Kate & Leopold's Hugh Jackman Just Might Well Be the New Cary Grant
Just when you've given up on the hope that movies will find another leading man as funny, classy and unmistakably masculine as Cary Grant, along comes a guy who just might fit the bill. Australian actor Hugh Jackman, costar of Kate & Leopold, appeared on moviegoers' radar last summer as the adamantium-clawed Wolverine in X-Men?a starmaking part that drew on a grand tradition of brooding, handsome rebels in American pop culture, from James Dean through Paul Newman and, more recently and erratically, Vince Vaughn. Jackman's hard, honest scenes with Anna Paquin's Rogue, Wolverine's little-sister-in-spirit, were the best thing in the movie?the heart of a story that needed more heart. But they didn't overshadow the film's main attraction, Jackman's wounded fury?a quality most great male stars, Grant included, have been required to summon.
Leopold realizes this New York has different immigrant groups, buildings and technological devices from the one he knew, but it runs on the same emotional power sources: greed, pride, curiosity, desire. He's a man who wants to know how life works. Whether in the 19th century or today, he hasn't got every detail figured out, but he grasps the basics, and judging from his consistently honorable behavior, one of his central preoccupations is the question of how one can be independent and successful without treating anyone else badly. In the world of American movies, where bad behavior and deep dysfunction are routinely glorified, a character this kind, strong and honorable is doomed to be written off as ridiculous?but it's precisely those qualities that make him so watchable and so valuable, and that might make the film a hit.
Leopold is consistent in every word he speaks and every action he takes. He believes in being straightforward with everyone, but never rude. He bolted from an arranged marriage in the 19th century not because he's a romantic chicken, but because the marriage was all about protecting his family's fortune, and he didn't even like the woman. He takes courtship, love and marriage seriously. "Marriage is a promise of eternal love," he declares. "As a man of honor, I cannot promise eternally what I have never felt momentarily."
Yet he retains a certain romantic optimism. He sees through the destructive, fashionable idea that women are only attracted to insensitive, abusive stud types; he's the sort of man who stands up when women enter the room and declares his intentions in handwritten letters?the kind of man who's been largely lost in our rush toward so-called modernity, to society's detriment. Best of all, like a Grant hero, you can never quite tell if Leopold knows full well how sexy he is, or if he has no clue. Everything about Leopold is a contrivance, yet Jackman (and, I'm assuming, director James Mangold) insists on giving him a certain opacity and hardness?a bit of mystery. The mystery makes you believe in Leopold even if you don't like the movie.
Ryan's character, Kate McKay, is nowhere near as interesting?and not just because Leopold gets to do the fun stuff, like planning a Goodbye Girl-style rooftop dinner for two and thwarting a purse-snatching by commandeering a police horse and running down the perp in Central Park. Kate's a Sex and the City type?a yuppie professional who's been living the single life for so long that it's made her distrust nearly everyone. She works for a marketing research company that specializes in "making boring movies shorter." (The filmmakers clearly meant this as a jab at the major studios' reliance on test screenings, but it's never wise to include lines that can be used against you by smartass critics; reportedly, a key subplot was cut a couple weeks before the film's release.) Kate's a variation on disappointed-in-love types that Ryan has played many times before; from one Ryan film to the next, the setting, the wardrobes and the plots change, but Ryan's slightly bruised optimism remains, without enough variation to make it interesting. (Her most original recent acting was in the action drama Proof of Life, as the anguished wife of David Morse's kidnapped engineer who fell for Russell Crowe's hostage negotiator but kept the relationship platonic, out of respect for the negotiator, her husband and herself.)
You can understand why Kate would ultimately admit her attraction to Leopold?hell, there are dead women, and a number of dead men, who'd crawl out of their graves for a shot at this guy?but Leopold's attraction to Kate is rather baffling. Their love for each other is a plot requirement, just like Kate's cynical resistance to Leopold's charms, the 11th-hour misunderstanding that threatens to keep them apart and Kate's recruitment of Leopold to act as a pitchman in ads for a loathsome brand of margarine he's never tasted. (This last bit is a rare instance where Leopold behaves inconsistently and unethically.) I couldn't enjoy the movie unless I first decided not to think about the fact that Leopold could probably find a better romantic match during any random stroll around the block.
