The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (305 page)

He played himself in
Grosse Fatigue
(94, Michel Blanc); D’Artagnan in
La Fille d’Artagnan
(94, Tavernier); a huge international hit with
Il Postino
(94, Michael Radford);
Les Milles
(94, Sebastien Grall);
Le Roi de Paris
(95, Dominique Maillet);
Facciamo Paradiso
(95, Monicelli);
Les Grands Ducs
(96, Leconte);
Fantôme avec Chauffeur
(96, Gerard Oury);
La Veilleur de Nuit
(96, de Broca);
Marianna Ucrìa
(96, Roberto Faenza);
Les Palmes de M. Schutz
(97, Claude Pinoteau);
Soleil
(97, Roger Hanin); as Philippe d’Orléans in
Le Bossu
(97, de Broca);
Le Pique-nique de Lulu Kreutz
(00, Didier Martiny);
Un Honnête Commerçant
(02, Philippe Blasbard);
Ripoux 3
(03, Zidi);
Les Côtelettes
(03, Bertrand Blier);
Péru et Fils
(03, Michel Boujenah);
Edy
(05, Stéphan Guérin-Tillié);
Trois Amis
(07, Boujenah).

Christopher Nolan
, b. London, 1970
1998:
Following
. 2000:
Memento
. 2002:
Insomnia
. 2005:
Batman Begins
. 2006:
The Prestige
. 2008:
The Dark Knight
. 2010:
Inception
.

At what point in this very inventive career would one want to see Nolan taking up an invitation to make the next Batman film? At the time of
Memento
—which was a considerable hit among American avant-garde moviegoers—I think that destination would have been regarded as a sellout and a horrible waste of Nolan’s intellectual playfulness and the chance that it was about to open up new attitudes to film narrative. Will he be allowed that freedom with
Batman 5?
Time will tell. Meanwhile, without meaning to be crushing, I have to say that his work has already become progressively less interesting.

A keen home moviemaker in his teens, Nolan went to University College, London, where he studied English. He made his first feature at weekends, on 16 mm, in black-and-white and very cheaply. For this viewer, its interfolding of the crime genre with schemes of identity is the cleanest and most amused and stimulating of his three pictures. It’s as if Edgar Ulmer had met Jacques Rivette—and following may also be a sign that Nolan needs the English setting for his deadpan connections to work best.

Memento
was set in America, in color, and with minor stars (Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano). But this time the loom of “art film” was aggressive and daunting. The playfulness was flat-out difficult—which raises a fascinating question: is there any room for difficulty at the movies, or is it a measure of the medium’s limits (or glory) that the complex has to be made immediate? Still,
Memento
is a lot more worthwhile than
Insomnia
(taken from a Scandinavian film), which is nearly as implausible as it is depressing and routine. The ponderous presence of Al Pacino and Robin Williams “acting” may be an alarming portent of where
Batman 5
will lead Nolan. I suspect that his future will find a way to guide him back to modesty and limitation. He has the cunning (just like Ulmer) that needs those restrictions.

Alas, Nolan’s pictures have grown very large, and portentous.
Batman Begins
impressed some as gravity meeting blockbuster, and a few people alleged that
The Dark Knight
was a major modern
Metropolis
. But so is
Metropolis
(still!), as well as very silly.
The Prestige
, it seems to me, is a work of striving and self-importance. Nolan has a dark vision, but the pictures carry no pain.

Nick Nolte
, b. Omaha, Nebraska, 1941
The life of Nick Nolte is a good deal more interesting than many of his roles. Yet it deepens our appreciation of someone who has grown to be America’s most elemental actor, the only person around who challenges the immersion in work of Marlon Brando. Nolte is said to be the smallest full-grown male his family has known. He learned to read only as an adult. In 1962 he received a suspended jail sentence of forty-five years for selling draft cards. He bummed around from college to college in the Southwest simply in order to play football. And he was truly raised in Iowa and Nebraska—Brando country. He was also thirty-five (looking a dozen years younger) before he got his break in the TV miniseries
Rich Man, Poor Man
(76, David Greene and Boris Sagal).

