Here's an invitation to consider the past, present and future choices of five young actors who've survived murderous odds to become touchstones for their generation.
__________________________________________________________
In an industry fixated on the latest, not necessarily the best, only a handful of the young actors who rise to the top of the heap stay there for long. It takes an ineffable combination of talent, smarts, determination, looks, will, resilience and sheer luck to prevail over wrong-headed projects, masochistic miscasting, lost opportunities and ill-advised hairdos.
Matt Damon
Matt Damon's light-up-the-room grin, camera-grabbing good looks, cocky blue-collar charm and ferocious concentration all conspire to make him a rougher-hewn, grittier Tom Cruise. He's Cruise by way of Jimmy Cagney. With a gaze inner-lit by Boston bar neon and a stride quick with the rhythm of work boots down ethnic neighborhood streets, his screen persona shows darker, more openly ambiguous undercurrents than Cruise's, but it's toughened and strengthened by a similar inborn wisdom. Damon seems to realize how much his authenticity owes to the angst, urgency and insular humor of the Old Neighborhood. No matter the actual truth about his birth and upbringing, the camera reads him as the hunky Dead End Kid that the homecoming queen from the good side of town wants to take to the prom.
It's a boon to Damon's career mythology that he got plucked out of relative obscurity and dropped into the Cinderella spot by Francis Ford Coppola. The director who delivered to us the young Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan could have had his pick of the litter to play The Rainmaker's idealistic, up-by-the-bootstraps young attorney, but he chose a rookie, and Damon came through for him with an assured and unforced performance. Especially remarkable for an actor so new and raring to go was how Damon knew precisely when to take a backseat in his scenes with older pros like Jon Voight and Teresa Wright.
But it was Damon's own creation, Good Will Hunting, that brought him into focus as an actor and a star. How rare and refreshing that Damon and his lifelong buddy, Ben Affleck, created a script that neither condescends to, nor canonizes, working stiffs. What's more, try to name other actors of any age or era who've had the talent and perspective to write themselves roles that cut to the core of what makes them unique. The camera loves Damon's fresh-faced Americanism enough to practically share a BarcaLounger and a Bud with him, but this role invited the lens to probe the emotional black-and-blues under the kid's bravado, to observe the rage under the essential niceness.
Damon's Will hadn't yet reached the screen when Steven Spielberg chose him to play the soldier Tom Hanks goes looking for in Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg had probably responded to the emaciated, drug-addled, guilt-wracked Gulf War grunt Damon played in Courage Under Fire. In fact, the sprung demons that danced behind Damon's gaze in that performance may have been what convinced Spielberg that this young actor would be able to pump life into the woefully underwritten role of Ryan. As it turned out, the director was only half right, but playing the object of the harrowing search in Saving Private Ryan nevertheless shined up Damon's golden-boy status.
Anything coming after the double play of Good Will Hunting and Saving Private Ryan would have been anti-climactic for Damon. The respectable but self-inflated Rounders didn't hurt him or help him. His soul seemed lifetimes too young to play a gambling addict, but his choice of a role that would have been, in another era, prime sirloin for Robert Ryan or John Garfield showed energy and desire, qualities that are characteristic of his approach to his career. Two other crucial qualities Damon has are decisiveness and a taste for risk, both of which are evident in his upcoming projects. In Kevin Smith's nose-thumbing parody of established religion, Dogma, he and Ben Affleck will play fallen angels to Alanis Morissette's God. Here, one suspects, is a movie that has to be awfully good not to be just plain awful, but Damon jumped at the chance to do it. The silken, pansexual sociopath he'll play in The Talented Mr. Ripley is a daunting stretch, but one suspects all it took was a long look at director Anthony Minghella's work on The English Patient before he leapt in. Nor did he hesitate over the opportunity to be directed by Billy Bob Thornton in the part of a Holden Caulfield-meets-Gary Cooper cowboy in All the Pretty Horses.
