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 | 10 Comments
Rants.
That whimsy is difficult to achieve in a movie is obvious, and also a massive, insulting understatement. It’s next to God damn impossible, particularly in our MySpace, four cell phone society. Filmmakers rarely even bother striving for whimsy, making any movie is a enough of an opportunity to show your nuts, much less a film with fairies, goblins, ghosts, etc., much much less a film that involves said creatures chasing after a personified star for varied reasons that aren’t worth recounting. That’s what Stardust is though (no fairies, or goblins I’m afraid, but lots of ghosts and witches) and it works. It’s not a classic, but the film flies, primarily because the love story between Tristan (Charlie Cox) and the star in question (Claire Danes) is believable and surprisingly poignant. Some had a hard time believing that director Matthew Vaughn was following his brutal gangster picture, Layer Cake with this, but that works in an unexpected way. Vaughn doesn’t try too hard, his experience with Cake and the overrated Guy Ritchie pictures has left him hesitant to peddle the sentimentality, and so he doesn’t. And, as a result, you actually believe the world of Stardust.
I also believed the world of Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Tykwer conjures a fascinating eighteenth century Paris of almost laughable, Dickensian rot, and the story itself starts strongly, following a young man (Ben Whishaw, more recently of I’m Not There) and his animalistic sense of smell as he works his way out of a brutal tannery and into the shop of a once revered perfumer (Dustin Hoffman). Whishaw is our lead, but he and Tykwer are so committed to the story’s idea of him as a blunt cipher that the supporting actors are forced to do the heavy lifting. That’s fine while Hoffman is the supporter, but the film shifts halfway through, and takes Whishaw to a small town of supposedly splendid scents that, in his desperation to find a perfume that satisfies his advanced abilities, turns him into some sort of hybrid of Jack the Ripper and Dr. Frankenstein. The supporting actor of this half is Alan Rickman, usually more than able to elevate his material, but here he’s left without too much to do. It’s all Whishaw, Whishaw, Whishaw, and soon you find that you don’t much give a hoot whether he’s caught, finds his perfume, or jumps of a picturesque cliff. In terms of raw, surface craft, this is one of Tykwer’s most impressive pictures, but it’s all in the service of a boring shaggy dog story, with an ending that hints at satire that seems to be just out of reach.
The satire of Mike Nichols’ Charlie Wilson’s War is front and center. The film is an entry in a genre I rarely care for, the Not that Significant, Self-Absorbed Deviate Learns the Value of Life and Improves It in Some Way and That’s Why We’re Making this Movie genre (I swear, it appears in Wikepedia just like that) but War has a boozy, free floating charm that it never entirely compromises. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script and he’s masterful when he reins in the overwriting and the outrage and simply tells a story (see the underrated The American President or the even more underrated television show Sports Night). Sorkin is in control of his faculties here, perhaps too much control; the film should be even boozier, druggier, angrier and more aggressive. There should be more scenes like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s first, where he tells a superior to fuck off and breaks their window with a wrench. There should be more Philip Seymour Hoffman period. Can we approve some sort of grant that allows him to triple his already prodigious output? Hoffman is to War, what Kathy Bates was to Nichols’ Primary Colors, he’s the showstopper, the scene stealer, the charismatic, unattractive, blunt misfit in a group of stars who lends the picture an element of danger. Hoffman compensates for Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts’ just fine but overly self-congratulatory performances. The film also has a happy ending that’s refreshingly not that happy, and it seems to me to be one of the more convincing pictures about the secret handshake operations of global governing.
Stardust: ★★★
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer: ★★
Charlie Wilson’s War: ★★★
Pot Luck aka Three Chuck rants for the Price of One.
In the last week or so I’ve caught
I’m Not There,
There Will Be Blood, and
Sweeney Todd in the theatre. Amazing and mildly exhausting in equal measure. These are films that should be seen, digested, and seen again. Not shoehorned into a few days and knocked over like dominos. Such is the situation though, and, particularly considering the traditional winter drought that’s approaching, it’s a nice situation to be in. Eventually maybe studios will realize that people like movies the other 3/4 of the year too, and everything will be easier to catch. Maybe the Academy will one day be able to recall films that are more than sixty days old. One can dream.
