| ||||
| - - - - - - - - - - - - Arts & EntertainmentBooks Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News  PeoplePolitics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Collectors' cards Brilliant postcards - - - - - - - - - - - - Audio and video highlights of our Brilliant Careers profiles - - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon People stories, go to the
People home page. - - - - - - - - - - - -
Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon People Nothing Personal People Feature Nothing Personal People Feature Nothing Personal - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Wearing sublime casuals designed by Marlene Stewart, Nolte plays actor Matt Hobbs, who is so gentle and affable that it takes you a moment to realize that these qualities are wrapped like a cozy blanket around an essential narcissism. When his wife (Tracey Ullman) leaves him, taking their baby girl out of the state, he finds it easier to stay in L.A. and live the life of the eternally hopeful than to make time for visits. Then suddenly Ullman's character lands in jail and he's stuck with Jeannie (Whittni Wright) -- who's now 6 years old. The arc of Matt's development is clear: He has to learn to think beyond his own needs. What makes the movie so original is the juxtaposition of the life he leads with Jeannie with the world of the studio, where narcissism is rampant. Nolte gives one of the funniest, most subtly nuanced and most accurate portrayals of an actor I've ever seen. In the early scenes, he seems to be parodying his own days as a pretty boy; later he parodies the Method. It's a loving send-up, like Dustin Hoffman's in "Tootsie." These are actors whose Method preparation, after all, is famous: Nolte lived among the homeless for a while before shooting "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," and in the scene where he entices his hosts' neurotic dog into eating his supper by lapping dog food out of his bowl, that's really what he's eating. "I'll Do Anything" contains an uproarious sequence in which Matt auditions for a bored director who immediately walks out of the room and lets his producer (Brooks), a tasteless blowhard, supervise. You can see Nolte's Matt searching around for a hook into this guy, a way to read his hysterical outbursts, to maintain some dignity and sensibility without pissing anyone off. Nolte and Brooks don't miss a trick.
Along with "Weeds" and Karel Reisz's 1990 "Everybody Wins," "I'll Do Anything" is the neglected jewel among Nolte's movies. No one went to see "Everybody Wins," either. It's a delicately shaped film noir in which Nolte is seduced by the most unexpected of femme fatales -- Debra Winger as a Marilyn Monroe type (Arthur Miller wrote the script) with multiple personality disorder. ("I, like, break up," is the way she explains her puzzling behavior.) Nolte and Winger had already done one movie together -- a deadly adaptation of Steinbeck's "Cannery Row," eight years earlier -- and they didn't bring anything out in each other there; in "Everybody Wins," though, he gets so caught up in her sexual energy that he spends some of the movie looking like he was bopped on the head in the dark. Nolte's Tom O'Toole is an investigator known for taking on lost causes -- he's also a Catholic with an aggravated sense of mission -- and for his delight in making the public prosecutor look like an idiot. Winger's Angela Crispini offers him the chance to free an innocent man convicted of murder and dangles the image of corruption in high places, while she's coming on to him at the same time. In traditional film noirs, the hero is either a private eye with a smart take on the case or else a dupe who's manipulated by the femme fatale; Nolte's Tom O'Toole is a combo -- a duped shamus. This (dark) comic setup makes it easy for us to undervalue what Nolte does in the role, but the movie wouldn't work without his sensitivity and his wit. Nolte's acting galvanizes the touching "Weeds," and he's the only actor (among at least a dozen gifted ones) who's able to deliver a performance of any shape and clarity in Terrence Malick's incoherent "The Thin Red Line" -- he cobbles together a persuasive portrait of a bullish colonel whose every move is motivated by his desire for the generalship he feels is owed him. He carries off some amazing effects in Paul Schrader's "Affliction," a project he helped to initiate, though the material finally defeats him. "Affliction" is a thesis picture, set on proving that the small-town cop Nolte plays is doomed to turn into his violent, alcoholic dad (James Coburn). Nolte gets at the terror and despair deep inside this rough hunk of a man, who's struggling against his impulses; if he could just give up the battle, he'd be less miserable, but as it is he can't settle himself. As long as Nolte's Wade resides in the area of this conflict, the performance is superb, and his scenes with Sissy Spacek (who plays his supportive girlfriend), and with Brigid Tierney as his daughter, who means so much to him but whom he can't talk to without straining every muscle in his face, are plausible in every detail. But when the movie gets where it's going and Wade explodes, even Nolte's intensity and conviction can't save it. If I had to choose my favorite Nick Nolte performance, it might be "The Prince of Tides," where he's almost good enough to make us forget the preposterous plot about the repressed Southerner who's called upon to tear away the veils of his own past as a way of helping a therapist heal his suicidal sister. (This movie must have had shrinks howling in the aisles.) Or "Life Lessons," where Dobie's sexual obsession with his assistant takes him to hilarious and piteous heights, The performance is like an unbroken series of arias. Or it might be Roger Spottiswoode's 1983 movie "Under Fire" -- perhaps the most extraordinary project the actor has ever been involved in -- where he does his most physically eloquent acting in the role of a man who always responds first with his body -- his eye, his instinct for getting the best photo, charges his muscles; he operates his camera seemingly by reflex. When a young Sandinista who's made a connection with Russel is killed before his eyes, though, he doesn't reach for his camera, and that signals a profound change in this man. All of Nolte's big scenes "Under Fire" rely on the depth and color he brings to tiny phrases or to silences; the idea is that what Russel goes through in the course of this narrative is beyond words. It's a cliché that our most beloved stripped-down action heroes -- our Gary Coopers and John Waynes and Steve McQueens -- are walking illustrations of the Hemingway dictum that action is character. Nolte gives us more -- active physicality without spareness. With him, action is character plus feeling.
- - - - - - - - - - - - Sound off - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon | |||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
