Man Power

CLIVE OWEN

Clive Owen is the minimalist's sex symbol--his ability to invite erotic attention by doing almost nothing is uncanny. Even now he may be best known as the thoroughly anonymous "driver" in that cool series of Internet films/commercials directed by stylishly selected auteurs for BMW, and that is appropriate. It deals in and depends on edgy mystique, which its unknown star--the oxymoron is the message--exudes (Owen plays a similar character, an unfeeling assassin, in The Bourne Identity). David Fincher, whose company produced BMW's little coup, knew an actor who could conjure whole worlds of postmodern noir when he saw one, and he saw one in Croupier, the film that quietly introduced Owen to American audiences. It was a movie that banked 100 percent on its leading man and gave him, in his role as a self-involved writer turned card dealer, no fireworks to set off, just minute-by-minute of close-up screen time and voiceover to inform us of such things as, "I'm not an enigma, I'm a contradiction." Enigma, contradiction, sure; we'll ponder the distinction as long as it calls for us to keep looking at him. Owen is so interestingly cold you can't help getting yourself tangled up in ideas about what might warm him.

Owen's masculine underplay works like a charm because his subtle register of expression and gesture withholds any apparent wish to charm--this in a profession that is ever so desperate to charm. Little wonder he was the ultimate saving grace in the almost too-charming British comedy dedicated to the notion of the redemptive power of gardening, Greenfingers. Playing an emotionally battened-down prisoner given new inner life by unexpected horticultural success with a packet of flower seeds, Owen was required to play a man transformed from a state of defeated hostility to one of romantic vulnerability in less than two hours. There are many formulaic ways to do this without being very convincing on either end of the spectrum, but Owen refrained from all of them, finding fresh means of sidestepping the sentimentality that the material all but begged for.

Owen's dramatic thrift must owe quite a lot to his particular nature, but it must reflect an acquired wisdom about his own face as well. Quite an involving face this is, reconciling, as it does, slight hints of Mel Gibson's stunning looks with the cruder handsomeness of Dylan McDermott. Like McDermott, he works well on TV--in the British series "Second Sight," which played on PBS in America-- where the blunt clarity of his features seals the viewer off from distractions that usually plague TV watching.

The much-admired Gosford Park owes its entire erotic tick to Owen. He is, of course, with Helen Mirren, the big dramatic secret of the piece, but long before we've been clued into that, he's taken over the proceedings from the sidelines by saying little and provoking our curiosity. In Gosford Park, though, Owen shows an intensified, cameo version of what he's suggested elsewhere--the presence of a secret agenda that it's our pleasure to uncover. As Robert Parks, he is a man of self-defining purpose in the guise of a servant following orders. The hidden decisiveness is silently attractive, and we can't help being gratified when it expresses itself briefly in a stolen kiss. That is precisely what one hopes from an actor who keeps a lid on the obvious while letting mystery roil under the surface--that the ultimate objective of the thief we fear he is will be stealing kisses.

VIGGO MORTENSEN

The very fact that Viggo Mortensen has been around Hollywood since the early '80s without breaking into major stardom tells you a lot about his sort of sexual charisma. It's derived from no obvious tradition of studliness, hunkiness or whatever other crude term covers the general phenomenon of broadly perceived male attractiveness. In fact, it defies those categories and doesn't seem eager to promote itself at all. The mere sound of the name Viggo Mortensen hardly conjures up visions of beefcake to begin with. But here he is, well into his 40s, and suddenly his long-term cult following finds itself surrounded by a new fan contingent that thinks of Mortensen as the larger-than-life warrior Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

It would be instructive to look at Mortensen's debut in Peter Weir's 1985 film Witness and his most recent performance, in The Lord of the Rings. Nobody ever seems to have mistaken this actor for an all-American type. In Witness, he was the open-faced, implicitly open-hearted younger brother of Amish farmer stud Alexander Godunov. His features were as clean and untrammeled as a new field of wheat and his eyes were so wide apart you could have driven an Amish buggy between them. Almost 20 years later, he has experience written on him, but he is equally of another time and mindset. Truth is, Mortensen's unusual brand of attractiveness has always been so exotic, and in some ways so florid, that only roles that accommodate that weirdness work for him.

Over the years, Mortensen has been perceived by casting directors as so unlikely in the role of a mainstream character that his physical beauty was played for decadence. How could the future romantic warrior of The Lord of the Rings have been so misunderstood? Part of it is no doubt Mortensen's own self-styled bohemianism--he's a poet and a painter, he'll have you know, and he's not about to be your pinup. But a good part of it is also the physiognomy-is-destiny thing. This is not a Brad Pitt face or a Tom Cruise--it offers none of that reassurance. It looks almost as if it might have been created by a sculptor for the sheer outrageousness of putting these elements in proximity to one another.

One of the roles that best exploited the romantic/unsavory polarity in Mortensen's screen persona was the 1998 film A Perfect Murder, in which he played the lover of a rich-girl beauty (Gwyneth Paltrow) unhappily married to older control freak Michael Douglas. Mortensen's character starts out as the penniless artiste-lover that a blue-blood blonde might sin with, then turns out to be a con-man jailbird with flexible ideas about homicide. And even when you see the worst in him, you don't wonder why Gwyneth spent her lunch hours at his loft. A far less objectionable, but equally illicit Mortensen played married woman Diane Lane's free-love liberator in director Tony Goldwyn's little gem A Walk on the Moon. This role may well have been a crucial turning point for Mortensen. For one thing, he was very good in it, but the important difference was that the extravagance of his romantic looks didn't hide anything dark. He was a self-indulgent hippie, but he was a nice guy. He was good for Diane Lane.

The idea that a man who looks like Viggo Mortensen can be good for you is novel, but Hollywood seems to have accepted it. And now, having played a presence as a romantic and heroic figure in a mammoth hit like The Lord of the Rings, Mortensen is forever changed in the public imagination. Here he's not merely good for someone, he's good, period.

______________________________________

Pages: 1 2