Damon's willingness to mix the arty, the classy, the daring and the mainstream in his choice of roles shows a remarkably balanced approach to the game of career longevity. That and the sheer quantity of work he's eager to do sets him apart from most of Young Hollywood, which tends toward a paralyzing love-hate relationship with the commercial realities of filmmaking. Having brought off the miracle of getting the moviegoing world to fall in love with him, Damon is now ambitious enough to want to show how much of him there is. The best indication of the depth that will keep him in front of us for the long term is his determination to deal in the greater purposes of acting: he's intent on showing us who he is as a way of showing us who we are.
Winona Ryder
Everyone in the industry takes it as an article of faith that Winona Ryder is a class act. Her seriousness of effort, her innate gifts and her unusual beauty are indisputable. She's received two Oscar nominations. She's made films with Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Tim Burton. She's gone head-to-head with Daniel Day-Lewis and come out the one blessed by the Academy. And she's managed to sustain--even heighten--her mystique while growing up in Hollywood. No wonder her peers respect the hell out of her.
Years of evidence attest to the pleasures Ryder can bring to the screen. As the wraithlike goth suburban teen who preferred dancing the calypso with the undead to hanging with her yucky white-bread family in Beetlejuice, she was Wednesday Addams hot-wired with Lolita. She and Christian Slater teased out dark, outlaw sexuality from each other in the wickedly wry Heathers. (She was the only girl in that high school movie who seemed to get how fine a line there is between the popular pom-pom girl and the geeky outcast.) A few years later she was spectacular in The Age of Innocence as a clear-eyed, deceptively passive young wife who quietly manipulates her husband into forgoing the love of his life and languishing in a cul-de-sac of boring convention and unrealized desire.
And yet, despite a resume more substantial than that of any other American actress her age, there's something oddly absent from Ryder's career to date--her sexual coming-of-age. Now in her late 20s and more beautiful than ever, she still hasn't found an adult male costar with whom she can ignite the way she did with Christian Slater back when she was a teenager. (Memo to, Ryder: no more costarring with Ethan Hawke or Lukas Haas.) Without the role and performance that declare her full-blown sexuality, all her attempts at self-emancipation into adulthood seem to short-circuit, leaving her in a sexual limbo somewhere between Peter Pan and Joan of Arc.
She generated steam with Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula, but it was not enough to push her into the territory of full-blown, dangerous, erotic womanhood. The Crucible should have provided just the top-drawer, complex setting for her sexuality to find expression; here she was playing off her most intriguing paradoxes--chaste, yet provocative, earthy yet ethereal. But the whole tone and mood of that movie were so far off she couldn't cut through the muddle. Then again, perhaps it's just a matter of her voice and diction--those hard r'_s which were so endearing when she was a precocious youngster now have the ring of arrested development. There was encouraging offbeat chemistry between Ryder and Kenneth Branagh in _Celebrity--if only Woody Allen had given her enough space to develop a whole flesh-and-blood creation.
After a fallow period in the aftermath of the dispiriting Alien Resurrection, Ryder stepped up her pace and aggressively sought out newer directors. We'll next see her in cinematographer-turned-director Janusz Kaminski's Lost Souls, a big-budget project that has her playing a young woman who inadvertently learns she must convince an unknowing, handsome young journalist (played by Ben Chaplin) that he's the target of a conspiracy to bring Satan to earth. She'll then star as the psychologically embattled heroine of Cop Land director James Mangold's film version of the memoir Girl Interrupted, an Oscar-bait role that ought to exploit her gift for being simultaneously endearing and odd. But since she seems drawn to playing feisty, independent, gender-role challenging parts like the ones that attracted Katharine Hepburn in her day, she might take heed that Hepburn's legend arguably only took hold when she was paired with Spencer Tracy. One has to wonder where Ryder might find her Tracy. Could it be Matthew McConaughey? Ben Affleck? Edward Norton? Tom Cruise?
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.
