A negative attraction.

What’s light is dark. What’s expected is masked and behind the mask lurks the unexpected. Like the photo image in a film negative, light falls in opposites and reversed contrasts but the subject we see is the same as in the positive print. Don’t look directly at that familiar profile, the classic six-foot frame or listen too closely to the comfortable vocal timbre. Pretend you don’t know who he is and instead, let Mr. Brooks reveal himself to you. Slowly. Yes, Kevin Costner is playing a murder addict in his new film Mr. Brooks. As Thomas J. Murphy, he played a murderous casino robber in 2001’s 3000 Miles From Graceland. Going back to 1993, Costner’s Butch Hayes, in Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World was an escaped convict kidnapper. All three roles were a hell of a long way from Field of Dreams but I’ll leave it up to you if they made for compelling cinema.

Actors that have made their names and careers making us believe in their every man heroics are often lusting to play the bad guy, the snake, the psychopath. Studios lusting after big stars sometimes turn to the change-up role to beg an actor’s favor and often the stars themselves are willing to risk personal investments in dollars and popularity to play at coaxing out their dark side on camera. In the studio dance of creating a winning release slate, ego stroking and vanity projects have a way of finding the unexpected splashed across your local movie screen often to very mixed results. Sometimes though, the results are unexpectedly strong.

When it works.

If the upside for a project that runs contrary to an actor’s image is simply to win over that actor on the next script deal, so be it. Business after all is business. If it’s about an actor having some fun breaking the mold of his or her usual diet, variety is more than a trade paper and though it may have been better left as a home movie, the movie getting made will likely have innocuous consequences. Every now and then though, there’s this great script that’s been banging around or some inspired lunch conversation sparks over at the hot-for-the-minute Hollywood bistro or maybe there’s even an actor who actually has some serious chops looking to stretch. Regardless of the set-up, every now and then a little movie magic begins to brew. Let the Hype machine start cranking. There’s something different afoot and this is a situation where I think it’s just fine to draw in an audience.

Let’s layout a couple of careers that were built on just such a whimsical notion. Once upon a time, say around 1993, there’s this awkward geek of a director guy. Seems he has an idea to take a kind of washed out, aging, has-been nice guy and play career Frankenstein. (Ok, who knows how it really went down but just hang with me awhile.) The geek director guy throws his whole idea into the Hollywood spin cycle, washing off the good guy, has-been image and spitting out a black-suited, greasy haired, drug snorting, weapons toting, honest to Cecile B. DeMille moviestar. Pulp Fiction is released in 1994 catapulting John Travolta back into the spotlight for decades and Quentin Tarantino gets to go hang out with some of the hottest talent in Hollywood.

To be fair, Tarantino scored two years earlier with the now classic Reservoir Dogs, but it’s arguably Pulp Fiction that cemented his destiny. There’s a lot of spectacular talent burning up frames of that film but just as arguable is that John Travolta’s 180 degree twist of a performance is the firing pin that exploded the film into box-office success and indelible pop culture.

Marketing twists or twisted marketing?

No, they aren’t all gems but there have been enough to validate the concept. Travolta’s wasn’t the only career remade with some blood splatter and gunfire. Where was Kurt Russell before he signed on and “signatured” the role of Snake Plissken in the John Carpenter classic, Escape From NY? So successful was the eye-patched, smart-mouthed, tough guy that even after 15 years, audience’s returned to the theater to see the encore performance in Escape From LA. With far less tongue in cheek, Russell challenged the type casting again and pulled off a riveting performance in an under appreciated role as a bad cop in the Ron Shelton directed Dark Blue. This from a guy who started as a kid running around the sound stages of Walt Disney’s Burbank studio clubhouse.

Loved Michael Douglas as adventurous good guy Jack T. Colton in Romancing The Stone? Sure, but can you ever forget his “greed is good” turn in Wall Street as (one of the best character names ever) Gordon Gekko? Douglas had the heroic good looks and the friendly demeanor to even pull off playing The American President just getting back into the dating pool. His is a career with character stretches that are great fun to watch. In ’93 Joel Schumacher evoked just the right touch of tightly twisting exasperation on a single hot, uncomfortable day in LA with Falling Down. Douglas’s portrayal of at-wits-end defense engineer William “D-Fens” Foster was so spot on and so deliciously flirting with exaggeration that it’s become one of those wonderful and throughly repeatable DVDs.

