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Home , Alan Arkin, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando

before and after make-up for his role as Don in © Serious face, centre stage David Thomson’s career as a film critic has been a performance worthy of Brando or Olivier CLIVE JAMES

ake way for Marlon Brando, but surprisingly few. Mainly the text is con- and David fined to memorialising these three. And if you Thomson. Other great doubt that David Thomson counts as a great actors are mentioned in actor, consider that he has built a reputation MDavid Thomson’s new book, for being profound out of a whole lifetime of 1 SERIOUS FACE, CENTRE STAGE

doing almost nothing except watching movies. shared my general impression of a classically You and I did the same, but we get called friv- good-looking young man eating the script and olous. David Thomson gets revered. It’s a trib- eructating it back to the atmosphere in a series ute to his serious face, transported carefully of slurred burps and aphasic grunts. Accord- to centre stage and looking all of us in the eye, ing to Thomson, though, Brando was a revo- daring us to call him crazy for being eager to lution. That’s the way the book is organised, in discuss the divine stature of Julia Roberts in fact: Olivier is the last of the ancien régime and Pretty Woman, a movie, which, he says, he has Brando is the whole of the revolution includ- seen “five or six times.” What was he hoping to ing . find, ’s eyes? My apologies for even momentarily con- juring up Brando’s screen performance as is old head at least as full of screen Napoleon in Désirée, a miasma of portentous performances as mine, Thomson brooding which Thomson prefers to think was strangely chooses, for the focus an act of sabotage on Brando’s part instead of his new short treatise, a skimpy of just his usual digestive attack on the writ- Hhandful of stage performances dating from ten script. I admire Brando too, but only for his very early years. Some of them he actually those moments on screen—they amount to the saw, but only a few. Out there in Australia, I length of about two and a half movies in all— heard about Brando’s performance as Stanley when he showed some respect for the group Kowalski in ’s Broadway produc- enterprise in which he was engaged. tion of , but couldn’t Unequivocal admirers of Brando often see it. Thomson, about six years old at the excuse his habit of sabotaging his own starring time, couldn’t have seen it either. He did see vehicles on the grounds that he was so seri- Olivier on stage as Shakespeare’s Othello—I ous about his craft he couldn’t bear a context saw that too, the year I got to England—and that was not true to life. There is something earlier he had seen Olivier as Archie Rice in in that idea, but not much. He did, after all, the Royal Court production of John Osborne’s walk away from the editing of One-Eyed Jacks, The Entertainer. Even though Thomson was a movie he not only starred in, but directed. only 15, it must have been a formative experi- In other words, after half a career of bitching ence, with every detail of Olivier’s sweat-wet about lack of control, when he got control he make-up clear to the future critic’s piercing didn’t know what to do with it. Cope with the scrutiny. irrationality of that, and you are ready to cope But he never saw Brando on stage in Street- with his apparently wilful, indeed suicidal, car: if he had, half the book would have no determination to add an extra dimension to other subject. He saw Brando’s Stanley the his role as in Mutiny on the way I did: in the movie. He must therefore have . The dimension he added was histrion-

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ics. Any of our modern-day male screen stars Attenborough must have been nursing a large who pad out a role by peppering each speech gun. Otherwise Kingsley, while pronouncing with pauses and looking sideways in six differ- on the virtues of passive resistance, would have ent directions is being histrionic in a way that been busy verifying optically the existence of Brando invented. My friend Antonia Quirke . argues that pioneered the The accumulated insanity of Brando’s her- screen mumble but Stewart’s use of the device itage through the generations should be kept had only limited scope, because eventually in mind when we assess his brilliance in Julius the written lines got through uninjured. In his Caesar, , and speeches, Brando could make even the visuals The Godfather. In all four cases (we could make mumble. It was a kind of achievement, but a it five if time had not so cruelly overtaken Last dubious one for him and a disaster for all those in by making on-screen sex com- younger actors who copied him, and therefore pulsory where it was once forbidden) the direc- a continuing disaster for all of us. tor knew how to control him, but it couldn’t

“Any of our male screen stars who pad out a role with pauses is being histrionic in a way that Brando invented”

In the movie Species and have been easy, especially with his deadly habit Michael Madsen staged a competition for who of not learning his lines. The late Eric Ambler, could look sideways more often. Madsen won it who worked on the script of Mutiny on the by actually turning his back on the camera to Bounty, once told me that the reason Brando look out of a window that wasn’t there. Should keeps looking down at the ship’s railing is that you see Species again, if only to check up on it had bits of the script pasted on it, and even whether Natasha Henstridge could really be in The Godfather, when he came back from that beautiful while harbouring within her career death and was really trying to do his skin a gigantic multi-branched mucoid alien, best, there were bits of script stashed all over check out the way that Kingsley, while talk- the set, including on the shirt of the actor he ing, and even more when someone else is talk- was talking to. ing, looks to every part of the screen as if his There can be no doubt, incidentally, that feet were shackled to the floor in the middle Brando often had a legitimate beef even when of an art gallery. That he didn’t do the same dealing with real artists instead of the usual when starring as Mahatma Gandhi is a tribute con-men. In The Countess from Hong Kong, to the late ’s powers as a which he did because he admired Charlie disciplinarian. As he sat in his director’s chair, Chaplin, he was appalled to find that Chaplin