For years thereafter, Nolte was somewhere between rugged, dumb, or brutal on screen. And it is only in the last few years that the rather bewildered, forceful presence has begun to reveal complicated talents. Consider, in
Rich Man, Poor Man
, Nolte was already several years older than Tom Cruise is in
Jerry Maguire
. When we favor kid actors we risk getting immature stories. But if actors are to find courage and wisdom, they need years of work and the chance to outlive our prejudices. In that sense, Nolte is to be compared with Robert Mitchum.

After his TV success, he was a hunk in
The Deep
(77, Peter Yates); Ray Hicks in
Who’ll Stop the Rain
(78, Karel Reisz)—very good, but far too subtle then for public recognition; a footballer in
North Dallas Forty
(79, Ted Kotcheff); and Neal Cassady in the very arty
Heartbeat
(80, John Byrum).

He made a commercial impact with Eddie Murphy in
48 Hrs
. (82, Walter Hill), and then he was a very nice, shambling “Doc” in
Cannery Row
(82, David S. Ward). Despite their onscreen rapport, his costar in that film, Debra Winger, has said she never knew whether Nolte’s personality was courageous or just stupid.

He was slipping with
Under Fire
(83, Roger Spottiswoode),
Teachers
(84, Arthur Hiller), and
The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley
(85, Anthony Harvey). Recovery appeared in the form of his Boudu reincarnation in
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
(86, Paul Mazursky), his first chance to play comedy. He suffered through poor films, and macho attitudes:
Extreme Prejudice
(87, Hill);
Weeds
(87, John Hancock);
Three Fugitives
(89, Francis Veber);
Farewell to the King
(89, John Milius); and
Everybody Wins
(90, Reisz).

Then he was cast as the painter in
New York Stories
(89, Martin Scorsese), and in half an hour he showed us a talented man confused by love and romance, by work and growing old. Better still was his cop in
Q & A
(90, Sidney Lumet), one of the great modern performances in American film, a kind of latter-day Hank Quinlan, a muddle of insight and bigotry. All of a sudden one had to see the growth that had occurred.

Another 48 Hrs
. (90, Hill) was honestly titled. But in 1991, Nolte delivered two extraordinarily skillful and touching performances—as the central figure in
The Prince of Tides
(91, Barbra Streisand) and as the trim, soulless lawyer in
Cape Fear
(91, Martin Scorsese). The latter was the real redeeming feature of a disappointing picture: some spectators may have been dazzled by De Niro’s creation of lurid evil, but Nolte was all the while delivering a small masterpiece about ordinary compromise. In
Lorenzo’s Oil
(92, George Miller), he was as evidently Italian as Brando had been twenty years earlier.

Nolte is a subject for rejoicing and great hope. For we face the next decades with at least one actor capable of playing large, mature, but deeply troubled men. This actor carries his wounds, his talent, his past mistakes, and his urgent promise like a man trying to tidy up—there is something of Norman Mailer about him. But he deserves better than
I’ll Do Anything
(94, James L. Brooks),
Blue Chips
(94, William Friedkin), or
I Love Trouble
(94, Charles Shyer).

But he moved, profitably, towards drama and more adventurous choices: a fascinating
Jefferson in Paris
(95, James Ivory); very good as the lead cop in
Mulholland Falls
(96, Lee Tamahori); doing Kurt Vonnegut in the ambitious
Mother Night
(96, Keith Gordon); romantic in
Afterglow
(97, Alan Rudolph);
U Turn
(97, Oliver Stone); excellent and nominated for
Affliction
(97, Paul Schrader);
Nightwatch
(98, Ole Bornedal); one of the few emerging with credit from
The Thin Red Line
(98, Terrence Malick); Vonnegut again in
Breakfast of Champions
(99, Rudolph);
Simpatico
(99, Matthew Warchus); Adam Verver in
The Golden Bowl
(00, Ivory);
Trixie
(00, Rudolph):
Investigating Sex
(01, Rudolph);
The Good Thief
(02, Neil Jordan);
Northfork
(03, Michael Polish);
The Hulk
(03, Ang Lee);
Beautiful Country
(04, Hans Petter Moland);
Clean
(04, Olivier Assayas).

