The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (215 page)

Did
Lonesome Dove
remind people of what he might do? Suddenly, as Clay Shaw in
JFK
(91, Oliver Stone), Jones played rich, swish, and languid—and got a supporting actor nomination. Then he brought rascally panache to the mayhem of
Under Siege
(92, Davis).
House of Cards
(93, Michael Lessac) was a dud, but in
The Fugitive
(93, Davis), Jones was the motor that drove a film so implausible that it had to keep moving. He nearly eclipsed the nominal hero, and won the supporting actor Oscar and a lot of big offers for leading roles. Thus he made
Heaven and Earth
(93, Stone);
Blown Away
(94, Stephen Hopkins); and
The Client
(94, Joel Schumacher).

For a few years after his Oscar, Jones seemed encouraged. He found good parts and pictures in a range of moods: the very touching husband in
Blue Sky
(94, Tony Richardson);
Natural Born Killers
(94, Stone); the black frog croak of
Cobb
(94, Ron Shelton); the TV Western he directed and acted in,
The Good Old Boys
(95), and even his clever Two-Face in
Batman Forever
(95, Joel Schumacher). But that energy faded. He became coarse—or was it depressed?—and you felt he had lost faith in the business as his checks grew bigger:
Volcano
(97, Mick Jackson);
Men in Black
(97, Barry Sonnenfeld);
U.S. Marshals
(98, Stuart Baird);
Double Jeopardy
(99, Bruce Beresford);
Rules of Engagement
(00, William Friedkin);
Space Cowboys
(00, Clint Eastwood);
MIIB
(02, Sonnenfeld);
The Hunted
(03, William Friedkin); and restored to life, oddly gentle, as a man who has lived with the Apache in
The Missing
(03, Ron Howard).

It was still not quite clear whether Jones was an authentically hard man or just a loner who despised himself for making stupid movies.
Man of the House
(05, Stephen Herek) was bad enough to force the issue. Jones next starred in and directed the magnificent
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
, for which he won the acting prize at Cannes. He was in
A Prairie Home Companion
(06, Robert Altman); then as the father in
In the Valley of Elah
(07, Paul Haggis). The topper to this run was his world-weary sheriff in
No Country for Old Men
(07, the Coen Brothers). One lesson of that seemed to be stay near home:
In the Electric Mist
(09, Bertrand Tavernier) was a detective story set in the South. But actor and director apparently fell out and the film appeared in two different cuts—117 minutes and 102.

Spike Jonze
(Adam Spiegel), b. Rockville, Maryland, 1969
1994:
Beastie Boys: Sabotage
(v). 1997:
How They Get There
(s). 1998:
Amarillo by Morning
(s). 1998: “It’s Oh So Quiet,” in
Björk: Volumen
(v). 1999:
Being John Malkovich
. 2002:
Adaptation
. 2009:
Where the Wild Things Are
.

Yes, there is an American New Wave and it’s exactly like the rest of America—casual, brilliant, spoiled, ironic, and devoutly youthful. Spike Jonze is very much an inspirational figure, not least for the way he was born an heir to the Spiegel mailorder catalogue and then married into the Coppolas—he married Sofia Coppola in 1999.

As a kid, he was part of the group behind
Dirt Magazine
, and he moved on from that to be a director of several music videos. But then, with writer Charlie Kaufman, he delivered
Being John Malkovich
, a fair contender for the American
Breathless
, and a quite captivating coup until about half an hour before the end when it begins to grow depressed worrying about its own ending. Above all, the obvious assumption that dream and reality go hand in glove, and the disinclination to soup up that congruity, is what made the film. For it looked and felt as straightforward as Magritte, no matter the enormous imaginative leaps being entertained. It was one of the great American debuts, and it did well enough to put even the industry in a spin.

Adaptation
, for me, closes down rather earlier than
Being John Malkovich
—in other words, the daring runs for cover, or simply can’t face the ordeal of ending itself. This is no small point. It is in their endings that most films are most conventional and leaden. That wrap is their grim concession to old habits and commercial rules. Jonze knows how to start a film in amazing ways. But the task of finding new endings is more challenging, and the dismay could yet sap his own great energy.

