GQ MARCH 2000 LEADING MEN OF HOLLYWOOD SPECIAL ISSUE
The Names Above the Titles
by Terrence Rafferty
Talk slow, talk low, and don't say too much.-- John Wayne
Sorry, Duke, but that's not what makes a leading man anymore. In today's Hollywood, the boy doesn't always get the girl, sometimes the villain becames the hero, and the barely pubescent walk in the shoes of their wizened predecessors. How did the paradigm shift? Terrence Rafferty analyzes the most popular actors in Hollywood history to find out
WHAT'S A LEADING MAN? IS THAT A LEADING question? Not really: Its answer isn't predetermined. It is a trap, though, a trick question, because "the leading man"is one of those maddening terms that both denote something specific and connote something difficult to define -- asset of values. A leading man, strictly speaking, is simply the actor who plays the principal role in a film, a TV show or a dramatic production. Yet when a moviegoer hears the term, the image that springs to mind is not that of Ernest Borgnine in Marty or of the "leading manof such well-reviewed90s films as Barton Fink, Vanya on 42nd Street and Sling Blade. Should semantic precosion require us to include John Turturro, Wallace Shawn and Billy Bob Thornton in this Category? We all recognize that these men are not examples of the sort of actor we are talking about, a breed that, despite many modifications in a century of movie history, is still clearly descended from the likes of Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks: A true Leading Man is not merely an actor who leads a theatrical ensemble but one who embodies a kind of masculine ideal -- who is capable, we feel, of leading men into battle and/or women to what used to be called their ruin.
Ideal is, in the context of the movies, just another word for fantasy, and like it or not, a leading man in the Platonic sense in which most of us instinctively use the term is one who inspires especially vivid and satisfying fantasies. Women want him. Men want to be him. These are truisms. But wait. Do the fantasy requirements of the sexes necessarily coincide? Take a male viewer who likes to imagine himself as Arnold Schwarzenegger, rippling with animal strength, disdainful of the petty niceties of civilized behavior, implacable in his will to power. His female companion, staring fixedly at the screen into a different sort of reverie, adream world in which both Arnold and her dangerously overstimulated partner have been replaced by the Leonardo DiCaprio of Titanic, someone tender, gallant, playful, delicately handsome....Hasta la vista, Terminator Boy. Such incompatible fantasies are, I'm afraid, much more common these days than they were, say fifty or sixty years ago, when virtually every picture released by a Hollywood Studio aimed to attract a wide and heterogeneous audience -- to "something for everyone." It's pretty safe to say that the men men wanted to be -- Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper -- were also the men women wanted to be with. And it's clear that this transgender consensus is not holding up well in our brave new world of demographics and niche marketing, the age of chick flicks and dick flicks.
That's just one of many reasons why it's tough to be a leading man these days -- why, in fact, it sometimes seems that the whole concept is hopelessly anachronistic. It's futile to wonder where the next Grant or Gable is coming from; there isn't going to be one, The leading man of the '30s and '40s weren't, after all, exact copies of Valentino, so why should we expect Tom Cruise or bruce Willis or Will Smith to replicate their studio-era ancestors? (And if you're feeling nostalgic for Grant or Gable or Fonda or Stewart or Bogard or Cagney or Mitchum or Wayne or Brando or or McQueen -- there are always AMC, TCM and the video store.) Yet the general reverence for the old-Hollywood icons does suggest that today's version of leading-manhood is a bit more problematic than yesterday's -- that our male ideal is more ambiguous and our fantasy figures thus less powerful.
It's worth remembering that the leading-man ideal of half a century ago wasn't by any means simple or monolithic: Grant's wit and romantic savior faire, Gable's brashness, Cooper's diffident strength and Bogard's cynical integrity were all, somehow, included. No one man could be expected to possess every possible masculine attribute, and the only quality those guys held in common was, I suppose, confidence; each of them had gift of knowing exactly who he was, and even greater gift of appearing completely unconflicted about his particular collection of masculine values. They didn't have to be all things to all people: Each just had to be a very clear and very forceful something. Of course, that sort of blissfully assured identity was a lot easier to sustain under the studio system, which virtually demanded that contract player, once he became a star, not stray too far from the persona that had endeared him to the moviegoing public. In many cases, the actor's range was too narrow to accommodate much variation, anyway. Actors such as Gable, Cooper, Wayne and Errol Flynn benefited from studio typecasting, because they were rarely asked to do the many things they couldn't do and eventually became extremely proficient at the few things they could.