He has become more rarefied, slipping down the cast list quite often, working overseas, and backing new directors. Just as surely, a cult has grown up, that sometimes helps carry Nolte into mystifying depths and strange currents:
Hotel Rwanda
(04, Terry George);
Neverwas
(05, Joshua Michael Stern);
Off the Black
(06, James Ponsoldt); in an episode from
Paris Je T’Aime
(06, Alfonso Cuarón);
Quelques Jours en Septembre
(06, Santiago Amigorena);
Peaceful Warrior
(06, Victor Salva);
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
(08, Rawson Marshall Thurber);
The Spiderwick Chronicles
(08, Mark Waters);
Tropic Thunder
(08, Ben Stiller);
Arcadia Lost
(09, Phedon Papamichael).

However, for the true Nolteist, the film to see is a documentary,
Nick Nolte: No Exit
(08, Tom Thurman), in which Nolte cross-examines himself (a superb idea—I know, because I had it), and which lets the majestic roguishness of the man spill out.

Mabel Normand
(1894–1930), b. Boston, Massachusetts
“Mabel” was the sweet young thing at the Keystone studio, the pretty, dark girl with lively eyes who loved diving into pools and who thrilled the hearts of Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle in the early years of the First World War. A contemporary of Mary Pickford and the Gish sisters, she was one of the first proofs that a good-looking girl with charm and a sense of fun could succeed in the movies without any special pretense to acting. The Keystone setup helped to make her seem the more charming—as Chaplin put it, beauty among the beasts.

She was a model before joining Griffith at Biograph in 1911. Still only sixteen, she acted several times for him, most notably in
The Squaw’s Love
(11), in which she did a back flip into a river first take. But it was Mack Sennett who used her most at Biograph, as the female attraction in comedy shorts. When Sennett left Biograph to form Keystone in 1912, Mabel went with him to even greater prominence. She remained with Sennett until 1917; she depended on his advice, and she was his girl. As well as appearing in over a hundred shorts directed by him, she had gone as far as directing herself by 1914, when still only twenty:
Mabel’s Stormy Love Affair; Mabel’s Bare Escape; Mabel’s Nerve; Mabel’s New Job; Mabel’s Latest Prank; Mabel’s Blunder;
and
Mabel at the Wheel
. It was on this last that she and Chaplin fell out, in a way that suggests a lot about work at Keystone, as well as their different attitudes to film. This account of it, by Chaplin, also suggests that he knew his Lumière:

Now I was anxious to write and direct my own comedies, so I talked to Sennett about it. But he would not hear of it; instead he assigned me to Mabel Normand who had just started directing her own pictures. This nettled me, for, charming as Mabel was, I doubted her competence as a director; so the first day there came the inevitable blow-up. We were on location in the suburbs of Los Angeles and in one scene Mabel wanted me to stand with a hose and water down the road so that the villain’s car would skid over it. I suggested standing on the hose so that the water can’t come out, and when I look down the nozzle I unconsciously step off the hose and the water squirts in my face. But she shut me up quickly: “We have no time! We have no time! Do what you’re told.”

That was enough, I could not take it—and from such a pretty girl. “I’m sorry, Miss Normand, I will not do what I’m told. I don’t think you are competent to tell me about what to do.”

Mabel seems to have held no grudge. Before Chaplin moved on, they worked together several times—
Mabel’s Strange Predicament
(14, Sennett and Henry Lehrmann);
Mabel’s Busy Day
(14);
Mabel’s Married Life
(14);
The Fatal Mallet
(14);
Caught in a Cabaret
(14);
Her Friend the Bandit
(14);
Gentlemen of Nerve
(14);
His Trysting Place
(14);
Getting Acquainted
(14); and
Tillie’s Punctured Romance
(14, Sennett). Her new partner was Fatty Arbuckle and she worked with him for most of 1915:
Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day; Fatty and Mabel’s Simple Life; Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition; Mabel, Fatty and the Law
—foreboding title;
Mabel and Fatty’s Married Life; That Little Band of Gold; Fatty’s Tintype Tangle
—all directed by Arbuckle; and
Mabel’s Wilful Way
and
Mabel Lost and Won
, both directed by Mabel herself.