Yes, Douglas had already played bad, but this may have been the role that opened audiences up to really looking for the edgier side of his abilities. Falling Down had followed the sexy cop drama Basic Instinct and further back, there had been some serious infidelity in Fatal Attraction. But it would be five years after Falling Down that Douglas turned to wife murdering schemes in 1998’s A Perfect Murder. Cynical and mean, Douglas pulls off the twist of character with complete believability, all the while nicely measuring up as a guy you’d trust playing with your kids in the backyard.

Showcasing good guys gone bad.

How’s this for famous movie quotes for 200? “If you build it, he will come.” There’s just no nicer persona than Costner as Ray Kinsella in 1989’s Field of Dreams. We trust this guy implicitly. We root for him and his impossible vision from our first stroll with him through an Iowa cornfield. We feel the chill when the 1919 White Sox saunter onto his ball-field and (admit it) we find a tear or two forming when he throws a baseball to the ghost of his father.

So what emotion is it exactly that we’re feeling when, as Mr. Brooks, he calmly startles a naked couple in their bedroom with a quiet hello and a muffled burst of expertly grouped gunshots? There is something downright eerie about the soft, lyrical little dance that follows. It’s as if the actor’s/character’s body had been momentarily possessed by a deeply disturbed schizophrenic. There’re dark scenes, dark lighting (even the flashlight under the chin trick) but most of all there’s Costner, being at once the guy we’d love as our boss and the guy who should be lifting beers with Charly Manson. Add in the extraordinary support from William Hurt as Marshall, the actual embodiment of Mr. Brook’s schizophrenia. All his goading, sympathizing and advising, perfectly point out the complexities within Mr. Brooks’ character, while we watch from without.

Costner was great as an escaped con striking up a touching kinship with a kidnapped kid while coming to the realization that he must die to give up in A Perfect World. He was cartoonish but threatening in 3000 Miles from Graceland. For my ten bucks, I’d say he hits the role of Mr. Brooks dead center and plays murderous addiction with a brilliantly subtle touch. In creative production circles, some of the very best subscribe to the “less Is more” theory. Simplicity and subtlety can create the sentences where staccato dramatic action provides the exclamation point. Costner touches this part with both exquisite delicacy and smirking dementia. My point is this... it’s because there’s a Ray Kinsella lurking somewhere inside, that Mr. Brooks is just so damned creepy. A perfect set-up for playing exactly this kind of character.

And he knew it.

If the stories hold true, it was Kevin Costner himself that shepherded Mr. Brooks to production. According to an article by Stephen Whitty of the NJ Star Ledger, once Costner brought his Tig Productions onboard, the script, co-penned by writer/director Bruce A. Evans and writer Raynold Gideon (who teamed as writers on 1984’s Starman, among others) found financing and a distribution agreement with MGM. By working through Costner’s company, the filmmakers and the actor also insured the creative freedom to tackle the project on their own terms without cuts or changes that a big studio may have found safer or more commercial. But was there any real risk in taking this kind of film to market? Costner didn’t think so and neither would I.

Unless you decide that it might be fun to see Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as cross-dressers in a lavish musical or say, Bill Murray taking a “serious” turn as a teenaged and misunderstood Darth Vader in yet another Star Wars film, my money would be comfortable riding on actors tackling a complete change of image now and again. Of course there’s the prerequisite that they have to be able to act in the first place. In a dark twist or just a change-up, I have to say that I enjoy seeing something out of character with my favorite actors and I like when an occasional project crops up that surprises me. Johnny Depp’s a favorite of mine. Do a DVD back-to-back night with Sleepy Hollow, Finding Neverland and Pirates of the Caribbean, the Curse of the Black Pearl. Or get back to some classics and watch Jimmy Stewart in Shenandoah, Harvey and Vertigo. What if Hollywoods penchant for stereotyping never got overcome by a little curiosity and some serious lusting for a sleeper hit? There would be a lot of great movies made with lesser talent and likely lots more left swimming in the writer’s imagination. Risky roles and character reversals help to keep fresh an industry that just loves doing the same thing over and over again.

So then, forgive me just a bit of cajoling. Next time there’s a small film, a change-up on the usual take, a favorite personality playing a role you may think is preposterous, just go get a ticket and a popcorn. Show a little support for creative risk-taking and you may even be rewarded with a great time at the movies. Agreed? Great, ‘cause you just may have your chance later this summer. That’s when the king of the reinvented career makes another really big twist on his usual characters. Famous as Tony, the kid from Brooklyn whose dreams disco dance over the Verrazanos Bridge, John Travolta will become Hairspray’s Edna, the plus-sized doting mom of a daughter living in Baltimore whose dream is to dance on TV.  How could that possibly be risky? Just be glad Costner stuck to playing a murderous psychopath and never learned to dance.

Sunday, June 10, 2007