When moviegoers wax lyrical about the good old days, when stars were stars, what they're yearning for, I think, is that enormous self-assurance projected by the studio era's leading men andleading ladies, that sense -- which has become more and more elusive both on the screen and in everyday life -- of a certain unity, and continuity, of personality. On one level, that's childish: a desire for security, repetition and stable, constant authority. But in another sense it's an entire rational response to the demands of our volatile culture and our complicated, information-clogged lives. Nowadays, knowing who you are and feeling confident that your core personality, the unique attributes of the self, will actually retain value over time is kind of the ultimate fantasy, don't you think?
Even fantasy figures require some sort of context in which their existence is at least plausible, and if triumphant individuality is the fantasy in question, the booming corporate culture of the late twentieth century is pretty obviously not the proper context. In bygone days, the Old West was a reliable setting, but that doesn't seem to work anymore: The landscapes are too stark; the rhythm of life is too slow. War stories, like Saving Private Ryan and the recent Three Kings, are better, because the action is fast and chaotic. But war is hell, and for many viewers exposures to its grim realities is too steep a price to pay even for a rare vision of heroism. We're generally more comfortable, it seems, imagining physical courage within the reassuringly fantastic borders of comic-book worlds, and in most cases the leading man is scaled to match the outrageous hyperbole of the visual style: hence Schwarzenegger. (I can't think of any other way to explain him.) But both Arnold and the other action-movie colossus of the '80s and '90s, Sylvester Stallone, are fading, and last year's biggest hit in the comicbook-adventure genre was The Matrix, whose leading man was the less conspicuously macho Keanu Reeves, This can't be a bad sign: At least Keanu seems human.
He is not, however, an old-style leading man, because his personality is sort of fluid -- OK, vague. Reeves may in fact know who he is, just as the studio stars seemed to, but he's keeping it to himself. Now thataction pictures are dominated by digitized special effects (and The Matrix more than most), Keanu's remoteness feels weirdly appropriate, because the actions he performs , and the settings in which he performs them, are almost entirely virtual. He isn't actually doing anything except posing, and occasionally gesturing, in front of a blue screen. He's just an attractive presence, the foreground component of a complex image that essentially has nothing to do with him: He's an anchorman. His self-effacement could be seen as a form of honesty.
That's another reason why it's hard tobe a leading man in the year 2000. Despite the prolification of action movies, male actors no longer get many opportunities to demonstrate physical dexterity or prowess (except for Hong Cong martial-arts stars such as Jackie Chen and Jet Li and handful of martial-arts-trained Hollywood actors, such as Wesley Snipes). Action isnt everything, but film, because it's a visual media, has naturally emphasized physical heroism over every other kind, so movie actors have traditionally had to prove their mettle by doing violent or dangerous things convincingly. In the old days, both contract players and stars might be called upon to ride a horse or (perilously for some) dance -- and accomplishing such feats made the guy up on the screen look special. The markers of star-quality individuality are now overwhelmingly verbal: attitude, not action. So what's a leading man to do?
Nothing. Or next to nothing. Although no one has solicited my advice, I'd counsel aspiring leading men -- unless they're as handsome and as enigmatic as Keanu Reeves -- to avoid high-tech action pictures. They should ask themselves this question: What's happened to Nicolas Cage, and could it happen to me?(Although Cage's passionate performance in last year's Bringing Out the Dead partially restored his credibility, on more Snake Eyes could wreck it for good.) Even those of us who love action pictures no longer much care, and often barely notice, whos in them: One anchorman is as good as another. Look at the actors who have played James Bond since Sean Connery put his dinner jacket in mothballs; Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan are nearly as indistinguishable from one another as major-party presidential candidates. Does anybody remember Christian Slater in Broken Arrow? Ben Affleck in Armageddon? Who was in Deep Impact, again? And those pictures were hits. Will Smith broke out of the ensemble in Independence Day only because his smart-ass shtick was the first reasonably fresh variation on action-hero attitude since Bruce Willis's definitive wiseacre in Die Hard which, in turn, was an amped-up version of the dryly witty action hero Harrison Ford embodied in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones pictures. But if the dismal failure of last summer's Wild Wild West is any indication, even heavy attitude doesn't have the shelf life it used to.
