There will surely be quite a few articles on Will Smith's star status in the next few days but most of them will be shallow, knee jerk pieces. Mark Harris wrote a thoughtful, balanced article on lead actors (no actresses mentioned) for GQ three months ago.
Heard all the Hollywood
hand-wringing about the death of the movie star? About how the only
things that can get people to the box office are comic-book heroes and
animated sequels? The people who say this definitely haven't seen
.
The thing is, the leading man isn't dead, but he's evolving into
something a little more complicated. Mark Harris explains the rules of
leading men and tells us who is one (Channing Tatum), who isn't (Taylor
Kitsch, at least not yet), and why
The ten highest-grossing movies
of 2012 included the following:
Three adaptations of young-adult novels. Three
adaptations of comic books. Two cartoons. One
installment in an action series. And one original,
non-franchise, live-action movie that was,
technically, aimed at adults.
Nine of the ten movies were, or were
intended to generate, sequels. The movie
aimed at adults was about a man whose
teddy bear talks to him. None of this is news.
We're all pretty familiar by now with the
not-so-brave, no-longer-so-new world of
franchises and the adult children who make
them. What's most jolting about this list is
what's missing from it: movie stars.
I don't mean that they're literally absent:
Recognizable men are cast in lead roles.
What's missing is, rather, the value stars
bring to a movie—a quality long thought
to be one of the most reliable and precious
commodities in Hollywood. The twenty-first-century movie business, judging by
this list, appears to be one in which
Skyfall's
Daniel Craig counts for neither more nor
less than
Twilight's Robert Pattinson or
The
Hobbit's Martin Freeman. It's a business in
which you can get to $200 million or $250
million by hiring Andrew Garfield (for
The
Amazing Spider-Man) or David Schwimmer
(for voice work on
Madagascar 3). And notably, it is a business in which you will not get
to that top ten on the back of someone like
Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt, unless they get
there on the back of something like
Pirates
of the Caribbean 5 or
Ocean's Whatever.
It's hard to escape the logical conclusion: Movie stars just don't matter anymore.
Financially, sociologically, culturally, they're
either obsolete or doing a damn good job of
pretending to be. Whether it's because they
stopped doing what movie stars are supposed to do or we stopped wanting them to
do it, here we all are, apparently, in a
post-movie-star universe in which the movies
seem to be doing just fine without the presence of an entire category of people who
have been, for the better part of the past century, the main reason a lot of people went to
the movies. And we shouldn't be surprised.
If, in 2013, our primary allegiances are to
genres and concepts and properties rather
than to people, if our biggest modern movie
stars are Batman and Bourne and Wolverine
and James Bond, and if the most a flesh-and-blood actor can hope is to be chosen
to serve as the temporary avatar for one of
those characters, then what meaning can
the term
movie star possibly have?
Plenty, it turns out. We still need movie
stars. And perhaps more surprisingly, we
still
have movie stars—lots of them, and
arguably a more talented and interesting
variety than at any time in the past thirty
years. But they play by new rules, and they
have to navigate an industry that often
seems hostile to their very existence.
···
To make sense of the new movie star universe, it may help to acknowledge
that the very words
movie star now seem
like kryptonite to half of Hollywood's A-list
(and A-list aspirants). From Johnny Depp,
who is, lest there be any doubt, a movie star:
"That 'movie star' stuff, I just don't buy it; it
just doesn't make sense to me." From Steve
Carell, who has worked very hard to try to
become a movie star: "I don't think of myself
as a movie star... I'm an actor, and I love
my job." From Armie Hammer, the star of
the hugely expensive big-studio franchise-wannabe
The Lone Ranger: "I personally
don't see myself...as a movie star."
This may all come under the heading of
protesting too much—the way the second
somebody says, "I don't consider myself
wealthy," you know they're a lot closer to
it than you are. But you can't blame actors
for running away from a term that reeks
of greed and compromise. Ever since the
Reagan-era Wall Street boom infected
Hollywood with a bigger-is-better aesthetic
and box-office performance became a routine part of plugged-in chatter, the industry and the press have welded the idea of
stardom to money so completely that it has
been dumbed down all the way to the level
of elementary-school math. According to
Hollywood and its observers, a star is someone who can open a movie.