It all works anyway?at least, it works if you like this kind of movie; if you don't, you'll be in hell. Kate & Leopold is a messily assembled but intelligent film?more intelligent than you've heard. The script, cowritten by Steven Rogers and director Mangold (Girl, Interrupted), makes a refreshingly passionate argument that it's in everyone's self-interest to conduct oneself with integrity even if there's no immediate reward in doing so. Mangold, whose dazzling 1995 debut, Heavy, concerned an overweight, emotionally damaged fry cook (Pruitt Taylor Vince) who barely spoke a word onscreen throughout the story's first half, seems more polished and less exciting with each new outing; Cop Land had too many characters, too much acting and no real point, and Girl, Interrupted was rather safe and dull unless Angelina Jolie was onscreen, doing her Jack-Nicholson-as-a-buxom-badgirl number.
In Kate & Leopold, there's no filmmaking excitement to speak of; cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh's framing and camera movements are competent and professional, but not terribly inventive; Mark Friedberg's production design is dense and detailed but nowhere near as magical as it should have been; Mangold's failure to make proper use of Liev Schreiber, whose frantic, beefy slapstick gyrations suggest Burt Lancaster crossed with Danny Kaye, is beyond puzzling. Still, I liked the film, mainly because I liked Leopold and all the thought that went into his creation. Critics will likely dismiss the movie as a trifle, just as they dismiss most films that concern themselves with love and courtship rather than male angst and violence. In doing so, they'll dismiss the movie's quietly revolutionary message: that it's better to be considerate than selfish, and that decency is sexy.
Framed
It's the end of the year, so it must be time for another awards-baiting prestige production from Miramax, directed by Lasse Hallstrom. I like Hallstrom quite a bit?his 1987 breakthrough My Life as a Dog was outstanding, and his 1991 domestic comedy Once Around was one of that decade's most underrated comedies?but this melancholy widescreen you laugh/you cry thing hardened into formula long ago, and no amount of heartfelt storytelling or skillful acting can make it seem fresh again.
This time, he's working with good material?E. Annie Proulx's novel The Shipping News. It's about a widowed, misfit Irish-American typesetter named Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) who relocates to his family's ancestral seaside house in Newfoundland with his troubled daughter, reinventing himself as a newspaper columnist, finding love with a supposedly widowed local woman (Julianne Moore) and learning about his family's troubled past. Proulx is precious, and movies thrive on preciousness; she has heart, and movies love heart. The Shipping News is far superior to Hallstrom's previous two efforts, the machine-tooled, fake-arthouse movie Chocolat and the solemn John Irving adaptation The Cider House Rules. But in a desire to cram as much of the book into the film as possible, Hallstrom and screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs skim over episodes that might have been powerful if they'd been probed a bit more deeply. "Episodes" is the word, unfortunately; like the comedy-dramas of James L. Brooks, The Shipping News fails to develop what's known as a through-line, so the chapters unfold one after another, without much connective tissue, like installments in a better-than-average tv drama.
Despite a miscast Cate Blanchett as Spacey's slutty wife Petal (her makeup job suggests Fran Drescher left out in the rain) and dull Cinemascope photography that seems too aware that the real money is in home video, the result is never less than watchable, and Spacey, whose rotten choices recently suggest that he can't decide whether to rip off Jack Nicholson or Robin Williams, is mostly terrific, rolling his voice up into his head, slumping his shoulders and delivering the most exciting passive character in recent memory. It's not great, not bad; it is what it is. When it's done, you can congratulate yourself on having seen a very respectable piece of work.
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Special Citation: To Jackpot, Session 9 and The Anniversary Party, which strove, imperfectly but honorably, to transform so-called digital cinema from a technological gimmick into a means of artistic expression.