Smith will probably recover; the master, Willis, has had his share of flops, and he keeps coming back. And speaking of Willis -- I think it's time we acknowledge that he's one of the great leading men of the last three decades. The audience has accepted him in an unusual (for this era) variety of genres: in action movies, in romantic comedies, in serious dramas, in elaborate science-fiction adventures and, most recently, in the solemn ghost story The Six Sense, which has very little action and, as far as I can recall, not one joke. Willis is solidly in the personality-based leading man tradition, yet he isn't a throwback: His brashness is different from Gable's -- it feels contemporary (and it's funnier). And although he turned out to be an extremely companionable screen presence, he's a good deal more abrasive than the regular-guy type of star -- the all American heroes like Stewart, Fonda and Hanks, who owe their durability to their ability to project a kind of hightened ordinariness. There's more anger in Willis , not all of it righteous; that's what tells us he's a man of our time.
One quality Willis shares with Hanks, and with practically every pther current male star, is sensational comic timing. Pure comedians like Chaplin, Keaton, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Eddie Murphy and Jim Carry don't really qualify for leading-manhood (although they sometimes aspire to it). Out-and-out comedy is usually based on the acknowledgement of weakness, which deliberately, and fatally, undermines the comedian's authority as a fantasy figure. Romantic comedy is more forgiving. In that genre, a leading man can bumble and waffle his way through two hours of utterly humiliating situations -- as, for example, Grant does in Bringing Up Baby and Fonda does in The Lady Eve -- and yet emerge with his masculine honor intact, because he does get the girl. (It's usually a pretty formidable girl, too: one whose love and respect are not won easily.) Romantic comedy has always been a staple genre for leading men. What has changed in the last decade or two is that male stars are required to be at least minimally funny -- verbally -- in every other kind of picture, too. You can't be an action-movie star anymore without the ability to spray your enemies with sarcastic bons mots; that's why even Schwerzenegger and Stallone occasionally feel compelled to plant their feet, brace themselves and launch a huge, population-annihilating quip. This has something to do with living in an age of irony, I guess. We can't relate to men who take things too seriously (unless they're fighting World War II). And we don't fantasize them.
The strong, silent type -- traditional Western-style hero -- doesn't stir audience the way it used to. If only Kevin Costner realized this. His leading man career is, by a wide margin, the most peculiar of our time, because he stubbornly persists in casting himself as a laconic, Gary Cooper sort of hero in ponderous epics like Wyatt Earp, Waterworld and The Postman. What's crazy about this is that Costner, a terrific comedian in Bull Durham and Tin Cup, refuses to allow even a trace of humor to seep into his big, mythic blowouts. When Costner does comedy, he's a true leading man; when he tries to be the hero with a thousand faces, he's nobody. (Couldn't one of those faces have a smile on it?)
It's a delicate balance. The modern leading man has to be at least a little ironic, just to establish that he isn't anybody's fool, but if he's too jokey he risks seeming like a light weight. The masculine ideal still includes a bit of judiciously applied moral gravity; you just have to be careful not to overdo it. Which brings us to yet another of the complicating factors in today's conception of the leading man: the question of maturity. In the studio era, when adults actually went to the movies in large numbers, the function of the leading man was assumed to imply a certain weight of experience, Until the '50s, when a distinct teen subculture began to emerge, most actors under 30 weren't considered substantial enough to carry a picture. This don't send-a-boy-to-do-a-man's-job philosophy was perfectly sensible, given the kinds of men Hollywood then designated as heroes: urban sophisticates, two-fisted frontier lawmen, jaded newspaper reporters, Emile Zola. In our youthcentric movie culture, the leading man role may now be filled by the sort of actor the studios used to cast as the "juvenile" -- a male ingnue, the chipper playboy who bounded into the drawing room with a hearty "Anyone for tennis?" Although some of today's younger actors are awfully good -- DiCaprio, Edward Norton and Ewan McGregor are charismatic and seriously talented -- there are many others who are being thrust into roles they're nowhere near ready for, and some for whom even a convincing "Anyone for tennis?" might pose a challenge. If you've seen Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions, the teen remake of Dangerous Liaisons, you understand what I mean.
But who knows? Phillippe could become a star, because the ranks of leading men have always included a few actors who are purely and exclusively sex symbols. Since I'm a heterosexual man, this is the aspect of male stardom I feel least qualified to evaluate. It's also the explanation I like to fall back on when an actor's popularity -- say, Brad Pitt's -- otherwise defeats my power of analysis. Not all leading men are Adonises, and God knows not all Adonises turn out to be leading men. But in the movies, sex appeal always matters.
The kind of sex appeal that's based on character rather than -- or in addition to -- appearance tends to last longer, though. Sean Connery at 69, still get the girl; Robert Wagner plays straight man to Dr. Evil. And despite the substitution of verbal gamesmanship for swordmanship or horsemanship as the essential skill of the manly hero, actors who can project physical and/or emotional strength continue to make up the bulk of the leading-man corps. I've been talking mostly about major stars, but there are plenty of other genuine leading men (Cruise and Hanks and Willis can't be in every picture, after all) who lack the clearly defined image required to be fantasy figures and yet have the heft to carry a movie: guys like Jeff Bridges, Nick Nolty, Tommy Lee Jones and Kurt Russell. (They're the heirs of an honorable tradition that over the years has included such wonderful actors as Joel McCrea, Joseph Cotton, Sterlin Hayden and Michael Caine.) Of that group, only Jones has had a recent hit, but box-office returns are not the full measure of the leading man: If George Clooney isn't one, the term has no meaning. And although Russell Crowe may never become a star, his performance as a corporate whistle-blower in Michael Mann's the Insider is the most stirring and original piece of leading-man acting I've seen in years. The one thing our movies have conspicuously lacked in the past decade is a believable -- unsentimental and unironic -- portrayal of big business, big government and big media: Crowe accomplishes it very quietly, almost unobtrusively, daringly keeping the sources of the character's strength half-hidden, mysterious. That's a man worth following.
The Names Above the Titles
by Terrence Rafferty
Talk slow, talk low, and don't say too much.-- John Wayne
Sorry, Duke, but that's not what makes a leading man anymore. In today's Hollywood, the boy doesn't always get the girl, sometimes the villain becames the hero, and the barely pubescent walk in the shoes of their wizened predecessors. How did the paradigm shift? Terrence Rafferty analyzes the most popular actors in Hollywood history to find out
WHAT'S A LEADING MAN? IS THAT A LEADING question? Not really: Its answer isn't predetermined. It is a trap, though, a trick question, because "the leading man"is one of those maddening terms that both denote something specific and connote something difficult to define -- asset of values. A leading man, strictly speaking, is simply the actor who plays the principal role in a film, a TV show or a dramatic production. Yet when a moviegoer hears the term, the image that springs to mind is not that of Ernest Borgnine in Marty or of the "leading manof such well-reviewed90s films as Barton Fink, Vanya on 42nd Street and Sling Blade. Should semantic precosion require us to include John Turturro, Wallace Shawn and Billy Bob Thornton in this Category? We all recognize that these men are not examples of the sort of actor we are talking about, a breed that, despite many modifications in a century of movie history, is still clearly descended from the likes of Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks: A true Leading Man is not merely an actor who leads a theatrical ensemble but one who embodies a kind of masculine ideal -- who is capable, we feel, of leading men into battle and/or women to what used to be called their ruin.
Ideal is, in the context of the movies, just another word for fantasy, and like it or not, a leading man in the Platonic sense in which most of us instinctively use the term is one who inspires especially vivid and satisfying fantasies. Women want him. Men want to be him. These are truisms. But wait. Do the fantasy requirements of the sexes necessarily coincide? Take a male viewer who likes to imagine himself as Arnold Schwarzenegger, rippling with animal strength, disdainful of the petty niceties of civilized behavior, implacable in his will to power. His female companion, staring fixedly at the screen into a different sort of reverie, adream world in which both Arnold and her dangerously overstimulated partner have been replaced by the Leonardo DiCaprio of Titanic, someone tender, gallant, playful, delicately handsome....Hasta la vista, Terminator Boy. Such incompatible fantasies are, I'm afraid, much more common these days than they were, say fifty or sixty years ago, when virtually every picture released by a Hollywood Studio aimed to attract a wide and heterogeneous audience -- to "something for everyone." It's pretty safe to say that the men men wanted to be -- Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper -- were also the men women wanted to be with. And it's clear that this transgender consensus is not holding up well in our brave new world of demographics and niche marketing, the age of chick flicks and dick flicks.