But to equate stardom with mere bank-ability ruins the fun—unless your definition
of fun is long and tortured analytical discussions of whether Tom Cruise is "still a star,"
even though nobody wanted to see a man
that short play Jack Reacher or, for that matter, see a movie titled
Jack Reacher. Beyond
that, it misses the truth. For one thing, some
actors can indeed open movies every single
time and yet are not what we think of as
movie stars (specialty acts like Tyler Perry
and single-niche performers like Jason
Statham), just as there are actors whose
box-office records may be spotty but whose
stardom is indisputable (Pitt, for one).
By the numbers, Adam Sandler is a movie
star, but only when he makes an Adam
Sandler movie. His stardom, like Abbott and
Costello's in the 1940s and Burt Reynolds's
in the 1970s, is extraordinarily consistent,
but also dependent on satisfying rather
than challenging the modest expectations
of his target audience. When Sandler tried
to break those chains, as he did in
Punch-Drunk Love and
Funny People, he won over
critics but lost his base. Stars shouldn't be
constrained by the fact that they do one
thing well—nor should the designation of
movie star be subject to such casual revision
every time the grosses roll in. All stars have
flops; real stars survive them.
The reductio ad absurdum of the financial
approach to stardom was exposed when
Forbes, crunching the numbers, declared
that our three biggest male stars are
Daniel Radcliffe, Shia LaBeouf, and Robert
Pattinson. If this is what stardom has come
to, why continue the discussion? Radcliffe,
Pattinson, and LaBeouf carried three of the
last decade's biggest film franchises, but
subtract their signature roles (as you must,
because those sweet rides are over) and
you've got three young actors—average age:
a still-too-soon-to-tell 25—ranging from
very promising to very problematic who are
still working to prove they are more than
the sum of their parts. Nobody ever wants
to be seen as this sort of "post-movie-star
movie star"—competent, handsome, and
untroublesome to the corporation bankrolling your franchise. The guys who get those
jobs always feel quickly compelled to prove
that they're not just on-screen because
their costumes fit nicely. Chris Hemsworth
wants to be known as more than the guy in
The Avengers people
also like, after Robert
Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and Samuel L.
Jackson but before Chris Evans.
So let's take weekend grosses and franchise successes out of the equation for
the moment and assume that something
remains aside from the usual airy-fairy
horseshit about "star quality" and "magnetism." Some leading men come to a pivot
point at which we in the audience stop
thinking, "Oh yeah, that guy again," and
start thinking of someone simply as a name:
Clooney. Hanks. Clint. Jack. Modern male
movie stars—the ones who are more than
just amalgamations of sex and money and
slick catchphrases—have something in common with their forerunners all the way back
to Hollywood's golden age. It's what film
critic Ty Burr called "the impact of coherent
personalities...behind individual roles," that
particular, recognizable quality that doesn't
overwhelm or rewrite those roles but makes
them richer and deeper. To understand
who makes the cut and who doesn't these
days, it might help to have a case study of
would-be movie stars.
···
At the beginning of last year,
there were two particularly strong candidates to become a one-namer: Channing
Tatum and Taylor Kitsch. For one thing,
they were the right age: Tatum is 32; Kitsch
is 31. That works, because, with rare exceptions (Travolta in the '70s, Cruise in the
'80s), we don't usually want male movie
stars to be in their twenties. We'll watch
them, we'll like them, we'll go to their films,
but being handsome (or pretty) and devoid
of life experience—the age at which your
clear, healthy, unlined face is a map of nothing but optimism untouched by personal
history—that's not quite the look of a movie
star. Stardom is something you have to
grow into. The beginning of your thirties is
a good time to make the jump, and it should
be a jump, an ascension, an unexpected
upsurge that makes people feel that even
though they've seen you before, they're now
seeing into you for the first time.
Tatum spent the past five years serving
as the most ingratiating element of
unmemorable movies like
G.I. Joe: The Rise
of Cobra and
Step Up 2 the Streets. Kitsch's
main credit was five seasons on
Friday
Night Lights. As résumés go, these were
modest but promising, the kind of credits
that often precede an official moment, that
tick of the career clock when executives
and directors and producers and media
people all start to ask, "Yes or no?"
