Arts & Culture
Will Hollywood's blokes please stand up?
Published 07 November 2005
With the absence of good old-fashioned heroes to provide the cliff-hangers and clinches, Hollywood has started outsourcing its parts for "proper" men to hunks from Australia, Britain and Ireland
Twenty-five years ago, aged 50, Steve McQueen finally succumbed to lung cancer on 7 November. One of the best-loved movie stars of his generation - "girls wanted to sleep with him and men wanted to be him" went the oft-quoted line - McQueen oozed debonair 1960s style and timeless raw machismo in equal measure. For a 15-year period, the actor successfully pursued a series of record-breaking pay days as aggressively as he added to his collection of motorcycles, fast cars and glamorous women.
When fans raise a tumbler to McQueen this week, they might also lament Hollywood's current inability to reproduce such old-fashioned facets of maleness. Other "men's men" might have glowered across 30-foot screens since McQueen's early demise - Jack Nicholson, for instance, Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford - but the image of the next generation of A-listers owes far more to (Mario) Testino than testosterone.
Consider Tom Cruise, the world's biggest movie star. Prior to his recent sofa-bouncing meltdown, Cruise had always appeared far too controlled to display signs of humanity, let alone rugged individuality. Equally eerily, for a leading man, Cruise has consistently appeared asexual in films, failing to summon up any on-screen chemistry with his leading ladies on the rare occasions that his characters have been fitted out with love interests.
Or examine the perennially adolescent persona of Cruise's nearest box office challenger, Will Smith: petulance alternated with braggadocio. Smith clearly is agreeable to many in a light comedy, but he too has neither managed to convey menace or sexuality convincingly and, with the exception of the biopic Ali - appropriately enough - he has never attempted to punch above his weight.
Pausing briefly to note Matt Damon - who as amnesiatic secret agent Jason Bourne, has the perpetual demeanour of a student who mislaid his dissertation - we come to Johnny Depp, who has stretched his pale, skinny androgynous teen incarnation into his forties. When Depp played a pirate, for God's sake, it was as camp and quirky as his depictions of Ed Wood, Willy Wonka and his most famous man-child, Edward Scissorhands.
Indeed, youth has become so prized a commodity in US society that when Hollywood throws up George Clooney, an actual romantic leading man who doesn't look as if he mimes in a boy band or hawks a skateboard line, he is described as a throwback to the days of Clark Gable. No wonder Leonardo DiCaprio keeps going for those roles in which his characters age significantly.
It would be logical to reason that the present perception of masculinity and maturity within American culture has been shaped by the baby-boomers now running the Hollywood studios. After all, the 50-year-old males still squeezing into tight, ripped jeans want to see hipper, younger versions of themselves on the screen. But Hollywood still occasionally needs to enlist old-fashioned masculinity - the sort of aura that a personal trainer cannot bestow alone. In the absence of local candidates, the studios increasingly outsource their old-style movie stars.
It was Britain's Daniel Day-Lewis, who played Hawkeye in that most American of stories, The Last of the Mohicans, and who was so fearsome as the unreconstructed Bill "The Butcher" in Gangs of New York. Another Brit, Christian Bale, played the materialism-driven monster in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, as well as that all-American cultural icon, Batman. And it was Australia's Russell Crowe who stepped into the ring for both Gladiator and Cinderella Man, picking up the mantle of butch bruiser from his fellow countryman, Mel Gibson. Meanwhile, their compatriot Hugh Jackman, the gritty hero to John Travolta's smooth baddie in Swordfish, has sewn up the X-Men series. And Pierce Brosnan, born in Drogheda, County Louth, nabbed the McQueen role in The Thomas Crown Affair remake.
Currently, the spotlight is shared between Britain's Clive Owen and Colin Farrell, who between them are attached to a dozen upcoming Hollywood films. Poised to join them on the hunk A-list is Daniel Craig, who stars in Steven Spielberg's forthcoming terrorism drama Munich, and who has just been anointed as the new James Bond. Unsurprisingly, Owen and Farrell were both also considered to play the role whose original incumbent, Sean Connery, still tops the charts when male moviegoers are asked who they would most like to be.
So where is the Hollywood "bloke"? Among those perplexed at why the next generation of Real Men has not materialised in Tinseltown is the Oscar-winning director Ron Howard. He suggests that the last convincing all-American leading man is Tom Hanks, whom he first directed 20 years ago in Splash, again a decade later in Apollo 13, and with whom he is currently making The Da Vinci Code. When that film is released next spring, Hanks will be pushing 50.
"I think it is hard to convince audiences of a movie star's authenticity, of his pureness, these days," Howard ventures. "Everything in America, including personalities, is so packaged and homo- genised that we now have to turn to outsiders to offer something fresh and raw and real. They are more credible as characters because we haven't been reading about their private lives and careers since they were eight years old. Russell Crowe, [whom Howard directed in Cinderella Man and A Beautiful Mind] is the real deal, but I really cannot think of an American equivalent."
Howard's long-time producing partner Brian Grazer, who has just overseen the upcoming heist drama Inside Man starring Owen, offers Brad Pitt as the leading old-style American movie star. "But I guess he is the only one." Interestingly, Pitt sabotaged his expensive dentistry in preparation for Fight Club, and has routinely hidden his paper-cutter cheekbones behind facial hair arrangements throughout his thirties, in a concerted effort to look less callow in films and more interesting at premieres.
While a disarming absence of orthodontia is undoubtedly one of the reasons that foreign leading men are winning the day, a bigger asset is their willingness to play characters from a less complicated era, because they are not hostage to political correctness in the way American stars are. In Farrell's breakout films Minority Report and Phone Booth, he played morally ambiguous characters. In the former, he risks Tom Cruise's life to advance his own career; in the latter, he calls his girlfriend from the titular booth so his adoring wife can't trace the call. And if that sort of behaviour wasn't potentially off-putting enough to most Americans, his character is a slick New York publicist. Meanwhile, in Owen's two breakout films, Closer and Sin City, his characters were sleazy and amoral; in the former he is an adulterous cybermasturbator; in the latter he plays a cop killer.
And that's the real rub. If there is anything valued in homogenised American popular culture above youth, it is an untainted commodity. This is why many home-grown actors are stepping on to a conveyor belt that takes apple-cheeked teenagers straight from high-school TV drama to MTV video to Gap ad. And for risk-adverse Hollywood - whose corporate parents now control a far bigger media machine - it makes obvious commercial sense to nurture such androgynous blandness and alienate as few ticket buyers, but also as few magazine subscribers or clothing empires, as possible.
These days, the studios are far more interested in making a fast buck than an enduring legend.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