That's just one of many reasons why it's tough to be a leading man these days -- why, in fact, it sometimes seems that the whole concept is hopelessly anachronistic. It's futile to wonder where the next Grant or Gable is coming from; there isn't going to be one, The leading man of the '30s and '40s weren't, after all, exact copies of Valentino, so why should we expect Tom Cruise or bruce Willis or Will Smith to replicate their studio-era ancestors? (And if you're feeling nostalgic for Grant or Gable or Fonda or Stewart or Bogard or Cagney or Mitchum or Wayne or Brando or or McQueen -- there are always AMC, TCM and the video store.) Yet the general reverence for the old-Hollywood icons does suggest that today's version of leading-manhood is a bit more problematic than yesterday's -- that our male ideal is more ambiguous and our fantasy figures thus less powerful.
It's worth remembering that the leading-man ideal of half a century ago wasn't by any means simple or monolithic: Grant's wit and romantic savior faire, Gable's brashness, Cooper's diffident strength and Bogard's cynical integrity were all, somehow, included. No one man could be expected to possess every possible masculine attribute, and the only quality those guys held in common was, I suppose, confidence; each of them had gift of knowing exactly who he was, and even greater gift of appearing completely unconflicted about his particular collection of masculine values. They didn't have to be all things to all people: Each just had to be a very clear and very forceful something. Of course, that sort of blissfully assured identity was a lot easier to sustain under the studio system, which virtually demanded that contract player, once he became a star, not stray too far from the persona that had endeared him to the moviegoing public. In many cases, the actor's range was too narrow to accommodate much variation, anyway. Actors such as Gable, Cooper, Wayne and Errol Flynn benefited from studio typecasting, because they were rarely asked to do the many things they couldn't do and eventually became extremely proficient at the few things they could.
When moviegoers wax lyrical about the good old days, when stars were stars, what they're yearning for, I think, is that enormous self-assurance projected by the studio era's leading men andleading ladies, that sense -- which has become more and more elusive both on the screen and in everyday life -- of a certain unity, and continuity, of personality. On one level, that's childish: a desire for security, repetition and stable, constant authority. But in another sense it's an entire rational response to the demands of our volatile culture and our complicated, information-clogged lives. Nowadays, knowing who you are and feeling confident that your core personality, the unique attributes of the self, will actually retain value over time is kind of the ultimate fantasy, don't you think?
Even fantasy figures require some sort of context in which their existence is at least plausible, and if triumphant individuality is the fantasy in question, the booming corporate culture of the late twentieth century is pretty obviously not the proper context. In bygone days, the Old West was a reliable setting, but that doesn't seem to work anymore: The landscapes are too stark; the rhythm of life is too slow. War stories, like Saving Private Ryan and the recent Three Kings, are better, because the action is fast and chaotic. But war is hell, and for many viewers exposures to its grim realities is too steep a price to pay even for a rare vision of heroism. We're generally more comfortable, it seems, imagining physical courage within the reassuringly fantastic borders of comic-book worlds, and in most cases the leading man is scaled to match the outrageous hyperbole of the visual style: hence Schwarzenegger. (I can't think of any other way to explain him.) But both Arnold and the other action-movie colossus of the '80s and '90s, Sylvester Stallone, are fading, and last year's biggest hit in the comicbook-adventure genre was The Matrix, whose leading man was the less conspicuously macho Keanu Reeves, This can't be a bad sign: At least Keanu seems human.
