On the Way with Joaquin

"You had me at 'Hello,'" Renee Zellweger confessed to the irresistible Tom-Jerry the Joaquin-Jerry would never have it so easy. There'd be retreats, recriminations, refusals--a frigging world war of betrayal before the Joaquin-Jerry would even be allowed in the same neighborhood as Renee Zellweger. "You always have to fuck things up!" Joaquin cried to his screen brother in last year's Inventing the Abbotts, sobbing. That's the ticket, that's how the Joaquin-Jerry would finally get the girl. Or he'd get himself beat up, the way he did in Oliver Stone's U-Turn, and she'd take pity on him. Either way, we'd probably spend less time rooting for him than trying to figure out what gives with him.

Now imagine Tom Cruise having a go at Joaquin's role as the dim-bulb teenager who became Nicole Kidman's ghoul tool in Gus Van Sant's To Die For. The amount of nudity would be halved and the number of close-ups would double. But would the hero of_ Mission: Impossible_ allow himself to be led by his pee-pee commit murder for a vapid, self-serving, clueless townie? Would Cruise be able to descend to anywhere near the depth of leaden witlessness Joaquin managed?

"I'll never live down my character in To Die For," Joaquin groans as the streets begin to narrow up in the Hills. He says this with ragged resignation stemming from the knowledge that Inventing the Abbotts, U-Turn and the new Clay Pigeons have all intervened to no avail. "See, the problem is, if early in your career you come out with a really well-defined character that kind of establishes you, you become known for that. For a while after To Die For, I didn't care, but eventually it bothered me and I started defending myself, citing my other work, not that I played Edward Teller or fucking Richard III, but even that's pathetic, having to defend yourself in that way. It's ridiculous and embarrassing and who gives a shit? Why should I have to defend myself like that? I did it, it was good, it's over. Fuck it."

Though I'm not looking for it, Joaquin has reminded me more than once, as he's been talking, of his older brother, River, whom I came to know and whose company I enjoyed. Joaquin described the atmosphere at the Jane's Addiction concert as "super-exciting," for example. Super-exciting was a River term; super-anything to him was a way of trumping perfection, suggesting there could never be too much of a good thing. And like River, Joaquin has a way of placing a "the" before his nouns--the acting, the marriage, the music--in a way that invests these things with an essence all their own that no one can ever separate them from.

"I'm not into the organized religion," Joaquin says. "I'm not into the crazy kids who shout the shit and tell you to do things. It's too fucking weird. But at the same time, I've seen people who were complete fuckups who then found God. They go to church, they don't drink, they don't do the nasty drugs, and in some ways, that's great--I mean, you have to do whatever it takes in order to make it through. For me, I believe in a God of whatever my own thing is--God of the trumpet, perhaps. Whatever."

You could say both River and Joaquin were ladled from the same philosophical stew--something innocent, nutty and idealistic. River went overboard with his vegan lifestyle (while he smoked like a diesel). Joaquin changed his name to Leaf when he was four (and changed it back at River's urging). River used to do everything he could to destroy his pretty boy image--soiled shirts, bad poses, super-bad haircuts. "I don't give a shit if I look like a freak," Joaquin told me at a photo shoot. "Look at me, right now: this is part of what's so sad about this business. They build you up--they take me, see, they make me look pretty, they put the stuff in the hair, put the makeup on, snap the picture--then when they decide that I'm fucked up and on the downward spiral, they start using the picture someone's snapped where I've just gotten off a plane, flown all night through seven time zones and I'm in mid-blink. While they like you, they use the good picture. But when word gets out that you might be doing drugs, when word gets out, right or wrong, that you, gasp, had drinks at a party, they dig up this picture and say, Oh, look, he's stoned at the airport, he's stoned all the time."

We've arrived at our destination now. Joaquin squeezes the Le Mans into a spot meant for a smaller car, and, as we mount the crooked steps to the house, takes one fleeting, over-the-shoulder, love-struck glance at his ride.

"I've come to a nearer acceptance--I wouldn't say understanding, because it's something I'll never understand--but just an acceptance of River's death," he says as we head into the house. "What was difficult in the beginning was that I felt robbed of my memories. See, a public death is a really difficult thing to go through. The death of someone you really love is difficult enough all on its own. Then, when your memories of what happened are distorted and put out there for public consumption . . . you just feel so robbed. Anything that was mine, that I knew, people would angle for, try to ask me, they wanted to know things." His voice goes facile as he does an impression of the smarmy Eastern journalist with the retractable jutting chin, teeth clenched FDR style, saying, '"From the inside, tell me a little bit from the inside.'

"Well," Joaquin continues, "I didn't want to. That was mine, that was all I had that wasn't ruined or distorted. I mean, for a while I could deal with it but when my mom would go to a store and see a picture of him in the National Enquirer, that killed me. To think of my sisters having to see that. That killed me. I couldn't believe, can't believe--I mean, we're screwed--that we live in such a cold, fucking callous society, everyone in the pursuit of whatever will convert into money, human compassion be damned."

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