He is making a version of Maurice Sendak’s
Where the Wild Things Are
, and in general it may be that he has more useful lessons to learn from literature (from Borges, from Musil, from Joyce) than from music videos. But this is a career of remarkable promise. (Imagine him married to the Sofia Coppola capable of the wistful inconclusiveness of
Lost in Translation
. Alas, that love ended in 2003.) Inconclusiveness can be an ending, too, but it needs to recognize emotional limits or truths that, so far, Jonze has been too busy to note.

Where the Wild Things Are
was a forlorn mess and a discredit to Sendak.

Neil Jordan
, b. Sligo, Ireland, 1950
1982:
Angel/Danny Boy
. 1985:
The Company of Wolves
. 1986:
Mona Lisa
. 1988:
High Spirits
. 1989:
We’re No Angels
. 1991:
The Miracle
. 1992:
The Crying Game
. 1994:
Interview with the Vampire
. 1996:
Michael Collins
. 1997:
The Butcher Boy
. 1999:
In Dreams; The End of the Affair
. 2002:
The Good Thief
. 2005:
Breakfast on Pluto
. 2007:
The Brave One
. 2009:
Ondine
.

When that excellent critic, Donald Lyons, claimed that
The Crying Game
was the best film of 1992, his position was reasonable, if depressing. There might be arguments preferring
Raise the Red Lantern
. There would certainly be those who voted for
Howards End
and
Unforgiven
—worthy pictures, not bad films, yet flawed, cautious, and archaic. When James Ivory and Clint Eastwood vie for a year’s best film, it may be that the movies can see their End.

And, similarly,
The Crying Game
is only a good, promising picture, leaped upon by hopeful critics in their longing to find something that might be a “best” film. Neil Jordan has distinct virtues: he is a writer, interested in fable and construction for their own sake, and a first-rate dialoguist (he won the original screenplay Oscar for
The Crying Game);
he has a world—the desolate, embittered wasteland of Ireland, and the shining city streets at night; he can present strong women and weak men, without having his own personality threatened; and he has a Maupassant-like taste for consequences that is torn between being unexpected and giving warning hints of destiny or fate. It may be to the point to see Jordan as a kid raised in movies, music, and Catholicism, struggling to apply the lessons to the woeful state of Anglo-Irish relations in our time.

Still,
The Crying Game
has problems of contrivance and plausibility, and of finding a way for Jordan’s kindness to infiltrate brutal lives. This is a recurring issue in his work and we may note the one deliberate resort to fairy story as well as a larger reliance on movie genres that can sit awkwardly with the realism of the city, of race, and confused sexual tenderness in unlikely situations.

But what’s an Irish moviemaker to do?
High Spirits
and
We’re No Angels
showed how easily wrong roads may spring up after early success. Jordan remains a developing talent, most provoked by small towns and infinite cities. He is a master of both the shabby, neglected provinces and the dreamy cityscape. He has genuine promise, and already, in Cathy Tyson for
Mona Lisa
and Jaye Davidson in
The Crying Game
, he has given us a pair of native odalisques who are siblings in their tenuous existence and their sweet gloomy smiles. These are two remarkable characters, or presences, and they testify to the eagerness with which Jordan looks at novel sights.

Jordan is a novelist and short-story writer who got into movies as a script assistant to John Boorman on
Excalibur
. If he succumbs again to Hollywood offers, let us hope that someone orders him to come no farther west than Boston. Better still, Jordan is the director most qualified to do a movie about the IRA that could make North, South, England, and all other observers less angry and more respectful.

Instead, at David Geffen’s urging, he went away and filmed Anne Rice, with results that only confirmed the intensity and the limits to that author’s following. Jordan keeps going, and I found
The Butcher Boy
as good as his best. But
Michael Collins
was a pretty empty-headed biopic.
In Dreams
was daft. And
The End of the Affair
was one of the more regrettable films of the nineties—regrettable in that it would be very hard to botch that story, even without his cast. But in truth, the Edward Dmytryk film (with Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson) was more moving. So, after a dozen films, Neil Jordan seemed as unsettled as a beginner.

The last few years have only added to that—of his three recent films,
The Brave One
is the least likely and the most intriguing. It’s the story of a woman who takes the law into her own hands, and it owes a lot to the exhausted ferocity of Jodie Foster.