He is not, however, an old-style leading man, because his personality is sort of fluid -- OK, vague. Reeves may in fact know who he is, just as the studio stars seemed to, but he's keeping it to himself. Now thataction pictures are dominated by digitized special effects (and The Matrix more than most), Keanu's remoteness feels weirdly appropriate, because the actions he performs , and the settings in which he performs them, are almost entirely virtual. He isn't actually doing anything except posing, and occasionally gesturing, in front of a blue screen. He's just an attractive presence, the foreground component of a complex image that essentially has nothing to do with him: He's an anchorman. His self-effacement could be seen as a form of honesty.
That's another reason why it's hard tobe a leading man in the year 2000. Despite the prolification of action movies, male actors no longer get many opportunities to demonstrate physical dexterity or prowess (except for Hong Cong martial-arts stars such as Jackie Chen and Jet Li and handful of martial-arts-trained Hollywood actors, such as Wesley Snipes). Action isnt everything, but film, because it's a visual media, has naturally emphasized physical heroism over every other kind, so movie actors have traditionally had to prove their mettle by doing violent or dangerous things convincingly. In the old days, both contract players and stars might be called upon to ride a horse or (perilously for some) dance -- and accomplishing such feats made the guy up on the screen look special. The markers of star-quality individuality are now overwhelmingly verbal: attitude, not action. So what's a leading man to do?
Nothing. Or next to nothing. Although no one has solicited my advice, I'd counsel aspiring leading men -- unless they're as handsome and as enigmatic as Keanu Reeves -- to avoid high-tech action pictures. They should ask themselves this question: What's happened to Nicolas Cage, and could it happen to me?(Although Cage's passionate performance in last year's Bringing Out the Dead partially restored his credibility, on more Snake Eyes could wreck it for good.) Even those of us who love action pictures no longer much care, and often barely notice, whos in them: One anchorman is as good as another. Look at the actors who have played James Bond since Sean Connery put his dinner jacket in mothballs; Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan are nearly as indistinguishable from one another as major-party presidential candidates. Does anybody remember Christian Slater in Broken Arrow? Ben Affleck in Armageddon? Who was in Deep Impact, again? And those pictures were hits. Will Smith broke out of the ensemble in Independence Day only because his smart-ass shtick was the first reasonably fresh variation on action-hero attitude since Bruce Willis's definitive wiseacre in Die Hard which, in turn, was an amped-up version of the dryly witty action hero Harrison Ford embodied in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones pictures. But if the dismal failure of last summer's Wild Wild West is any indication, even heavy attitude doesn't have the shelf life it used to.
Smith will probably recover; the master, Willis, has had his share of flops, and he keeps coming back. And speaking of Willis -- I think it's time we acknowledge that he's one of the great leading men of the last three decades. The audience has accepted him in an unusual (for this era) variety of genres: in action movies, in romantic comedies, in serious dramas, in elaborate science-fiction adventures and, most recently, in the solemn ghost story The Six Sense, which has very little action and, as far as I can recall, not one joke. Willis is solidly in the personality-based leading man tradition, yet he isn't a throwback: His brashness is different from Gable's -- it feels contemporary (and it's funnier). And although he turned out to be an extremely companionable screen presence, he's a good deal more abrasive than the regular-guy type of star -- the all American heroes like Stewart, Fonda and Hanks, who owe their durability to their ability to project a kind of hightened ordinariness. There's more anger in Willis , not all of it righteous; that's what tells us he's a man of our time.
One quality Willis shares with Hanks, and with practically every pther current male star, is sensational comic timing. Pure comedians like Chaplin, Keaton, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Eddie Murphy and Jim Carry don't really qualify for leading-manhood (although they sometimes aspire to it). Out-and-out comedy is usually based on the acknowledgement of weakness, which deliberately, and fatally, undermines the comedian's authority as a fantasy figure. Romantic comedy is more forgiving. In that genre, a leading man can bumble and waffle his way through two hours of utterly humiliating situations -- as, for example, Grant does in Bringing Up Baby and Fonda does in The Lady Eve -- and yet emerge with his masculine honor intact, because he does get the girl. (It's usually a pretty formidable girl, too: one whose love and respect are not won easily.) Romantic comedy has always been a staple genre for leading men. What has changed in the last decade or two is that male stars are required to be at least minimally funny -- verbally -- in every other kind of picture, too. You can't be an action-movie star anymore without the ability to spray your enemies with sarcastic bons mots; that's why even Schwerzenegger and Stallone occasionally feel compelled to plant their feet, brace themselves and launch a huge, population-annihilating quip. This has something to do with living in an age of irony, I guess. We can't relate to men who take things too seriously (unless they're fighting World War II). And we don't fantasize them.
