The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (294 page)

Ennio Morricone
, b. Rome, 1928
Well over seventy now, Morricone is supposed to have written more than three hundred movie scores. The majority of those have been for Italian films, and Morricone is always associated with Sergio Leone (in fact, the two were at school together, though only Morricone remembered that useful fact). As such, Morricone has a real part in the history of music in the Western, especially with the extravagantly romantic (and derivative) frontier symphonics for
Once Upon a Time in the West
(68). In addition, with use of flutes, wind instruments, the voice, and bare rhythmic accompaniment, Morricone has a great skill at building tension. How much you like such things may depend on your response to Leone’s work as a whole.

The list that follows is far from complete:
A Fistful of Dollars
(64, Leone);
Before the Revolution
(64, Bernardo Bertolucci);
Fists in His Pockets
(66, Marco Bellocchio);
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(66, Leone);
The Battle of Algiers
(66, Gillo Pontecorvo);
Guns for San Sebastian
(68, Henri Verneuil);
Teorema
(68, Pier Paolo Pasolini);
Burn!
(69, Pontecorvo);
Two Mules for Sister Sarah
(70, Don Siegel);
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
(70, Elio Petri);
Salo
(75, Pasolini);
1900
(76, Bertolucci);
Exorcist II: The Heretic
(77, John Boorman);
Days of Heaven
(78, Terrence Malick)—the foreign air of Americana being fed back into the real thing;
The Island
(80, Michael Ritchie);
The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man
(81, Bertolucci);
White Dog
(82, Samuel Fuller);
The Night of the Shooting Stars
(82, the Taviani Brothers);
The Eyes, the Mouth
(82, Bellocchio);
Once Upon a Time in America
(84, Leone), which is like the score for
The Godfather
made even more romantic;
Ginger and Fred
(85, Federico Fellini);
The Mission
(86, Roland Joffé)—Oscar-nominated;
Good Morning, Babylon
(87, the Tavianis);
The Untouchables
(87, Brian De Palma), one of his best scores—again nominated for an Oscar;
Casualties of War
(89, De Palma);
Fat Man and Little Boy
(89, Joffé);
Cinema Paradiso
(89, Giuseppe Tornatore);
Hamlet
(90, Franco Zeffirelli);
Bugsy
(91, Barry Levinson)—another nomination;
Love Affair
(94, Glenn Gordon Caron);
Disclosure
(95, Levinson);
Lolita
(97, Adrian Lyne);
Bulworth
(98, Warren Beatty);
Malena
(00, Tornatore).

In 2007, he received an honorary Oscar, despite five failed nominations for film scores.

Errol Morris
, b. Hewlett, New York, 1948
1978:
Gates of Heaven
(d). 1981:
Vernon, Florida
(d). 1988:
The Thin Blue Line
(d). 1992:
A Brief History of Time
(d). 1994:
The Dark Wind
. 1997:
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control
(d). 1999:
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr
. (d). 2000:
First Person
(TV). 2003:
The Fog of War
(d). 2003:
The Fog of War
(d). 2008:
Standard Operating Procedure
(d).

Not uncommonly, Errol Morris is interested in people like himself—in obsessives, trying to negotiate the intractable difficulties of life and the widespread yet indifferent misunderstanding of others. In some ways, his world is a little like that of Hal Hartley, but Morris is so much more vividly intelligent, and his sense of inquiry does so much to animate the style and structure of his work. No, really, the best comparison is with Chris Marker—though Morris lacks, as yet, the great man’s Borgesian serenity. Maybe that comes with time. And maybe when it does come it dispels the faintly aggressive air of intelligence for its own sake—the risk of smugness—that sometimes makes Morris seem an exploiter of his own raw material.

The child of a doctor and a musician, Morris attended the Putney School in Vermont before the University of Wisconsin (history) and the University of California at Berkeley (philosophy). It was while there that he drifted to the Pacific Film Archive, for which he wrote program notes and became an enthusiast of such things as film noir. But Morris is not a natural storyteller. The superb noir essay
The Thin Blue Line
seemed dramatic enough to bring him Hollywood offers. But
The Dark Wind
(for Robert Redford) was a very unhappy experience, from which Morris was fired, and the film hardly released. It was said that he could not communicate with actors, but I suspect that really refers to a clash of artistic visions.