Here are a few other things that I’ve caught over this same week to ten day period, but didn’t really have a full post’s worth of musings to share.
Reign Over Me, the newest film from Mike Binder and the newest in which Adam Sandler tries to atone for the obnoxiousness he unleashes as an actor and producer on a more regular basis, is one of my candidates for Worst Movie of the Year. There have been films that are technically less competent, but Reign Over Me takes the cake in sheer self-righteous unwatchability. The film is strange and ambitious. I give it that much. And only that much. In dramatic roles, Sandler usually plays the castrated opposite of the psychotic frat boy that populates his comedies. Here he gets to have it both ways: he’s deranged and castrated, and if that wasn’t enough, he gets to court Oscar by speaking in a pointless Fraggle Rock lisp that annoys more than anything else. Don Cheadle, as the old buddy who tries to save Sandler from himself, is warm and appealing, and wisely never tries to out convulse Sandler. You care for Cheadle, and hope that he one day finds someone else to help. After the overrated The Upside of Anger, and the awful Man About Town, it may be time for Mike Binder to reevaluate himself in the same banal way that his leading characters always do. Hopefully he’ll come up with something more useful than leftover Cameron Crowe, and something less desperate than a 9/11 grief cash-in.
Unlike Reign Over Me, Mr. Brooks at least has conviction in its absurdity. I can say this about the new Kevin Costner-Demi Moore-William Hurt-Dane Cook serial killer film (you read that right); every single scene is as stupid as it can possibly be. The film is unwieldy in the best way, subplots multiply like fungus: every other suburban yuppy is a serial killer or serial killer in training, and Costner presides over the entire enterprise in a performance that almost has to be self-satire. Costner is playing the same kind of colorless leading man that made him a star (and that he transcended beautifully in Bull Durham and Tin Cup) only here he’s the man of the year and the killer of the moment in equal measure. Has to be a joke. If this is a joke, I can guarantee you that Demi Moore isn’t in on it. Hurt, carrying over his character from A History of Violence, sure is though, and his scenes with Costner are the few that are truly pleasurable in a way that isn’t ironic. Mr. Brooks is the “good bad” movie of 2007.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is one of the unfortunate who knew? casualties of 2007. Some have speculated that the film may have stiffed because people are tiring of uber-comedy producer Judd Apatow’s sensibility and that the inevitable backlash has set in. I don’t buy it. I think the real issue is timing and the fact that Walk Hard is sending up something that people still take seriously: the Oscar bait musical biopic that, in it’s obligation to provide faux uplift and hope, is as false in it’s own way as anything Mr. Brooks is selling. Too bad. Walk Hard is the next evolution in the Anchorman, Talledega Nights line of hyperbolic farce, reining the shtick in just enough to magnify the bits of absurdity that drop in occasionally like hand grenades. Walk Hard is more concerned with cumulative effect than bits, and director-co-writer Jake Kasdan’s patience pays off. The music, like the music in Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind, is credible in its own right. The performances, particularly John C. Reilly’s, are as good as any to be found in more obvious Oscar bait. Hell the film, as an R-rated comedy, is actually a more credible examination of the self-destructive musician’s life than the real Mccoys who have to play cleaner to ensure that the kiddies can get in. Walk Hard also doesn’t, like most other Apatow movies, get soft and sentimental at the end. The sincerity and the sarcasm go together hand and hand here, in a more graceful way, no Act 1-crude, Act 2-crude and sentimental, Act 3-sentimental, story constructions here. This is one of the more pleasurable films of the Holiday season, and would make an interesting double bill, as others have suggested, with the more heavy duty life of the music man deconstruction I’m Not There.
Reign Over Me: ★
Mr. Brooks: ★★
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story: ★★★
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