One of the sadder notes to come out of Hollywood last week was that Bruce Willis was ending his movie career because of his diagnosis of aphasia, a disease that affects the brain’s ability to speak and use the right words usually associated with the after effects of strokes.
This mark’s the end of one of the most successful careers in Hollywood. Willis’ has been considered the quintessential action hero for his work in the Die Hard franchise that it is easy to forget his career not only shown far more range than that, it also began in television. In fact, there’s an argument TV showed Willis’ best range as an actor – he certainly got more recognition for it. So in this series of articles I’m going to pay tribute to Willis: his career in TV, his work in certain films that showed a wider range than most people gave him credit for and the failures in his career that may have curtailed him from getting the true recognition he deserved.
Willis’ is associated with movies that it’s easy to forget that, like so many movie stars of the 1980s and 1990s; he began his work in television. I was actually astonished watching an episode of the 1980s reimagining of The Twilight Zone to see playing the lead role in Harlan Ellison’s adaptation of his own short story ‘Shatterday.’ Willis plays two versions of Peter, a milquetoast who can’t do anything right and a more direct version who, over the course of a week, takes over his life. Most of their interactions come through phone conversations between the two Peters, with subtle differences as one asserts control and indeed most of the episode focuses entire on Willis. It’s rather remarkable seeing how fine the control of his emotions.
Willis then became the star of one of the great series of the 1980s one that really pushed the boundaries of broadcast television and is almost completely forgotten, save for the controversies around it: Moonlighting. Willis played David Addison, part of a detective agency along with Maddie Hayes (Cybil Shephard) More remembered for the behind the scenes conflicts involving Shephard more than anything, it was one of the boldest and imaginative series of the time. Frequently breaking the fourth wall, it went beyond a procedural to try thing few TV series have done before or since: they did one legendary episode entirely in the style of Shakespearean blank verse. And all the actors involved received high praise: Willis won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his work over the years. But because of all the struggles that happened, and how the series jumped the shark after its lead characters gave in to the sexual tension between them, the show collapsed nearly as quickly as it rose. And it is more talked about it then it is seen: like so many other shows from that decade, like China Beach and L.A. Law, it was never released into streaming, hasn’t been in syndication for decades, and while released on DVD twenty years ago, they are almost impossible to find anywhere. I’m still trying to track down a set on Ebay.
Willis actually bookended that Emmy with another one for Best Guest Actor in a Comedy in 2000, when he guest starred on Friends. He was not alone on the list of huge movie stars who appeared on the series over its run – Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon and of course Brad Pitt all made cameos, but he stayed longer than most and used far more of his abilities.
Willis plays the father of a student that Ross has started to date. In Willis’ first appearance, Ross (David Schwimmer) is clearly utterly intimidated not just because he’s dating his daughter but because, well, he’s Bruce Willis. Willis’ says very few lines in their first meeting, but he doesn’t have to because his sheer presence forcing Ross to make an utter fool of himself no matter what he says. One exchange I remember as Ross tries to make a joy:
Ross: “There are these two guys. One of them is Irish.
Willis: “I’m Irish.”
Ross: “And the Irish guy wins the joke!”
Because this is Friends Willis eventually starts dating Rachel. Should we be creeped by this? It’s Bruce Willis, you can’t blame her.
Friends did something it hadn’t done for Willis for a very long time: it allowed him to just be silly. There’s a wonderful sequence in his arc where Willis, who is preparing to have sex with Rachel, stands before a full-sized mirror and starts singing ‘Love Machine’ and dancing ridiculously. This is one of the few segments of Friends I truly remember liking at the time and even more than two decades later, and it’s really all because of Willis.
Willis was such a big box office draw and appeared in so many action movies over his career that it would be easy – too easy, in fact – to just dismiss him as a one note wonder. But as so many of us forget, Willis actually did start in two Best Picture nominees that have since been deservedly ranked among the greatest films in history: Pulp Fiction in 1994 and The Sixth Sense in 1999. There were actually two films close to both of these classics that I also value highly and will discuss as they add to Willis’ range as an actor.
Willis never gets the credit that so many of the other actors in Pulp Fiction do for making it part of the Zeitgeist. Most of the glory is given, understandably, to John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, and actors with smaller roles like Eric Stoltz and Harvey Keitel. I believe this is primarily because unlike almost every other character in the film – and indeed, pretty much all of Tarantino’s work, his character has very little dialogue. And because Tarantino’s films are all about the dialogue, Willis’ work gets lost. But it is worth noting that some of the best scenes in the film work entirely just by what he does and what little he says.
Consider the scene where Butch is sneaking into his apartment to find his father’s watch. There’s a long tracking shot which follows Willis from his car, through the yard, up the staircase and into the apartment. He finds his watch, pauses, puts a toaster pastry in the toaster, and then he sees the machine gun. We hear the toilet flush. Willis takes the gun and points it at his bathroom door. Vincent steps out. The two just look at each other for a long moment, and the audience remembers the other encounter they had where Vincent called Butch ‘a palooka’. The pastry pops up. At that instant, Butch squeezes the trigger. He goes into the bathroom to assure himself Vincent is dead. The smoke detector goes off. He puts the gun down, pauses, wipes off the butt, and walks back out through the window. It is not until he is back in his car, driving away with the radio on that he finally speaks: “That’s how you’re gonna beat ‘em, Butch. They’ll keep on underestimating you.”
