Nipped in the Bud Pt. II

ANDREW McCARTHY

Given two photographs to examine, no Martian would ever be able to distinguish any difference between James Spader and Andrew McCarthy. For that matter, no media-deprived New Yorker would either. But there's a big difference: Spader's the one who played second fiddle to McCarthy for years, then took over the career McCarthy fans thought would be his. The lesson here is that actors who play leading boy parts in movies aimed at teenage girls seldom make the leap into adult stardom. McCarthy, like Troy Donahue before him, is one example of why this is so. He has the seductive blankness--a facade uninterrupted by quirks or details of character--that puts sexually unsure young girls at ease while at the same time arousing their curiosity about a faintly advertised something that's going on underneath. It isn't just a matter of being expressionless, which McCarthy is; it's the ability to suggest what's being withheld--fill in the blank according to your fantasies.

Girls know that McCarthy will do to them what Robby Benson wouldn't. The trouble is that this provocative vacancy seldom plays past 25. McCarthy started out his career in Class playing a different sort of blank, the tabula rasa older woman Jacqueline Bisset wrote all over in elevators and other places. It wasn't a hit, but his next picture, St. Elmo's Fire, pushed all the buttons of an entire generation's collective psyche and established his place in the Brat Pack. A year later, along came another bull's-eye in Pretty in Pink, in which his character, the rich, ineffectual Blane, was so perfectly keyed to the contradictions of girl-teens' libidos that the original ending, in which Blane loses Molly Ringwald to Jon Cryer, had to be changed. Bingo again in 1987's Mannequin, a stupifying film whose box office testified to McCarthy's appeal. (Older moviegoers who saw that film were astonished to learn that McCarthy did not play the title role; they were not surprised a couple of years later in Weekend at Bernie's, where McCarthy barely kept pace with the stiff.) Less Than Zero (1987) was the turning point for McCarthy. Here, in the lead role of Bret Easton Ellis's scandalous, celebrated novel of teens whose personalities coagulated around brand names instead of character traits, McCarthy had an opportunity to show that his blank-ness had a depth beyond study hall daydream requirements. But real blankness, which real actors know cannot be portrayed by simple blankness, proved well beyond McCarthy's extremely limited repertoire of facial tics. Given yet another chance to show the existence of life behind a Waspy reserve, this time in the pseudo-erotic Fresh Horses, McCarthy came up wanting again. After having been one of the hottest young actors in Hollywood just two years ago, McCarthy is poised on the edge of oblivion into which lots of other actors with similar heat have fallen. His next film is with Claude Chabrol--certainly a departure, and a sign that McCarthy himself understands that he must reinvent himself as an actor or there will be no more acting jobs. --RM.

TIM HUTTON

By winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his first film, 1980's Ordinary People, 20-year-old Tim Hutton eclipsed the entire career of his father Jim, a popular light-comic leading man of the '60s. But Tim's portrayal of a sensitive, suicidal teen in the somber, intelligent drama has turned out to be the highlight of his career, his only critical and commercial triumph. His subsequent projects--other somber, intelligent dramas, for the most part-- have resulted in a vastly diminished profile. Hollywood simply has little patience for somber, intelligent dramas. But more debilitating to Hutton's career is the fact that, at 30, the talented actor still possesses a boyish face and naive screen persona that makeup and false beards can't hide. When he isn't given a screen father to play off of, it always feels like he needs one. And ironically, while real dad Jim spent years trying to break out of light comedies, Tim has the opposite problem: he projects introspection and utter humor-lessness on screen. This worked for him in the beginning. He carried his Ordinary People Oscar charisma with him into Taps (1981), in which he again personified disaffected youth, this time as the son of an army man, who leads a revolt at his military academy.

Suddenly he had two films, two hits. But in the end, it's been more of a curse than a blessing that Hutton got off to a fast start, and avoided the Brat Pack label. He escaped having to prove himself in mindless, youth-oriented entertainment, because he was the one they chose for heavier fare. Trouble is, the box-office explosions in the early '80s were set off by lightweight stuff, so Hutton escaped box-office success too. He was the title character in the tedious Daniel, playing a brooding young man with major family problems (his parents were accused of selling secrets to the Russians and were executed). In the flop Iceman (1984), he was finally cast against type as a scientist (with no father in evidence), but his full beard, ostensibly to protect against arctic blasts, merely looks like a futile attempt to age him. Hutton finally exhibited some of his early passion in The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) as a troubled son who gets his own shot at selling secrets to the Reds, but he's overshadowed by Sean Penn as his dope-head partner, and Hutton's just plain unconvincing in Alan Rudolph's romantic fantasy Made in Heaven (Hutton senior might have brought the necessary graceful charm to the Capra-esque whimsy, but Tim isn't light or airy enough to play an angel).

In Taylor Hackford's uninvolving Everybody's All-American, Hutton played second fiddle to Dennis Quaid and Jessica Lange, and when critics noticed him at all, it was to gleefully critique the unnatural and ever-changing facial hair he'd been saddled with--a far cry from the boy-wonder accolades of eight years before. Hutton is still young--and still talented. But does today's Hollywood of larger-than-life sex symbol heroes and comedians-turned-dramatists have room for a quiet, deadly serious male star in need of a father figure? This year's Q & A, a flop, did not suggest that such a trend is in the making. L.P.

KEITH CARRADINE

At first, in movies like Emperor of the North and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he seemed to be just another energetic, callow young actor. But during McCabe, director Robert Altman saw something else in Keith Carradine: he was an odd mix--equal parts sensitivity, self-involvement, sex appeal, and star-sibling (brother of TV star David "Kung Fu" Carradine). And he was a songwriter, to boot. Only Altman, with his skewed perspective, would have seen Carradine as a romantic leading man, and only in the mid-'70s would Altman have had the resources to pull it off. In a trio of movies--_Thieves Like Us_, Nashville, and Welcome to LA--Altman and his protege Alan Rudolph captured with breathtaking clarity the passive-aggressive manchild of that era, and turned Carradine into the least likely of stars. There he was, in all his shy-guy glory, the very archetype of the pained-but-available '60s survivor--singing "I'm Easy" on the 1975 Oscars (and he won, too, for Best Song).

A slew of good filmmakers came calling: in Ridley Scott's The Duellists, Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, Michael Ritchie's An Almost Perfect Affair, Walter Hill's The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, Carradine was cast, time and again, for the very laid-back qualities that Altman had minted. But '80s movies wanted action heroes who were buffed, not brooding (unless, like Tom Cruise, they're both), and so Carradine's had considerable trouble losing his mellow mantle. His best work in the past decade, in Rudolph's Choose Me and The Modems, can only be called variations on a familiar theme. To make the transition, Carradine's been turning increasingly to TV to get the chance to play other kinds of parts. Happily, miniseries like "Chiefs" and "Murder Ordained" show that he's surprisingly effective playing cons, cheats, and killers--a nasty streak of character acting ability no doubt inherited from his father, actor John Carradine. --K.H.

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Kevin Hennessey, Rebecca Morris, and Lamar Petersen are all graduates of Loyola/Marymount Film School where they collaborated on a short film called Miracle on Olvera Street.

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