Good looks can limit good actors, writes DONALD CLARKE
HAVE A glance at Jon Hamm in this week's Howl (review on page 11). He's not bad. He is best known for powering through the fags in Mad Men, but he makes a good fist of Allen Ginsberg's lawyer. He knows how to occupy the room. He has a slick way with the disingenuously aghast aside. But he'll never be a proper movie star.
Most everyone likes Brendan Fraser. Coming off the back of several broad comedies, in 2002 he delivered a terrifically sinister turn in The Quiet American. He wasn't bad in Crasheither. But he is never going to make the highest grade of cinema celebrity. He'll always be George of the Jungle.
Shall we do one more? Nobody could deny that Patrick Wilson has talent. You know the guy. He's that eight-feet tall southerner who played Owlman in Watchmen. Wilson has risen above the material in such passable romcoms as The Switchand Morning Glory. Do you know what? Patrick Wilson is never going to be more famous than, well, Jon Hamm.
So what’s the problem? Put simply, they’re all too handsome. No, that’s not quite right. Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt, the two biggest male stars in the world, are both easy on the eye. The problem is that Jon, Brendan and Patrick are excessively handsome in an old-fashioned, Brylcream- and-wingtip fashion. Lit properly, all three look like the drawings in postwar cigarette commercials.
Hamm's casting in Mad Menworks because (among other reasons) ad exec Don Draper looks like one of his own creations. Had the series been set in the 1970s, they might have considered casting a metal alien who enjoys powdered mashed potato.
Something happened in the 1960s. Before that decade confused everybody, Hollywood savoured the clean-cut, neatly parted man with the chiselled jaw. As the Eisenhower era kicked off, odder-looking, more gnarled stars (Bogart, Cagney) were replaced by unreal Adonises (Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis). Sure, grumpy method actors mumbled their way in to the frame, but it took the counterculture hurricanes of the LBJ era to relegate Mr Chisel to pastiche territory.
It’s a strange phenomenon. We can just about believe that Brad Pitt could walk the earth alongside mortal humans. Perhaps it has to do with that awful woolly hat he wears when running from photographers. You can’t imagine Jon Hamm in a woolly hat.
It seems as if, more than 50 years after such actors ruled Hollywood, we are still fighting back against the era’s ideals of beauty. Hamm, Fraser and Wilson can be cool, but, unlike the more grungy Depp, their cool is mediated by a sense of self-parody. They never seem earthly.
“What about George Clooney?” I hear you say. Well, Clooney is a proper star, but remember that, to win his Oscar for Syriana, he had to ugly-up by eating doughnuts for a month. Also, most of his films make no money. Honest – no money at all. Clooney should try wearing a woolly hat.