The entire passage takes place over nearly five minutes – the longest stretch in the movie with no dialogue. The scene tends to get ignored because of what follows…less than a minute later, Butch encounters Marcellus Wallace in the street, coming back with coffee and doughnuts. The scenes that follow are such part of cinema lore – the man in uniforms, the Gimp and the unthinkable thing that Wallace undergoes – that we tend to forget that Butch ran Wallace over, and very nearly killed him. His subsequent escape and decision to save Marcellus from his fate – another scene that is done with no dialogue – is also remarkable because there’s no reason for him to change his mind. Could another actor have done this as well? Possibly. But there are few who could have expressed so much without having to say anything.
That same year Willis started in another small film, Nobody’s Fool. The film centers on Paul Newman in one of his greatest performances as Sully, a sixty year old repairman with no luck in his life, who has family he never sees and who lives in the house with his grade school teacher (Jessica Tandy’s final role). A superb and gentle comedy, the movie featured several other good actors in small roles including Melanie Griffith (I’ll get back to her in a minute) Philip Seymour Hoffman in an early role, and fine character actors like Pruitt Taylor Vince and Philip Bosco. Once again, Willis’ work was underestimated.
Willis plays Sully’s major rival in this small town, a man who he is engaged in a back and forth pissing contest over the possession of a truck and, somewhat less significantly, Willis’ wife Toby (Griffith) who Willis doesn’t seem to care about and who Sully has been flirting with for years. (Would a thirty-ish woman really be attracted to a sixty year old man? If he’s Paul Newman, yes.) You get the feeling that these two men can only express their feelings for each other by ripping on the other. There are some friendships like that. At the climax of the movie, Toby finally announcing she’s leaving Willis’ character and going to Florida and asks Sully to come with her. Willis’ character is hostile and the two leave at gunpoint. Sully takes her to her car and as she goes in, he stops. He tells her until a few days he could, and in a line of dialogue I’ve never forgotten: “I’ve just found out I’m somebody’s father. I’m somebody’s grandfather. And maybe, I’m somebody’s friend.” We’ve seen in most of the movie how the first two relationships have played out, but it is the third that is the most revealing – Sully has finally recognizes a certain part of himself. Newman’s work in the movie was deservedly nominated for an Academy Award (and I still believe he should have won) but it’s hard to imagine that part of the movie working without Willis’ amicability being directed this way.
For all his action films over the years, I still believe the director who served Willis the best in his career was M. Night Shamaylan and I’m certain that he brought out the best in Shamaylan as a creative force. The Sixth Sense was one of those movies that still works as well as it does even if you know the twist ending because you find yourself looking for the clues all the way through. And as we all know, even though the Academy was willing to give nominations for Haley Joel Osment as Cole and Toni Collette as mother, the performance that is critical to the movie is Willis’ as Malcolm.
In order for everything about the movie to work, Malcolm must seem to be a presence in every scene he’s in, but in such a way that he seems almost invisible. To that end, Willis even at his most restrained a very dynamic actor, toned down his personality until it was almost muted. Willis had done that in other films – such as The Siege - and the results had been almost painful to watch. In The Sixth Sense it works perfectly. The movie is about Cole, but in order to hide it twist, it is told from Malcolm’s point of view. Because Malcolm seems so restrained in his approach to Cole – and because he might well be going through an estrangement with his wife – the audience has no reason to doubt that what we are seeing is anything but the truth. When the final revelation comes, it must come as a shock to Malcolm as much as the audience, and it is because it does that the final moment not only blindside you, but they are incredibly moving.
I also found Shamaylan’s follow-up Unbreakable one of the better movies in Willis’ repertoire. By this point the entire world had accepted Willis as John McLane the quintessential action hero, which at the time was far more acceptable than a superhero. So when we meet David Dunn being not only the sole survivor of a train crash, but not having a scratch on him, this would be something the audience would accept from most Bruce Willis movies, but not this one. Willis must come to the realization that he is a superhero and he spends almost the entire movie fighting against Elijah Price’s prodding and more importantly, that of his own son. There is a memorable scene when his son points a gun at David with the utter assurance that if he shoots him, nothing will happen. David talks to his son not under the idea that he is delusional, but that if he does so the bullet will bounce off him and hit his mother. It is a scene full of the emotion lacking in the lion’s share of Shymalan’s other films (Signs and Split are to date the sole exceptions) and it carries almost entirely due to Willis. When David finally accepts his destiny, it is the more significant moment. Whatever problems the audience might have with the ending of Unbreakable (I didn’t have any) it works more because we believe in David’s reaction to the horrors that have unfolded and that a man he considered a friend was responsible.
(I’ll even confess that I don’t hate the conclusion of the trilogy of these movies Glass the huge disappointment so many of my contemporaries do. I admit its kind of messy and there are far too many twist ending in the last fifteen minutes, but the power of the three central performances- MacAvoy’s frantic energy, Jackson’s sly villainy and Willis’ tired determination – do carry the movie for much of its run.)
So it’s clear that much of Willis’ career showed a great deal of range when he was allowed to express it. Why did he then so often embrace the action movie trope, even though he must have gotten tired of it as he got older? Well, as anyone who knows Willis history’, in the early 1990s there were a series of disastrous movie that didn’t so much curtail his career as his ambitions as an actor. In the conclusion to this series, I’ll deal with four of these films, some unfairly maligned, some truly disastrous, that for better or worse, shaped his career path for most of the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment