August 02, 2001
Jimmy, we hardly knew you.
Despite fine intentions, TNT's new Dean biopic doesn't get us much closer.
by Rob Kendt
Now that we can look back on the 20th century in its entirety, its
icons seem ever more distant, preserved in the amber of collective rather than
firsthand memory, even as its dominant motifs, having logged the necessary
half-life of hindsight, begin to acquire the clarity of posterity. We can think
of it as the American century, or a century of the cinema. Or, without
excluding either of these, we could call it the Century of the Actor, since
actors, particularly American movie actors, are the most recognizable currency
of the ascendant international media culture--the faces on its bills, if you
will.
It was an actors' century in other, more earthbound ways, too:
Actors professionalized themselves for the first time, forming guilds and
training institutions, codifying methods and "schools," and
commanding salaries exceeding those paid to heads of state. While in the
previous century an actor killed the president, in the 20th, an actor became
president.
Hovering beatifically at the center of this actor's century is
James Dean, the 1950s youth anti-hero struck down fatefully in his prime, who
remains arguably the most durably iconic actor to have graced the world's movie
screens--and related merchandising. Indeed, a handful of famous Dean
photographs have been reproduced ad nauseum on every conceivable collectible
tchotchke, from shot glasses to license plates, so that these images--of Dean
in the red jacket and jeans, kicking back in an open car in his cowboy hat, or
in the turtleneck and white jacket--are a sort of shorthand for "movie
star," rivaled only by visages of Marilyn Monroe.
In fact, today Dean may be more widely known for these still
photographs than for his films, of which there were but three (and none,
besides perhaps East of Eden, are particularly great films but for
Dean's presence). The culture wears him like the medal of a saint whose miracles
have long been forgotten. This benign neglect may begin to be set right by James
Dean, a perfunctory new biopic debuting this week on TNT, with the
talented, understated young James Franco (Freaks and Geeks) in the lead.
Despite Franco's cool, uncloying, very natural impersonation of Dean, it isn't
much of a film, even by TV biopic standards, but it does give us a sketch of
Dean's brief, wild ride to the top, and it strives to give the myth some human
contours.
Strives too hard, I think. Israel Horovitz's script has a
pop-pysch thesis as unsubtle as the Freudian schematics of Dean's two
definitive films, East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause: Dean became
an actor to gain his father's approval, denied him since his mother's death at
age 9, and throughout his career sought surrogate fathers to love or hate, or
both: Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Jack Warner, George Stevens, or the fictional
patriarchs with whom he faced off in Eden and Rebel.
So was Dean's brilliance and immediacy onscreen a case of acting
at all? In recent interviews, this was one question I had for Franco and the
film's director, Mark Rydell, who knew Dean in New York in the 1950s. In a
pivotal scene in the film, Dean spends his audition for Eden talking to
Kazan (Enrico Colantoni) about his own problems with his father. Kazan tells an
associate after Dean leaves the building: "He is Cal."
"I think the hypothesis that the film puts out is that one of
the reasons he was so great was because of the parallel between the parts and
his life," agreed Franco, a 22-year-old from Palo Alto, Calif., who
studied literature at UCLA and acting at Playhouse West in North Hollywood.
"And I think, although the challenge of straying away from ourselves in
parts can be good, I don't think it should be looked down upon or shied away
from that you go for yourself and you play yourself. There's something very
valuable about just bringing the truth of one's self to a part--maybe you won't
have the great range, but you'll bring something deeper."
And Rydell rejected the notion that his Dean film equates
acting with simple one-to-one identification with the part.
"I'm of the conservatory school; I've been teaching at the
Actors Studio for 30 years. I know that acting can be taught. Acting is a craft.
Jimmy studied that craft--savagely studied it," Rydell recalled of the
off-screen Dean. "Yes, he had an individual personality that was
attractive. But when he came to the work, he functioned like a craftsman. He
knew how to work. It's not just Jimmy being Jimmy. It was Jimmy using himself,
like any good craftsman should."
