren’t supposed to see.

Paul Newman had a quick, sure physical wit, a command of gesture and body. The Color of Money is a good movie that could’ve been great if Martin Scorsese hadn’t buried it under his – in this context – ridiculous auteur-Catholic-redemption obsessions, but it has one of the sharpest, most telling, expressions Newman ever graced a movie with (saying something). Newman, as the broken, sly, privately embittered “Fast” Eddie Felson, watches Tom Cruise’s Vince plead with a loser to keep playing nine-ball with him; it’s a game, a mocking earnestness with which Vince is only partially aware. The loser, John Turturro, starts walking, and Cruise offers to play without money - to see his best game. Newman’s response is a quick-slow glance of shock – this kid’ll eventually get himself killed - that’s also electric with possibility. This Eddie, miles from the beaming ego of the early passages of The Hustler, who’s now selling cheap booze and backing other players, sees in this kid’s talented-manic, comically deformed inability to self-censor, a rebirth. All in two seconds. Scorsese, sadly, undervalues Newman’s economy and keeps piling it on, slowing the movement of the typically tangy-poetic Richard Price writing. (Scorsese’s merging of personal demons and pop would be surer in his “Life Lessons” portion of New York Stories, also scripted by Price.)

Only Paul Newman was capable of this particular two seconds. Most would’ve overplayed, or underplayed, or overplayed their underplaying (though Michael Shannon implies a similar command in this year’s Shotgun Stories). Newman knew exactly how much to give and how far to push – he stylized (unavoidable to an extent – he’s undeniably Someone Else) without calling attention to his stylization – he was an everyman movie star who embodied, fully, the varying contradictions of those terms. Newman’s characters – Luke, Sully, Butch, Billy, Hud, Frank – felt our pain, gave our pain its due, while still glorifying the pain to the point that we expect, demand, from our movies. Paul Newman epitomized the notion that we’re all the stars of our lives; and he breathed into that idea both truth and fantasy – the definition of a true movie star. Paul Newman was a movie star who pushed being a movie star to the point of great acting. Everything is controlled and united in a great Paul Newman performance, but there’s little that can, without doing him a disservice, be said or written of a great Paul Newman performance; because the effort behind those words and praise implies an effort that’s never actually revealed in the work.

It was aging Newman that struck me, despite the iconic highs of his youthful work, in my most primal down-home place. As Sully, another train-wreck of a man led to nothing by the scattershot desire to be everything, Paul Newman gave possibly the performance of his life – it captured everything that we loved about him from young to old – the contradictions, the charm-insolence, the righteousness, the resignation, the player, the wit, the comedian, and, ultimately, the aging man who carried, breathlessly, all our resignations on his shoulders – someone of something tattered and pure at once. Nobody’s Fool is the one picture of Robert Benton’s that I’ve seen that I unreservedly like much less adore (it’s small town sugar sold just right), and Newman’s performance is key; besides its own value it also appears to inform the swiftness of all the other gifted actors who surround him (an influence, again, typical to great Newman). At one point Sully assures his dispirited, self-disgusted co-worker Rub (Pruitt Taylor Vince) that his adult son will never come between them. He’s my son, you’re my best friend, Sully rasps in that graceful-up-down-no-bullshit cadence that only Newman could summon. Rub tries to choke tears, and Sully kills the awkwardness in the flip way, that way we all do when faced with something revealing and vulnerable and embarrassing. The scene hangs with you. You watch it and you know that you’re seeing one of the best moments in Rub’s life, a moment of simple, direct, unaffected affection. The scene works so well because it plays, directly, on how we, ourselves, respond to people like Paul Newman. You don’t praise Paul Newman for a performance as you would the performances of most other great actors; you thank him for it.

Posted on October 8th, 2008 in Rants |

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