The strong, silent type -- traditional Western-style hero -- doesn't stir audience the way it used to. If only Kevin Costner realized this. His leading man career is, by a wide margin, the most peculiar of our time, because he stubbornly persists in casting himself as a laconic, Gary Cooper sort of hero in ponderous epics like Wyatt Earp, Waterworld and The Postman. What's crazy about this is that Costner, a terrific comedian in Bull Durham and Tin Cup, refuses to allow even a trace of humor to seep into his big, mythic blowouts. When Costner does comedy, he's a true leading man; when he tries to be the hero with a thousand faces, he's nobody. (Couldn't one of those faces have a smile on it?)
It's a delicate balance. The modern leading man has to be at least a little ironic, just to establish that he isn't anybody's fool, but if he's too jokey he risks seeming like a light weight. The masculine ideal still includes a bit of judiciously applied moral gravity; you just have to be careful not to overdo it. Which brings us to yet another of the complicating factors in today's conception of the leading man: the question of maturity. In the studio era, when adults actually went to the movies in large numbers, the function of the leading man was assumed to imply a certain weight of experience, Until the '50s, when a distinct teen subculture began to emerge, most actors under 30 weren't considered substantial enough to carry a picture. This don't send-a-boy-to-do-a-man's-job philosophy was perfectly sensible, given the kinds of men Hollywood then designated as heroes: urban sophisticates, two-fisted frontier lawmen, jaded newspaper reporters, Emile Zola. In our youthcentric movie culture, the leading man role may now be filled by the sort of actor the studios used to cast as the "juvenile" -- a male ingnue, the chipper playboy who bounded into the drawing room with a hearty "Anyone for tennis?" Although some of today's younger actors are awfully good -- DiCaprio, Edward Norton and Ewan McGregor are charismatic and seriously talented -- there are many others who are being thrust into roles they're nowhere near ready for, and some for whom even a convincing "Anyone for tennis?" might pose a challenge. If you've seen Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions, the teen remake of Dangerous Liaisons, you understand what I mean.
But who knows? Phillippe could become a star, because the ranks of leading men have always included a few actors who are purely and exclusively sex symbols. Since I'm a heterosexual man, this is the aspect of male stardom I feel least qualified to evaluate. It's also the explanation I like to fall back on when an actor's popularity -- say, Brad Pitt's -- otherwise defeats my power of analysis. Not all leading men are Adonises, and God knows not all Adonises turn out to be leading men. But in the movies, sex appeal always matters.
The kind of sex appeal that's based on character rather than -- or in addition to -- appearance tends to last longer, though. Sean Connery at 69, still get the girl; Robert Wagner plays straight man to Dr. Evil. And despite the substitution of verbal gamesmanship for swordmanship or horsemanship as the essential skill of the manly hero, actors who can project physical and/or emotional strength continue to make up the bulk of the leading-man corps. I've been talking mostly about major stars, but there are plenty of other genuine leading men (Cruise and Hanks and Willis can't be in every picture, after all) who lack the clearly defined image required to be fantasy figures and yet have the heft to carry a movie: guys like Jeff Bridges, Nick Nolty, Tommy Lee Jones and Kurt Russell. (They're the heirs of an honorable tradition that over the years has included such wonderful actors as Joel McCrea, Joseph Cotton, Sterlin Hayden and Michael Caine.) Of that group, only Jones has had a recent hit, but box-office returns are not the full measure of the leading man: If George Clooney isn't one, the term has no meaning. And although Russell Crowe may never become a star, his performance as a corporate whistle-blower in Michael Mann's the Insider is the most stirring and original piece of leading-man acting I've seen in years. The one thing our movies have conspicuously lacked in the past decade is a believable -- unsentimental and unironic -- portrayal of big business, big government and big media: Crowe accomplishes it very quietly, almost unobtrusively, daringly keeping the sources of the character's strength half-hidden, mysterious. That's a man worth following.
