Party of Five

Ryder's best shot at career-transforming romance will come if she decides to do_ Autumn in New York_, in which she would play a dying girl who entrances an older lothario--Richard Gere. Whether or not Gere ranks as her Tracy, just think what playing a terminally ill girl did for the far less gifted Ali MacGraw--and what getting romantic opposite stars twice her age did for Audrey Hepburn. Meanwhile, as one casting agent put it, "Once Winona gets a great script, great costar, great director and a great, womanly haircut, she'll lay us all to waste." Such things may be scarcer than hen's teeth, but Ryder looks to be in the business for the long haul, and she's got the cachet and gift that will keep us watching as she (and we) wait for the film in which she can truly soar.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Ever since Titanic crowned Leonardo DiCaprio king of the world there's been resentment that someone so damned young and good looking could have been invested overnight with the clout to demand $20 million a picture. Once the big ship hit the iceberg, it somehow induced widespread amnesia about the fact that it wasn't windswept, heroic romantic leads that booked DiCaprio's passage on Hollywood's upper deck. And because DiCaprio became the idol of screaming teenagers who mob him as if he were all the Backstreet Boys rolled into one, even people who knew he'd proven his talent long before Titanic have grown suspicious of him. It hasn't helped DiCaprio's reputation as a serious actor that he's been having too much rowdy fun in his private life, either.

The DiCaprio of five years prior to Titanic beat out 400 other hopefuls to play the emotionally/physically bashed, indomitable young hero of This Boy's Life. With a rock-solid, heartrending performance he flat-out stole the movie from Robert De Niro, no less. Sure, the camera burnished DiCaprio's still-immature face like a slightly tarnished copper penny, but the young actor's gaze opened a window on inner anguish of such ferocity and vulnerability that the lens wasn't wowed by mere surface. Even at that age, DiCaprio was a wizard at revelatory contradictions. He could make a fist of his face while his lanky body reeled with his character's pain. He was a kid so gifted and unpredictable, capable of such startling immediacy, that his arrival as an acting force seemed almost a benevolence in the same year that saw the loss of the irreplaceable River Phoenix.

DiCaprio took a giant leap forward when he played Johnny Depp's mentally challenged younger brother in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. Little wonder he was Oscar nominated for what remains his benchmark performance to date. Actors know it isn't tough to wring audiences dry playing handicapped characters, and they usually make such roles the occasion for showboating and shriek. DiCaprio's work in Grape was clean as a whistle. In a stroke of originality he created a boy who was handicapped and funny and endearing. Watching his performance now makes you wonder why some director didn't grab him right then and make a kick-ass movie version of The Catcher in the Rye.

DiCaprio soared when he followed his bent for off-track portrayals--e.g., the drug-addicted poet and hoops lover in The Basketball Diaries, the displaced teen in Marvin's Room. And even his misfires--the prematurely cynical kid gunslinger in The Quick and the Dead (for which he did a remarkable little death scene), and the gay poet Rimbaud in Total Eclipse--were actor's choices, not the calculated moves of a careerist hell-bent on being a star. But it was precisely such an "actor's choice" that altered everything for DiCaprio. By playing the lead role in little-known Australian director Baz Luhrmann's punk/hip-hop retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, he was probably taking the biggest risk of his career. When Luhrmann's extravaganza of visual excess and anguished emotionalism sent teens around the globe into an obsessive swoon over DiCaprio, what had been a crapshoot suddenly turned into a coup. Hollywood started thinking anew about who Leonardo DiCaprio was.

Then came Titanic. DiCaprio had initially resisted James Cameron's overtures to take on the lead in the big-budget gamble. Not only was this a role that had Big Fat Movie Star written all over it, it was a movie with the potential to take him down along with it. In the end, he plunged in and ended up fronting the world's first billion-dollar box-office hit. He emerged from the dare a gargantuan star with a huge price tag and backlash potential written all over him.

With The Man in the Iron Mask, a silly, clunky, hair-extension costume epic already in the can by Titanic's release and able to float on the big ship's wake, DiCaprio faced big decisions. Aware that he was damned if he did, damned if he didn't, he wavered in greater fits of ambivalence than he was already famous for. He let both The Talented Mr. Ripley and All the Pretty Horses go to Matt Damon. (To his credit, he also let American Psycho get away from him.) Mean-while, the small bit part he committed to in Woody Allen's Celebrity proved to be a wise decision. As the hotel-room-thrashing, bratty, ego- maniacal, sexed-up, coke-snorting boy star, he was able to kid his megafame and pop-culture notoriety, while giving an enjoyably energized performance that reassured those who'd tuned into him before fame struck.

But the bigger, more difficult choice of a follow-up leading man part was delayed and delayed until, finally, DiCaprio decided on The Beach, an offbeat film directed by the unpredictable Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame and A Life Less Ordinary infamy. In a role that again fits snugly into the "actor's choice" category, DiCaprio will play a druggy young drifter armed with a map to paradise on the sybaritic beaches of Southeast Asia. Yes, the project sounds iffy and it calls for him to appear half-dressed for the entire movie. But win or lose it, he'll at least have put the distance he clearly feels he needs between himself and his hordes of blindly adoring young fans.

A less easily rationalized move is his plan to follow up The Beach with a portrayal of the doomed, beautiful-loser jazz great Chet Baker. Does anyone really want to see DiCaprio lose his teeth on the big screen, let alone play his fifth druggie? Ambitious as this choice is, it points up the dilemma of DiCaprio's young career: how will he negotiate the abyss between his serious leanings as an actor and the sort of roles one gets $20 million to play? The question itself will probably provide more suspense than any movie we're likely to see in the next decade.

Pages: 1 2 3