The craft Dean and his predecessors Marlon Brando and Montgomery
Clift brought to the screen in the 1950s did stand out from the studied
professionalism, not to say stiffness, of most Hollywood actors before them.
Indeed, Dean's great contribution to screen acting was not so much
extraordinary technique as an almost frightening aliveness. His palpable,
unsettling life force still jumps, even from a panned-and-scanned small screen.
In East of Eden (1955), Dean doesn't stand or sit still; he's always squirming or
bounding or creeping about, and his habit of interrupting other actors mid-line
has a remorselessly youthful prankishness about it.
"He was well known for being difficult with the blocking and
refusing to be this robotic, cut-out prop," said Franco. "You watch
the other actors and there they are--they're standing in their places and they
have their light and they're saying all the lines. Well, here's James Dean and
he's all over the place. He's using movement as an expression as well, and he's
using the props. Everything is for a greater purpose."
On a craft level, Dean's vitality, which no amount of years in a
film canister can dim, was and remains great and valuable inspiration for
actors. On the career side, though, a more dubious legacy of the Dean mythology
is his legendary meteoric rise to fame. For all the emotional torment he
brought to his work, his career arc seemed to have the shape of, say, falling
off a log.
The new TNT biopic does little to debunk this. We see precious
little struggle or hard work, just a kind of blank determination to reach the
top. He lands a meeting with an agent who wants to give the kid a break, and
announces he won't consider anything but lead roles. He gets into the Actors
Studio first try; we don't see him wrestling with scene work or bolting the
moment Lee Strasberg gives him a critique.
The acting and career part was easy, the film seems to say--it's
life that was hard for James Dean, and of course that was why he was such a
great actor. Most working actors pounding the pavement in Hollywood and New
York know better, but it's a damaging myth for the uninitiated--for those who
would dismiss actors as children acting out and for those who would embark on
an acting career as a youthful lark.
For his part, Franco wasn't lured to Hollywood by the Dean legend.
For his generation, Johnny Depp and River Phoenix were the idols, and even
then, Franco recalled, their world didn't seem accessible to him.
"I didn't have a real clear conception of how you become an
actor," Franco said. "As a child, it seemed like another world.
Certain people are actors and that's just how it is. Then when I got older, it
was almost like I missed the boat or something, you know--in high school, I'm
17, and Buffy's already a star or whatever. Then, I went to UCLA as a
literature major, and once I was in L.A., it became clear to me, Oh, it's a
possibility."
If Dean was driven to act to fill a hole in his personal life, as
the film proposes, does Franco feel a similar lack driving him?
He said that, in playing Dean, "What I decided to go with was
that he needed to fill the loneliness and fill that lack of worth, that lack of
love, and maybe success would do that, maybe adoration by fans would somehow
fulfill that. But also acting is such a wonderful medium of expressing a wide
array of human emotion. With actors, it's a lack of excitement, a need to maybe
experience more than just one life, to live in these imaginary worldsÉ That's
what I found in myself and a lot of the actors around me. It's an overabundance
of life, maybe--always trying to dive into some other world and take other
people and other emotions on, because this one maybe isn't satisfactory."
This lust for life would explain Dean's storied obsessions with
bullfighting, bongos, late-night debauchery--said Rydell, "He drank, he
took drugs, he fucked everybody"--and the fast sports cars with which his
early death is associated. All told, my interviews with Franco and Rydell about
Dean were far more entertaining and illuminating than the film they've made.
It's an irony of Hollywood, or maybe an index of how much it's changed, that so
much more of Dean's fascinating life, more of who he really was, made it into
his fictional films than into this new biopic.
For all its well-appointed design and tasteful performances, TNT's
new Dean movie stands in relation to Dean's work more or less alongside
the paraphernalia sold on Hollywood Boulevard--as a knockoff of the original.