Kitsch got to don the armature of two
oversize, very expensive would-be franchises,
John Carter and
Battleship. About
half a billion budget dollars—serious money
even in a profligate industry—rode on the
bet that he could be the dude at the center
of the trailer. Tatum, meanwhile, worked
in two less costly subgenres—the romantic
melodrama (
The Vow) and the TV retread
(
21 Jump Street). Besides those lunges
for popular acceptance, each guy took an
ass-baring chance on artistic credibility—Kitsch pounding away atop Blake Lively in
Oliver Stone's
Savages, Tatum reprocessing his own past as a stripper for Steven
Soderbergh in
Magic Mike.
If we're grading these guys, money matters. You can't be a movie star if nobody
sees your movies. But even the stats start
to crumble when you look at them closely.
All three of Tatum's films were hits, not
huge but solid, each grossing between
$100 and $140 million in the U.S. Moreover,
they represented an undeniably efficient return on investment.
(
Magic Mike, for instance, was made for just
$7 million.) Kitsch's movies were not hits;
they earned too little domestically—between
$50 and $75 million apiece—and, except for
Savages, they cost too much. But the movies are a worldwide business and, globally,
Kitsch's three pictures took in $669 million,
substantially outperforming Tatum's. What,
therefore, does the math add up to? A wash.
Still, there's no mistaking the outcome.
The dust clears. We survey the landscape.
Channing Tatum is now a movie star. And
Taylor Kitsch is not. How did this transition,
not particularly predictable a year ago, happen for one of them? Why did it fail to happen
for the other?
···
The thing that breaks the tie between
Tatum and Kitsch—the sense that one of
them beat the system and the other got
beaten up by it—is the key difference between
movie stardom now and movie stardom in
Hollywood's golden age. From the dawn
of talkies to the end of the studio system—roughly the early 1930s to the mid-1960s—MGM and 20th Century-Fox and Paramount
and the like exerted some control not only
over who got to be a movie star but also over
the idea of what a star was supposed to be:
a handsome young man plucked from the
crowd and then reinvented from the ground
up. A squadron of professional image-remakers would give actors new names and looks
and voices and teeth—transforming Marion
Morrison into John Wayne or Archibald
Leach into Cary Grant.
There were always some stars who were
groomed by the insiders and then accepted
by the public (Gregory Peck, Rock Hudson)
and others who became stars despite the fact
that studios initially didn't know what to do
with them (most famously, Fred Astaire and
Humphrey Bogart). You could be a conformist or a rebel, Mr. Nice Guy or a tormented
brooder (or both if you were Jimmy Stewart).
With enough clout, you could lobby for better roles, better scripts, better directors.
But whatever you did, you did it within a
single cosmos defined by the output of a half
dozen studios. And you would never escape
what Jeanine Basinger has called the star
machine, a system designed to identify the
elements about you that worked best for
audiences and to reward you for successfully
retailing them in movie after movie. If you
didn't like it, there was no alternative path,
no indie movement, no Plan B.
| Star Power is a Finite Resource
|
|
No one is a movie star forever. Here, a look at the
life spans of a few of our most iconic leading men and their career
sweet spots
1. Robert Redford
• Was a movie star from: 33 to 57
• Prime: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ('69) to Indecent Proposal ('93)
• Arty movie that proved he wasn't just beefcake: The Candidate
2. Harrison Ford
• Was a movie star from: 37 to 52
• Prime: The Empire Strikes Back ('80) to Clear and Present Danger ('94)
• Arty movie that proved he wasn't George Lucas's bitch: Blade Runner.
3. Denzel Washington
• Was a movie star from: 35 to now
• Prime(s): Glory ('89) to Devil in a Blue Dress ('95); He Got Game ('98) to Flight ('12)
• Arty movie that proved he was a better villain than hero: Training Day
4. Tom Cruise
• Was a movie star from: 21 to 42
• Prime: Risky Business ('83) to War of the Worlds ('05)
• Arty movie that proved he could convincingly deliver the line "Respect the cock": Magnolia
6. Robert Downey JR.
• Was a movie star from: 22, 27, 43 to now
• Prime: Erratic; possibly The Pick-Up Artist ('87), then Chaplin ('92), but definitely '08 to present
• Beefcake movie that proved he wasn't just arty: Iron Man
|
Today, Plan B is so essential that it's the
name of Brad Pitt's production company.