Ben Affleck
Ben Affleck radiates a charming, make-it-look-easy, smartalecky screen quality that allows him to play the sort of "average guy" who isn't really very average at all. The role he cowrote and chose for himself in Good Will Hunting is the perfect example: as a construction worker who knows his blue-collar limitations without necessarily having made peace with them, he pulled off the high-wire act of playing abrasive yet likable, ingenuous yet calculating, resigned yet roiling with discontent. Affleck is also aces at projecting the kind of funny, hip, mordant and self-deprecating presence Hollywood thrives on.
Like Steve McQueen before him, he exudes a big-galoot cool that effortlessly takes the curse off gimmicky action scenes. Like McQueen, too, he has looks that offer a fresh alternative to the standard fare of even-featured actor guys and he makes a natural, offbeat screen lover. If he has yet to demonstrate he's got anything like the actor-intensity of DiCaprio, Edward Norton or his buddy Matt Damon, neither has he shown any limits to his possible range.
Affleck was stellar as the cocky Texas high school badass and freshman-basher in Dazed and Confused; there hadn't been a small-town teen character so simultaneously winning, ridiculous and hateful since Harrison Ford's in American Graffiti. In Chasing Amy, he turned a heartbreaking outburst of yearning for an unattainable lesbian into a staple for acting classes and auditions all around town. In Armageddon, his offhanded, self-mocking heroics melted the cheese right off the script. While his part in Shakespeare in Love seemed designed to keep him near offscreen romantic partner Gwyneth Paltrow more than anything else, he was an unmistakably welcome presence whenever the camera found him literally waiting in the wings. Ultimately, he possesses the resources to become one of our more indispensable all-purpose leading men.
But despite success in mainstream Hollywood fare, Affleck is likely to stay close to the indie world. Upcoming, there's Kevin Smith's in-your-face Dogma, in which he and Matt Damon will play angels booted out of heaven. There's also the comedic 200 Cigarettes, in which a bunch of screwed-up, angst-ridden teens and twentysomethings collide on New Year's Eve. In the big-studio comedy/romance-cum-disaster movie Forces of Nature, though, he'll have the chance to become the first male costar since Keanu Reeves and Bill Pullman to light Sandra Bullock's fire, and a major success there would have career-revving implications. Among the follow-up big-studio projects he's rumored to be considering is another pairing with Bruce Willis in the next Die Hard.
Clearly Affleck gets off on variety. Perhaps before too long he'll pump up the pissed-off, wild-hare quality he possesses and play the spectacular bad guy he's got in him. Imagine him as a coolly amoral type like Richard Gere's villain in Internal Affairs. In the meantime, on the evidence of their chemistry in Good Will Hunting, it would be worth it for Affleck and Damon to test Hollywood's good will and brave the sophomore curse to collaborate on either Halfway House, their project about workers in a Boston home for the mentally impaired, or Like a Rock, their buddy project. These two ought to be paired onscreen as often as they've got material to run with. Together, they could be a Paul Newman and Robert Redford for our scrappier, dressed-down, irony-drenched era.
Claire Danes
One of the singular things about Claire Danes is that she comes with a cheering section any aspiring star might envy. Her Industry fans include not just the powers who spotted her in her sensitive underdog TV show, My So-Called Life, but extremely influential fellow actresses who've been where she is and clearly see her as a kindred spirit. Winona Ryder championed Danes for both Little Women and How to Make an American Quilt. Jodie Foster directed her in Home for the Holidays and stumped for her to play Juliet in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Few who go out of their way to mentor so generously are as fully rewarded as Ryder and Foster have been. Danes's Beth in_ Little Women_ was a poised, luminous earth-mother-in-training. And though Home for the Holidays was every bit as messy and irritating as, well, going home for the holidays, Danes's performance in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet made up for it all.
Opposite Leonardo DiCaprio's brashly magnetic Romeo, Danes gave Juliet an incandescent innocence made up of equal parts moonstruck idealism and openheartedness. Nothing there felt calculated, and in an era when so many young actors get ironic and close-to-the-vest when it comes to playing romance.
________________________________________________________________
Stephen Rebello