So Morris has gone in search of eccentricity as subject matter, which is fine. But I have the feeling that his greatest challenge might be the real mainstream—not just people as bizarre as Fred Leuchter and Stephen Hawking, but lives as decent, “ordinary,” and mainstream as that led by Mr. Morris. If he could curb his need for oddballs, he might find a level of universality that could prompt his best work. Maybe I’m looking for the minds of Ken Burns and Errol Morris to fuse—now we are close to the Marker.

The Fog of War
is Morris’s best film, and the most tender, in part perhaps because Morris and Robert MacNamara are alike: they are outstanding rational minds, eager to find a place for emotion. They are also competing egos, trying to control the film, so it was proper really that its Oscar be a small bomb they both take for six months a year.

Viggo Mortensen
, b. New York City, 1958
It’s rare for a movie actor to wait until his forties to gain leading parts. It’s rarer still for him to appear in three pictures in a row—in an unmistakable lead part—that do as well as movies have ever done, and for him then to break out in a big splashy Western for which he is paid only $2 million. It’s flat-out unlikely that he should have a Danish father and an American mother, or that he should have been raised in Argentina, Venezuela, and Denmark with a bit of Manhattan thrown in. Did I say that he is also a painter (in some films he has contributed his own artwork), a poet, a musician, a photographer, and a publisher? But in 2007 (when he was nearly fifty) he showed not just one of the great bodies in modern film, but naked commitment to an uncompromising fight scene. He was playing a Russian gangster living in London, speaking very good Russian and acting as cool as anyone since Brando. There’s a scene in that film,
Eastern Promises
, where his character, Nikolai, stubs a cigarette out on his own tongue. At that moment, all was made clear: Viggo Mortensen was an old-fashioned star, as confident and taciturn as Gary Cooper.

He only took the key role of Aragorn in the three
Lord of the Rings
pictures because his young son, Henry, had read the Tolkien books and knew they were golden. But for that family influence, the hangdog gloom on the face of Viggo Mortensen might still be playing oddities, lowlifes, and scumbag villains. In that capacity, he was a striking supporting player for fifteen years or so, beginning with his Amish farmer in
Witness
(85, Peter Weir), and up to the nearly magical blouse-seller in Tony Goldwyn’s
A Walk on the Moon
(99) where Viggo gave every hint of changing Diane Lane’s life expectancy.

In those years, Mortensen was an expert scene stealer: think of his mortification as the wired plant, Lalin, who is found out by Al Pacino in
Carlito’s Way
(93, Brian De Palma); the iron-jawed, unblinking weapons officer in
Crimson Tide
(95, Tony Scott); the unrelenting sergeant who drills Demi Moore in
G.I. Jane
(97, Ridley Scott); or even his young suitor, Caspar Goodwood, in
The Portrait of a Lady
(96, Jane Campion). On the down side, Mortensen hardly ever smiled or gave any sign of reliable human warmth. He was in his element as the painter/lover/sleazebag in
A Perfect Murder
(98, Andrew Davis)—and that was at least one picture that used his own paintings.

Of course, his son was right: Mortensen had the command of languages (he chose to speak Elvish), the grim Nordic look, and the unflawed heroic cast of mind that Tolkien required. All over the world, in the early years of the new century, people learned how to spell “Viggo.”
Hidalgo
(04, Joe Johnston) was the big Western that followed, and there has been another Western,
Appaloosa
(08, Ed Harris). They were good fun and brave horse pictures, without a deep impact.

More to the point, Mortensen fell in with David Cronenberg, the most unlikely but rewarding step in his career. Who would have thought that Cronenberg (a poet of unease and neurosis) was ready to mine a vein of dark heroism or to find the situations that could leave Mortensen looking like a god of understatement?
A History of Violence
was a modern epic, and Mortensen was unfailingly authentic as the smalltown diner owner, the sexy husband, and the resigned angel of death. After that, Nikolai in
Eastern Promises
was child’s play, yet so exciting onscreen that we are left anxiously ready for his next adventure with Cronenberg.

Still, the most awaited thing from Mortensen was his central figure, the Father, in the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road
(09, John Hillcoat). Once upon a time in the movies, we expected the stars of action-adventure films to bring moral and physical commitment together in moments of crisis. Today, very few can make that delivery or do it with the lucidity that is Viggo Mortensen’s to command. Nominated for
A History of Violence
, he needs one tragic heroic role to win his Oscar. He is an actor who demands to be seen, a grown man in an era of lost boys.