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Robert Redford and in Out of Africa had no idea which parts of the script were alive all the leading men checked up on each oth- and which were dead. For a man so intelligent, er’s use, or abuse, of the text, especially if it even bookish, the disappointments of movie had been written by Shakespeare. Olivier com- stardom must have been cruel. But his way of plained that sang instead of being defensive was to use the words as a bar- speaking, a slim shaft of bitchery which Thom- ricade, behind which he could hugely crouch: son, for his argument, would have done better more and more hugely as his intake of ice- to leave unquoted, because Gielgud really was cream increased. In that posture, he couldn’t the complete master of speech. Young actors say anything straight. today, snorting at the starting gate, would Thomson assumes, usefully, that Olivier do well to take a look at Gielgud on YouTube could. Again, our author has a good point to reciting the great valedictory speech from The state before making too much of it. Olivier Tempest as it was used climactically in Prospe- could bring the English language alive in his ro’s Books. mouth as surely as Brando killed it off. Olivier But Olivier’s on-screen Shakespeare plays came from a British stage tradition in which certainly add up to a tremendous achievement,

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a cultural high point of the . His but mainly he succumbs to the post-modern whiplash delivery as Richard III should serve mode in which no statements can be made to emphasise, however, that when deprived of except those too sweeping to be analysed or too Shakespeare’s help he could mangle a writ- idiosyncratic to be contested: historic scope ten line as badly as any other actor trying to through a peep-hole. compensate for tone-deafness with super-pre- A kind of panic has set in: otherwise a man cise articulation. Listen to him in the voice- as smart as Thomson would simply be able to overs for The World at War episodes and you say why Brando was a bankable film star and wonder why Jeremy Isaacs, in expiation for Olivier wasn’t. When not clad and scripted as having cast Olivier as the narrator, did not cast English or Danish blank-verse royalty, Olivier himself from a window. Blithely, or perhaps was able to carry few movies on his own after nervously, careless of where the stresses were That Hamilton Woman. His best screen work is meant to be placed, Olivier could give you one in support, in roles such as the berserk Nazi false reading after another. dentist in Marathon Man, or the tight-lipped English cop—the ideal male model for a mack- “Olivier could mangle a line intosh—in Bunny Lake is Missing. Considering as badly as any other actor how much he had going for him, one might well ask why. trying to compensate for The answer, sadly, is that it comes down tone-deafness with super- largely to appearance. If it came down to act- ing ability, the biggest screen star of the post- precise articulation” war era would have been , and would have starred on the cov- But that wasn’t Olivier’s main handicap as a ers of knitwear catalogues for males. screen star. Here we come to a touching illus- When he lay on his deathbed last Novem- tration of how Thomson, in his latterday role ber, might still have been regret- as an omniscient sage, has reached the point ting that his film ofCatch-22 was never a hit. where he is unable to say anything elementary: But by then he must have known why it wasn’t. a perennial danger for the professional critic Take a look at the way Alan Arkin , as the sex- which has perhaps become acute, now that the starved Yossarian, groans and writhes when he web is crawling with blog-trolls and rootless catches his first glimpse of the symphonically nutters who believe that a cultural viewpoint upholstered young blonde female attached to may be transmitted through nothing but opin- the arm of . The scene couldn’t ions, with no effort wasted on the actual writ- be better played. On the strength of his abili- ing. He says some subtle and reasonable things ties, Hollywood—supposedly a citadel of phil- about and Daniel Day-Lewis, istinism but in fact crazy about art—gave

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Brad Pitt in Troy © WARNER BROS.

Arkin many a starring role. He was wonder- ful in all of them, but the public couldn’t be made to care. In Havana, Arkin gave Robert Redford an acting lesson, but Redford couldn’t give Arkin what he always needed—a lesson in screen presence.

n the movies, screen presence doesn’t depend just on the actor, it depends on us: the way the actor looks has to suit our dreams. An actor might even be too Ihandsome: when ’s Anthony Lane called a prisoner of his own jawline, he was writing true and penetrating cultural criticism. On the other hand, there are actors who look quite normal but they strike us the way that the Species creature would have liked to strike Kingsley. Dreams go deep, and hence there is no point looking for reasons why you can’t stand an actor. I for one have always been ready to eat glass rather than watch a Nicholas Cage movie, and I felt the same way about Matthew McConaughey even after my pitiless younger daughter made me watch True Detective: great stuff, but it had him in it. Perhaps, in the bilges of my psy- che, there are the memories of faces that once made me fear for my life, and these actors resemble those prototypes. But when we clear all that psychological clutter aside, we are left with the likelihood that the stars of both main genders strike us as archetypally beau- tiful. Garbo did that for spectators of both sexes, and so did . If Grant had

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taken, when it was offered, the starring role we go on.” It takes a cyborg to deliver lines like in Ninotchka that was played by Melvyn Doug- that, and if you haven’t got one you have to las, the results might have been incandescent. build one. Imagine Grant’s face in the reaction shots But Brad is a star, even if his upside-down during Ninotchka’s most lyrical aria: “bombs head has been replaced by an algorithm. To may fall… but we have had our moment.” He catch Neill’s essence and value it, you have to wouldn’t have had to do anything except look watch him in supporting roles. Look at the del- pleased. Least of all would he have felt com- icate and poetically articulated way he gives pelled to examine the décor. In that era, stars his great speech in The Hunt for Red October, were chosen for the way they could blow your still by far the best movie in the Jack Ryan mind even if they did nothing. They still are. franchise. Born and raised in the ,

“For the otherwise not completely stupid Troy, had his thighs digitally enhanced”

There is a role for those who don’t, but the Sam’s character is dreaming of the wonders role tends to be further down the bill. I loved of freedom in the west. “I will have a pick-up Sam Neill when he starred in The Dish. I love truck… or a recreational vehicle.” Sean Con- Sam Neill in anything, and perhaps partly nery as the Shoviet shubmarine captain with because his good looks are not unreal, but a shpeech impediment listens in wonder, as comfortably consonant with the demands of well as he might, because he couldn’t have time. But in the whole of his useful career he delivered a line like that even if he had been has rarely been the star. In the Jurassic Park supplied with a pick-up truck of his own. Nor movies, the star is CGI technology, omnivo- could Olivier have spoken those lines with such rous velociraptors from which Neill symboli- an ear to the phonetic balance of the writing, cally runs away: although the time approaches, and Brando would have had to read them off no doubt, when the actors will be digitalised Connery’s chest, while adding a few post-hippy along with everything else. For the otherwise anachronisms of his own devising, and—ah, not completely stupid Troy, Brad Pitt had his this above all—constantly pausing to scrutinise thighs digitally enhanced, and it now occurs the layout of the set. to me that this electronic tinkering was part But you can tell what game we’re playing of his preparation to deliver the voice-over in here. We’re getting into the treasure-chest of the Chanel commercial that made some of us small change, the necessarily bulky mental think of giving up on civilisation alto- coffer where all those memories are stored in gether. “It’s not a journey. A journey ends. But which the screen comes fully alive because the

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acting has successfully twinned itself to real- will forgive me for calling the 11th hour, Thom- ity. Contrary to the opinion of almost all young son says almost nothing about all that, even male actors, it can’t be done by sweeping the though he has always been right about the fun- crockery off the shelf in anger, as damental importance of sex appeal on screen. did in Heat, and as thousands of other screen In the aesthetics of the theatrical arts, almost actors have done ever since the habit of demol- all the truths are awkward. Perhaps Thomson ishing the props was instituted by guess who? is being cautious. His book-length love-letter to Nicole Kidman earned him much scorn. Per- t was Marlon Brando, in the stage pro- sonally, I liked him for it. Let the doddering duction of Streetcar; and Elia Kazan senex go ape: there is wisdom in that too, and should have shot him for it—just a lit- anyway, it’s only writing. But there can be no tle bit, a flesh wound to get his atten- doubt that when the subject turns to the female Ition. But directors are in thrall to actors too. stars, Thomson is less in control of his tone And quite often even the most maniacal actor than ever. Let’s end where we began, with Pretty is right. In Out of Africa, Robert Redford was Woman, a movie that Thomson has seen five or never going to shave his head to mimic the six times. He describes Julia Roberts as “a kid baldness of the central character Denys Finch with a head full of young impulses and a body Hatton, but his director Sidney Pollack must ready for playful sex.” If you say so, David, but have been startled when Redford announced the last time I said something like that they put that he had no intention of adopting an Eng- me on olanzapine. lish accent either. Leave the acting to and Meryl Streep: the audi- ence wants to see me being me, not me being someone else. And Redford was right. The movie was a starring vehicle. Nearly all suc- cessful movies are, and the unsuccessful mov- ies tend to be the ones that not even you and I have heard of. As for the women, Thomson says remarka- bly little, for him. There was a time when you could have counted on him to go bananas about, say, Emily Blunt’s performance as an ambitious young dancer in The Adjustment Bureau. (Compare and contrast the terrible time that Natalie Portman is obviously having in Swan.) Nowadays, at what I hope he

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