Actors who are interested in curating their
stardom over the long haul have to do it with
one foot in the system and one foot outside
it, because we as moviegoers crave a kind of
genuineness and individuality—or at least a
simulacrum of it—that isn't consonant with
being a willing corporate tool whose career
is to be shaped by paycheck gigs and studio
needs. (This is what LaBeouf was moaning
about when he recently said, "If I could give
the money back and get all the credibility...that I'm seeking, I would do it tomorrow. In
a heartbeat.") A George Clooney who made
only neo-Rat Pack movies would look like a
lazy underachiever despite the films' success,
but a George Clooney who makes those movies in order to gain the power to traffic in the
serious, the small-scale, and the adult (
Up in
the Air,
The Descendants, etc.) looks like the
master of his own fate and a shrewd player, a
man who knows how to navigate the realms
of both commerce and art.
The modern male movie star needs to be
fluent in the ways of Hollywood—but as a
second language, the first being his own
passions and convictions and interest in his
craft. When Christian Bale finally came to the
cowl and cape in the
Dark Knight trilogy, it
was as a visitor to the mainstream, not as a
product of it. And when he chose
The Fighter
and a Terrence Malick double-feature as his
non-Batsuit projects, it seemed personally
and professionally in character for an actor
who pours what seem like barely containable
levels of rage, defiance, charisma, and commitment into his work; one reason Bale was
such an ideal Batman is that, in Christopher
Nolan's hands, the character is constantly
struggling to hold onto his integrity despite
having a split identity.
All stars, to a degree, end up playing brand
extensions of themselves. Look at Robert
Downey Jr. in his current post-Troubled
Genius phase. Whether as Iron Man or
Sherlock Holmes, the fast-talking, fast-thinking, cocky, damaged,
preening, never-quite-fulfilling-his-potential guy he plays is proof
that movie stars can turn even franchises
into meta-autobiography. More than any
other A-lister, Downey seems to suggest that
he's winking at the mainstream even while
making sure the check always clears. Michael
Fassbender, only 35 but craggy and worn
and already a little roughened by experience
from the day we met him, is someone who is
equally mesmerizing whether he is walking
toward the camera titanically, confrontationally naked in
Shame or uttering the precisely
clipped syllables of a disembodied robot
in
Prometheus. That constant awareness
of how to calibrate your performance up or
down, a knowledge of how to break through
the clutter or to own the quietness, is a sure
mark of stardom. It is evident in the work of
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who won raves in
The
Dark Knight Rises for forcing a huge movie
to meet his gentle, unforced, human-scale
performance halfway. And it's even there in
the career approach taken by James Franco,
who can, depending on the project, seem like
a movie star, a movie star in air quotes, an
actor tapping into his inner movie star, or a
grad student doing a doctoral thesis on the
idea of stardom.
Playing the game without appearing to be
a pawn within it is hard. So hard that a number of very good actors bend over backward
to avoid any choices that could suck them
into the movie star maw. Joaquin Phoenix—
who, of course, made
I'm Still Here, a nervous breakdown of a meta-documentary
about the grotesquery of celebrity—is as talented an actor as any in his generation. But
when he makes a studio movie like
Walk the
Line, it feels like it's only because whatever
fascinates him happens to intersect briefly
with the mainstream. One reason Phoenix
is so mesmerizing in
The Master is that the
character's violent, wounded, animal qualities are so in line with
what we as moviegoers feel about the actor—he's emotionally
naked but at the same time impenetrable.
That's part of the reason Oscar voters went
ahead and nominated Phoenix's performance even after he called the
whole awards
process "total utter bullshit"; if you're an
actor whose entire public persona is built
upon being almost defiantly true to yourself,
you don't get penalized for it.
It's not an easy needle to thread. Nobody—despite all of their protestations and demurrals—ever becomes a movie star without
wanting it. But appearing to want it too much
can also endanger you. Jeremy Renner's
2010 Oscar nomination for The Hurt Locker
brought him right to the edge of the main-
stream. Renner isn't typical movie-star material—Paul Rudnick
brilliantly described him
as "Daniel Craig with the mumps," which is
a brutal but not inaccurate reminder that
hotness matters; being not very tall, slightly
squinty, and squashy-featured is no impediment if you at least look
like sex incarnate
when you emerge from the surf in skintight
swim trunks. Still, all stars are, in some way,
exceptions to the rule, and Renner's compactness and physical grace
give him a center of gravity that makes every shot feel as if
it's designed around him; his watchfulness
makes you lean in. But when, following stints
in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol and
The Avengers, he stepped into the Bourne
franchise last summer, The New Yorker's
David Denby was moved to ask, "Is Renner a
star? I'm not so sure... We rarely know what
he's thinking; we don't feel close to him."
The ability to connect with audiences that
way is certainly one component of stardom
(and always has been). But I think what Denby
was reacting to was the fact that Renner leapt
perhaps too quickly at roles in three franchises without one moment in any of them
in which he played an actual human being.
Given the chance to play a cipherlike action
hero, he cast aside much of the particularity,
nuance, humanity, and power of his earlier
work in order to run and jump and shoot and
scowl, and what's left is...a cipherlike action
hero. This doesn't mean Renner isn't a movie
star. But it might mean he doesn't know his
own strengths—and that's one quality that
separates the top tier from the ranks of the
almost-there. Can the definition of movie star
be broadened so generously that it includes
Bale and Franco, Phoenix and Renner, or are
they just, you know, good actors?
···
It helps to remember that stars are not
born but made. To some degree, self-made:
Their talent, skill, looks, and instinct about
exactly what it takes to break from the pack
all matter, and sometimes, when those qualities coalesce perfectly, an
actor can will himself to transcend the merely appealing, the
just ordinarily likable, and become one of the
elect. From then on, we're invested in their
journey through years and even decades.
We're excited or touched or even moved by
the possibilities they show us. Their lives,
on-screen, seem to tell us an ongoing story in
addition to the story we happen to be watching at that moment. Calling
someone a movie
star is a kind of confession, a way of admitting
that there are certain people on-screen we
don't just watch but actively follow.
What do those guys have that the others
don't? Here's the list. This is what it takes.
The right balance of relatability and mystery. It's the Renner Conundrum (to put
it Ludlumesque-ly): Movie stars need to
seem like people you could know and, at
the same time, people you could never fully
know. Matt Damon looks like somebody you
knew in college, or maybe the dad of the kid
with whom your kid rides the bus, but his
reserve suggests a personal moral code and
an ability to keep things close to the vest—a privacy that can make him read as both
ordinary and unknowable; his Bourne was
the perfect mating of character and actor.
Overexposure—a constant hazard in an era
of omnivorous media coverage—destroys
mystery, which is why so many celebrity
profiles you read are exercises in evasion.
But too much caginess, or worse, public
grievance about the fact that people are curious about you, destroys relatability.
Performers who project relatability but
have nothing elusive about them do better as
network-television stars, or maybe morning-show anchormen. (Exception: Hanks.) On the
other hand, if all you're capable of projecting
is mystery and you're a quart low on relatability, you are probably a douchebag. (Exception:
Fassbender.) You can tilt heavily in one direction: Channing Tatum is unquestionably
more everydude than enigma, but his performances still suggest there might be a thing or
two about him you don't know yet.
Sex appeal. Movie stars have wide latitude
in this area. You don't necessarily have to be
hot, or handsome, or muscular, or young.
It's amazing how little any of those things
have ever mattered when it comes to movie
stars. You don't have to swagger in a way that
suggests your between-the-sheets résumé
involves several pages of single-spaced typing. You don't have to make love to the camera
(and probably shouldn't try). You can even, if
the movie and the moment are right, expand
America's definition of sex appeal to include
you, the way Cagney did, the way Bogart did,
the way Dustin Hoffman did. But you've got to
have something.
There's a complicated corollary to this,
which is that male movie stars have to appeal
to straight men, too, not just women and gay
guys. And there is a straight-guy equivalent
to Date/Marry/Shag, which is Someone You
Could Have a Drink With/Someone You
Could Cry in Front of Who Wouldn't Bust You
for It Later/Someone Whom You'd Want on
Your Side in a Bar Fight. Men offscreen relate
to men on-screen somewhat skittishly; we
want them to be like us, but also better than
us; we want them to convince us that they're
the people we could be if we just worked out
some of our issues and went to the gym a
little more often and didn't have lower-back
problems and were taller and handsomer
and...you get the picture.
A sense of humor. There are very few characteristics that can be described as vital for
a male movie star. This is one. An actor who
comes off as so unironically alpha that he
makes you feel worse about yourself is never,
over the long haul, going to be a true movie
star unless he can wink at his own macho
shtick a little and demonstrate that he gets
the joke. When Ryan Gosling went on MTV
and consented to do some dramatic readings of the "Hey girl" Internet meme seen
on Tumblr ("Hey girl, sometimes I get so sad
when we can't watch Golden Girls together"),
he demonstrated a kind of humility that, even
if it's carefully stage-managed, is essential.
If you're incapable of presenting yourself
on-screen in a way that suggests you find
anything funny, ever, you are probably
Vin
Dieseltoo self-protective to be a movie star.
Or maybe you're just stupid, which is not an
ideal long-term professional asset, either.
The ability to keep surprising people. There
was a time when stars stayed stars by doing
the same thing over and over again—Bob
Hope and Bing Crosby and Roy Rogers probably never lost a night's sleep over their desire
to show greater range. But for most modern
movie stars, shaking up public expectations is
the job that never ends. It requires self-knowledge, because in order to surprise people,
you have to know not just who you are, but
who they think you are. It involves arrogance,
because you have to believe that you can do
something nobody yet knows you can do,
and then keep finding the next thing that fits
that bill. And it takes an ability to recognize
your own perceived deficits, because the most
effective surprises lead audiences to say, "I
didn't know he had that in him."
Being a movie star requires maintaining a
complicated balance between the unchanging (that recognizable identity that you carry
from role to role) and the elastic (the ability
to reshape yourself for each new part without completely vanishing). Channing Tatum
did not become a star in The Vow, in which
he plays a love-struck husband so dumb he
decides that his amnesiac, brain-injured wife
would probably enjoy a surprise party. That
role cemented a certain image of Tatum as
a guy who can play well-meaning, jockish,
hopeless dolts. We already knew that. Instead,
Tatum started to become a star in 21 Jump
Street, because he played a well-meaning,
jockish, hopeless dolt who was also a narcissistic tool, and he did it with a kind of charm
and modesty that let us know he was completely in on what we thought of him and one
step ahead of us. Surprise! We didn't know he
had that in him.
Similarly, think of Bradley Cooper, who
for years has seemed to live right on the edge
between movie star and not. On an international promotional tour for The Hangover II
(which was not, in any way, going to push
him over the top), he busted out some fluent
French in a couple of interviews, and the
Internet collectively fainted. That YouTube
video and its effect served as a kind of ideal
dress rehearsal in miniature for the impact of
his Oscar-nominated performance in David
O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook. His
work in that film served to quiet skeptics—
particularly those who had conflated him
with his characters enough to file him under
"handsome jerk." "Handsome jerk" is a niche;
"handsome funny vulnerable jerk" is something it usually takes a movie star to play.
Showing up naysayers isn't enough to get you
all the way there, but it's an essential career-building step.
The intelligence to recognize your
moment—even if that means waiting for
it. Every male movie star has a different
magic number—an age at which his attractiveness and ability and maturity all come
together. Before that, a star may not feel fully
formed; after that, if he has talent, he seems
to become more assured, complicated, and
real with every passing year. Tom Hanks's
ideal age was about 36—when he made
Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. How can you
tell, besides the two Oscars? Because, for one
thing, Hanks looked 36 when he was 26, and
he looked 36 when he was 46. Once he found
himself at the crossroads where his age linked
up with how we felt about him, he hit his
stride and, some bad choices notwithstanding, has never really lost it. Once we knew
who he was, we were in for the whole ride.