Louis Jourdan
(Gendre), b. Marseilles, France, 1919
Louis Jourdan has been one of the best-looking men on screen. He is, in addition, an intelligent man and a sympathetic actor of real ability. No wonder David O. Selznick put him under contract soon after the war, when Jourdan had several French movies to his credit, as well as prolonged, courageous service in the Resistance. He had a long career: he was in one great hit (
Gigi
) and one indisputably great picture (
Letter from an Unknown Woman
). Yet it was a career that did not really take, no matter that Jourdan and his wife, Quique, were popular figures in Hollywood society. Was he too smart, too shy, too modest? Time and again, you have the feeling that he needed just one part, and the urging to play it to the full—a great villain, perhaps?

The son of a hotelier, he traveled widely as a boy, and was trained at the Ecole Dramatique in Paris. His French films are
Le Corsaire
(39, Marc Allegret);
Premier RendezVous
(41, Henri Decoin);
L’Arlésienne
(42, Allegret);
Félicie Nanteuil
(42, Allegret);
La Vie de Bohème
(42, Marcel L’Herbier);
Untel Père et Fils
(43, Julien Duvivier);
La Belle Aventure
(45, Allegret).

In America, against his director’s wishes, he was the valet in
The Paradine Case
(48, Alfred Hitchcock); the man in
Letter from an Unknown Woman
(48, Max Ophuls); Rodolphe in
Madame Bovary
(49, Vincente Minnelli);
Bird of Paradise
(50, Delmer Daves);
Anne of the Indies
(51, Jacques Tourneur);
The Happy Time
(52, Richard Fleischer); back to France for
Rue de l’Estrapade
(53, Jacques Becker);
Decameron Nights
(52, Hugo Fregonese);
Three Coins in the Fountain
(54, Jean Negulesco); to France for
The Bride Is Much Too Beautiful
(56, Pierre Gaspard-Huit), with Brigitte Bardot;
The Swan
(56, Charles Vidor);
Julie
(56, Andrew L. Stone);
Gigi
(58, Minnelli);
Dangerous Exile
(58, Brian Desmond Hurst);
The Best of Everything
(59, Negulesco);
Can-Can
(60, Walter Lang).

Nothing was quite the same after that, but Jourdan seems never to have announced a retirement:
The Count of Monte Cristo
(61, Claude Autant-Lara);
Disorder
(62, Franco Brusati);
The VIPs
(63, Anthony Asquith);
Made in Paris
(66, Boris Sagal);
To Commit a Murder
(67, Edouard Molinaro);
Young Rebel
(67, Vincent Sherman);
A Flea in Her Ear
(68, Jacques Charon);
Silver Bears
(77, Ivan Passer);
The Man in the Iron Mask
(77, Mike Newell); very funny in
Swamp Thing
(82, Wes Craven); the villain to Bond in
Octopussy
(83, John Glen);
The Return of the Swamp Thing
(89, Jim Wynorski);
Year of the Comet
(92, Peter Yates).

Louis Jouvet
(1887–1951), b. Crozon, France
Jouvet was an immense movie presence in the late thirties, so plainly powerful and intelligent—and determined to have the world know that theatre was more important than movies. In 1913, he had joined Jacques Copeau’s company; but in 1922 he set up his own company and combined acting and directing. He had an especially close relationship with Giraudoux, whose glossy wit suited Jouvet’s style. One of his great stage successes was in Jules Romain’s
Knock
, which he filmed twice—in 1933, directed by Roger Goupillières, and in 1951 (his last film), directed by Guy Lefranc. He had made a few silent pictures, but his film career began properly in 1933 with
Topaze
(Louis Gasnier) and was pursued seriously until the outbreak of war, even if it was usually out of step with the understated naturalism of the period:
La Kermesse Héroïque
(35, Jacques Feyder);
Mister Flow
(35, Robert Siodmak); as the Baron in
Les Bas-Fonds
(36, Jean Renoir);
Mademoiselle Docteur
(36, Edmond T. Greville);
Un Carnet de Bal
(37, Julien Duvivier);
Drôle de Drame
(37, Marcel Carné);
L’Alibi
(37, Pierre Chenal);
La Marseillaise
(38, Renoir);
Entrée des Artistes
(38, Marc Allégret);
Hotel du Nord
(38, Carné); and
La Fin du Jour
(39, Duvivier).