Samantha Morton
, b. Nottingham, England, 1977
When she was only twenty, Samantha Morton played three big parts in British television raids on literature: Harriet Smith in
Emma
(97, Diarmuid Lawrence);
Jane Eyre
(97, Robert Young); and Sophia Western in
The History of Tom Jones
(97, Metin Hüseyin). In the few years since, she has demonstrated an ability to look like everything from a zombie replicant to a pretty little thing from the 1930s to a very modern young woman. Her choices are adventurous and it’s quite clear now that she is one of the best English-speaking actresses around, so plain and still on first sight, so rich in discovery.

She was trained to be a television actress, but by now the big screen has her attention—and ours:
Under the Skin
(97, Carine Adler);
This Is the Sea
(98, Mary McGuckian); getting an Oscar nomination as the mute in
Sweet and Lowdown
(99, Woody Allen);
Jesus’ Son
(99, Alison Maclean);
Dreaming of Joseph Lees
(99, Eric Styles);
The Last Yellow
(99, Julian Farino); as Sara Coleridge in
Pandaemonium
(00, Julien Temple);
Eden
(01, Amos Gitai); at her best yet in
Morvern Callar
(02, Lynne Ramsay);
Minority Report
(02, Steven Spielberg);
In America
(03, Jim Sheridan);
Code 46
(03, Michael Winterbottom);
Enduring Love
(04, Roger Michell).

In the last few years, Morton has done nothing to lose her reputation for audacity and brilliance:
River Queen
(05, Vincent Ward);
The Libertine
(05, Laurence Dunsmore);
Lassie
(06, Charles Sturridge); as Myra Hindley in
Longford
(06, Tom Hooper), so clever, so wicked, so infernal—you wonder if the actress deserves life imprisonment. She was in
Expired
(07, Cecilia Miniucchi); as the widow of Ian Curtis in
Control
(07, Anton Corbijn);
Mister Lonely
(07, Korine); the greatest ever Mary Queen of Scots in
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
(07, Shekhar Kapur)—Blanchett is a KO victim;
Synecdoche, New York
(08, Charlie Kaufman);
The Daisy Chain
(08, Ainsley Walsh);
The Messenger
(09, Oren Moverman).

Armin Mueller-Stahl
, b. Tilsit, Germany, 1930
Very soon after 1945, Tilsit was renamed Sovetsk, a city in the Soviet Union. Thus, Armin Mueller-Stahl was raised as an East German and did not move to the West until about 1980. If we did not know that, would we notice or feel the smothered past and the years spent under tyranny in a film like
Music Box
(89, Costa-Gavras) in the same way? Or is it simply that Mueller-Stahl is among the world’s great actors, as well as the stoic bearer of a mustache that is like the stamp of guilt or doom? Let us just say that he seems to have a deeper and more shaming sense of compromise than actors born in greater freedom.

On the way to becoming an actor, Mueller-Stahl studied hard as a violinist and played in concerts in his late teens. But by 1956, he was a young romantic lead onstage who soon started making films:
Die Letzte Chance
(60, Hans-Joachim Kasperik);
Königskinder
(62, Frank Beyer);
Christine
(63, Slatan Dudow);
Nackt unter Wölfen
(63, Beyer);
Columbus 64
(66, Ulrich Thein);
Die Dritte
(72, Egon Gunther).

By then, he was protesting the restrictions behind the Iron Curtain and he was blacklisted. And so, by the end of the 1970s, he crossed over to the West:
Kit & Co
(74, Konrad Pretzold);
Jacob the Liar
(75, Beyer);
Die Flucht
(77, Roland Graf);
Geschlossene Gesellschaft
(78, Beyer). Once in west Berlin he made
Lola
(81, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and began to acquire worldwide recognition:
Veronika Voss
(82, Fassbinder);
Trauma
(83, Gabi Kubasc);
Viadukt
(83, Sandor Simo);
Un Dimanche de Flic
(83, Michel Vianey);
L’Homme Blessé
(83, Patrice Chereau);
A Love in Germany
(83, Andrzej Wajda);
Rita Ritter
(84, Herbert Achternbusch);
Colonel Redl
(85, Istvan Szabo);
Vergesst Mozart
(85, Miroslav Luther);
Angry Harvest
(85, Agnieszka Holland).