Sometimes, you have to ripen. Stars evolve
on-screen at about the same pace as we evolve
offscreen. So in many ways, the later you
peak, the better for the fragile egos of your
audience. Clooney's ideal age seems to have
been about 45—the Syriana-Michael Clayton
period. He needed the gray hair and extra
years because his whole "I've done things
with women you only dream of" vibe required
some visible baggage—creases, texture, a little
sag. Clooney, it turned out, was much more
interesting as a guy too old to be Batman than
he was as Batman. Middle age suits him, and
he ennobles it.
Tom Cruise is about Clooney's age; unfortunately, Cruise's ideal age was about 25—the
Top Gun-Color of Money moment of maximum cocksureness. I don't mean to suggest
that it was all downhill from there—Cruise
is a much better actor now than he was then
and, several cubic tons of personal history
notwithstanding, a more connected screen
presence. But we, as moviegoers, are less forgiving of stars who peak young—for whom
aging can read as erosion—than we are of
stars who make us feel a little better about
the passing years. Cruise's refusal to age on-screen—the carefully managed news drops
about doing his own stuntwork, the "can-
did" photos showing off his trainer-chiseled
torso—has come to seem distancing, even
alienating. When he turned 50 last summer,
it felt like a prank someone played on him.
When Clooney turned 50, by contrast, a lot of
guys thought, "I hope I look that good when
I'm his age" (or, "I'm his age. Holy crap, where
did I go wrong?!").
Indispensability. This is it. The final dividing line. The quality that separates actors
we like, or even love, from those we feel are
irreplaceable. A star convinces us that he's
filling a void we didn't know was there; he
makes us believe that until he came along,
the movie world of which he is now at the center was somehow incomplete. Which
brings us back to Taylor Kitsch. Leading-man
gigs in expensive films that are designed to
be blockbusters are, for emerging stars, the
devil's temptation. Last year, Kitsch won
two of those roles, and then discovered that
a big opportunity is not the same thing as
a good part. As fans of Friday Night Lights
can attest, Kitsch isn't just good-looking;
he's a talented actor with a specific set of
gifts behind the dreamy eyes and the baked,
Costner-ish drawl. No, he's probably not the
first guy you'd cast as Wernher von Braun,
but he was born to play the redeemable
bastard, the near bum who might or might
not—depends on the role—summon the
moral courage to do the right thing (a quality Savages tapped into nicely). The soulful
loner who gets in his own way: If you don't
think that's a rich vein for a movie star to
mine, go take a tour through the fifty-year
career of Paul Newman.
But movies like John Carter and Battleship
pull an actor away from the specific and
toward the generic. I don't know where
Kitsch ranked on the casting wish lists for
those parts, but the point is, those lists very
likely existed, and they probably weren't
conceived with much attention to anything
but physical fitness, youth, nice bone structure, and the ability to form words. The lead
role in that kind of movie is the Guy, just like
the other roles are the Girl, the Bad Guy, the
Sidekick, the Crusty Guy, and the Funny Guy.
The Guy is a terrible thing to be. Nobody
becomes a movie star by playing the Guy,
because there are lots of guys who can play
the Guy. You don't want people leaving your
film, even if it's a hit, feeling that you were
interchangeable with half a dozen other people on the posters in the multiplex lobby. You
want them to believe that anyone else in the
role would have represented a disappointing compromise. There's your litmus test: If
they want you, and they can't get you and,
as a result, they have to rethink the part,
you're a movie star.
Which brings us back to Channing Tatum,
and Magic Mike. (Remember the other guy
in the movie? You know, the young guy who
played...you know, the Guy? What was his
name again?) If Tatum ends up being someone we're still writing and talking about
thirty years from now, then this movie, in
which he played a young, decent guy who
didn't mind temporarily retailing his body
on his way to bigger and better things, may
be seen as his Rocky. In the film, Tatum did
the whole movie-star job: He gave us a piece
of who he was while making it clear that it
wasn't the only piece. He took a chance. He
wove something about himself into the work
without ruining its shape. He not only risked
ridicule, he owned the risk. He commanded
the screen but played well with others. He
exposed himself in new ways while making
sure to hold something back for later. He
laughed at himself and made you laugh with
him. And he made it clear that nobody else
could have done the job quite the same way.
Well done. Now let's see what his long game
looks like.
Mark Harris the author of Pictures at the Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.
