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When Nolte shambles across a freeway overpass in the new "Simpatico," swigging from a bottle of Bushmills he has secreted in a dirty overcoat that promises to contain as many surprises as Harpo Marx's ever did, he seems to have found the essence of his man-mountain self. His flyaway, dirty blond locks look like a set of crazy wings that, if they could, would take him to a better place. But that huge, powerful body keeps him trudging forward. And as the performance takes shape, the crags and hollows of Nolte's face look less like the marks of life's hard knocks than the protection nature has devised to soften the blows. When the camera catches Nolte in an unprotected moment and his eyes open wide, betraying every emotion he's kept close to the vest, you understand why most of the time they seem so tiny, hiding out behind that fortress of a face.

Simpatico Directed by Matthew Warchus Starring Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, Albert Finney, Sharon Stone, Catherine Keener, Shawn Hatosy and Kimberly Williams

In "Simpatico," the impressive debut of director Matthew Warchus (who, along with David Nicholls, adapted Sam Shepard's play), Nolte's Vinnie is the down-and-outer as romantic dreamer. Not in the manner of Bukowsi-style gutter sentimentality, but as if, beneath the booze and the funk and the dirty old clothes, Vinnie were still a teenager. Well into a hard middle age, Vinnie still holds every adolescent promise as sacred, still regards long-ago bonds as if they were a conversation that paused five minutes ago.

The bond here is with his friend Lyle (Jeff Bridges) and Lyle's wife -- and Vinnie's former girlfriend -- Rosie (Sharon Stone). As teenagers, the three worked a scam involving a horse race that won them enough to set themselves up in the racing business. But the scheme was sniffed out by the racing commissioner, Simms (Albert Finney), so the three engineered the public exposure of Simms' shady dealings while privately blackmailing him to ensure they wouldn't be found out.

"Simpatico" begins years later. Lyle, who wound up marrying Rosie, has become one of Kentucky's top racehorse owners and is about to sell his Triple Crown winner, Simpatico, who will be put out to stud. Nothing has worked out for Vinnie. Existing on Lyle's dime, he still lives like a derelict in the seedy little California town where he and Lyle and Rosie worked their scheme, and the memory of it has never ceased to sicken him. Stumbling home from the dive where he does some of his drinking, Vinnie sits with the shades drawn looking at home movies of the crooked victory, torn up over both what he did and what he lost. And the movie opens at the point where he has to do something about it.

The subject of "Simpatico" is how we live -- or don't live -- with corruption. Lyle has accepted the scheme as simply the price of doing business, and he's too caught up in his grand life to care about how it's been poisoned -- even, most of the time, to notice that it has. He's too jazzed at being a racing hotshot to spend much time worrying that Rosie, like Vinnie, has become a drunk, albeit one kept in much more lavish dissolution.

If it seems incredible that we've been watching Jeff Bridges for almost 30 years now, that may be because, at 50, he still has the strapping build and youthful good looks of a high-school football hero. Warchus puts the way Bridges has aged so sensationally, and our image of him as an open, immensely likable actor, to contrary effect.

Lyle is the very picture of thoughtless, smooth-faced corruption, and under his surface affability, you can detect the hardness of steel girders. And Bridges is so adept at underplaying, at immersing himself in a character, that it's easy to think he's not doing anything special. But when you recall how many times this actor with a (deserved) reputation for likability has played characters who are difficult to like (the embittered lounge pianist in "The Fabulous Baker Boys") or even horrifying (the beyond-cold killer in "Jagged Edge"), you realize how he's used his ability to connect with audiences in order to draw us to characters we might otherwise resist. The role of someone whose charm is a ruse is peculiarly suited to him, a reminder of the depths we take for granted because Bridges is, from movie to movie, so dependably good.

Next page | As in a Ross Macdonald mystery, the past returns to haunt the present