Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 13, 1995 TAG: 9501170010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES CHAMPLIN LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``Immediately after the film was over I hustled the picture out of there,'' Newman remarked a few days ago. ``About four months later I got a note from Altman, saying he'd wanted the picture himself. I said, `Bob, that's the only heroic guy I've ever been seen as, and I made up my mind I was gonna stick that thing up.' ''
It is true that while Newman has always borne a close resemblance to a Greek god, and at the age of 69 still does, he has played an inordinate number of what one writer called ``flawed rakes.'' (``I would take ownership of the phrase,'' Newman says admiringly.)
Newman certainly has been seen as good and perhaps heroic figures. His Rocky Graziano in ``Somebody Up There Likes Me'' in 1956 established him indisputably as a movie star, but most of his good guy roles fade before the lingering luminescence of the rascal or worse he was in, for examples, ``Hud,'' ``Hombre,'' ``The Hustler,'' ``Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,'' ``Sweet Bird of Youth, ``Cool Hand Luke,'' the alcoholic, burnt-out lawyer who finds redemption in ``The Verdict'' and more recently the comically villainous business executive in the Coen brothers' ``The Hudsucker Proxy.''
The paradox is that Newman, more than almost any actor of his long generation, somehow can't help being attractive and sympathetic even when by all that is good and holy he shouldn't be. In ``Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,'' both he and Robert Redford were in the great tradition of lovable rogues, and when their law-breaking pasts caught up with them in a hail of Bolivian gunfire, there was no satisfying sense that justice had been properly done, only a glum regret that there wouldn't be a sequel.
Newman once complained that in one of his nastiest roles, as the callously insensitive Hud, he tried to be as unsympathetic as he could, hoping the audience would leave, as he told an English interviewer, with ``loathing and disgust; instead we created a folk hero.''
In ``Cool Hand Luke'' in 1967, he was the epitome of the '60s anti-hero, free-spirited and defiantly, fatally self-destructive. He was not by definition a tragic figure, yet he invested his prankster with a kind of tragic nobility that heightened the indictment of an oppressive justice system.
Newman is now back again at the business of being a flawed rake in need of redemption in Robert Benton's ``Nobody's Fool,'' set in small-town Upstate New York and based on a novel by Richard Russo.
The film is a kind of socially realistic fable, charming and offbeat, in which Newman plays a construction worker who has abandoned wife and now-grown son, boards with one of his grade-school teachers (Jessica Tandy in her last, fine role), drinks a tad too much, plays cards with his luckless lawyer, flirts a little (avoiding any threat of commitment) and is generally the charming wastrel he ever was.
He likes the film a lot, which is not invariably true of actors contemplating the vehicle in which they have worked. ``It has a human dimension, which is getting to be rare in films these days,'' Newman said, sitting in the barn, which is a few yards from his house and contains a projection room and a small kitchen and is filled with family photographs and mementos of his racing activities.
The film ``has patience, it has courage; it's content to let things unfold in whatever human ways they unfold, without worrying about the clock in the cutting room,'' Newman says, pausing between words, trying, as is his custom, to say just what he means.
``The thrust of the film is the development of the characters. It's about a guy becoming accessible. Where a guy's going to go emotionally is less predictable than when you have a very strong plot line - a man's gotta get the money by a certain time, that kind of thing.''
Jessica Tandy was already ailing with cancer when she made ``Nobody's Fool.'' ``She seemed fragile,'' he says sadly, ``but she was a big presence. There was as always something patrician about her attitude, and she never gave any outward indication of whatever turmoil was going on. She was tranquilizing for all of us.''
On the making of the film: ``I keep thinking nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but it is. I remember when you had a stable of actors at a studio and you started with the first scene, and then you shot the second scene, and then you shot the third scene, and finally on the last day of shooting you shot the last scene.
``Now you shoot the last scene the week after you've started, and people get shuffled in and out because they've only got nine days and everything is out of sequence. And how the film comes together in some semblance of emotional buildup is something of a puzzle. You go on instinct a lot. You take the plan, the script, and eliminate the organization and maybe it works better that way.''
The miracle of good film acting is that, even when it is done in sequence, as it almost never is any more, the performance is a mosaic of very small shards, most only a few seconds long. Yet if it works, the portrayal not only has a beginning, a middle and an end (ideally of rising interest and impact), it also has a naturalness and a seeming spontaneity that never suggests an actor has been acting.
Newman, trudging through the snow in the fictional North Bath, N.Y. (actually Beacon, N.Y., near the Hudson River), is indubitably Paul Newman, and a welcome sight, too; but he has become Sully Sullivan, a man with a troubled past and a problematic future which are all Sullivan's. The actor's identity, although not his presence, has disappeared within the creation. The process is what makes superstars, and Newman, who has been at it for 40 years, remains one of the handful.
by CNB