Between Reviews: Bye-bye Butch

BYE-BYE BUTCH

OCT 5, 2008 – IF THERE’S A CASE TO BE MADE that actors become the stuff of legend not while they’re amassing a legendary body of work but after – when the anointing is over and done with and there’s nothing left to prove – Paul Newman would be a prime candidate for Exhibit A. The serious years, the years he coulda been a contender in the Great Actor sweepstakes alongside Brando, are rightly celebrated. After announcing his arrival in Somebody Up There Likes Me, Newman gamely resisted the charms of Elizabeth Taylor (at her heartbreakingly prettiest) as he sweltered in the hothouse of mendacity that was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Exodus, his shot at a blockbuster epic in those early years, was an equally self-important Prestige Production, based on nothing less than the founding of Israel. And then he really hit his stride with a series of anti-hero outings that appear, today, not so much performance as penance, as atonement for being born with the face of a swoony romantic hero. The hungry pool shark in The Hustler, the monstrously selfish cowboy in Hud, the conflicted white man raised by Indians in Hombre, the chain-gang martyr in Cool Hand Luke – if you cock a ear in the direction of these admittedly impressive portrayals, you may catch the silent plea of a criminally good-looking man craving to be recognised for more than just his criminal good looks.

And that’s perhaps why Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid comes off as the definitive Newman movie, the one where he finally learned to stop worrying and love the bomb that he was. There’s enough in this deceptively breezy buddy-movie that’s entirely one of a piece with the nihilistic ethos of the sixties – what with the vice of the establishment tightening ever-so-slowly around a couple of non-conformists – and yet, Newman, with his potent blast of movie-star charisma (and aided by Robert Redford, no slouch himself in the charisma department), convinces us that we’re having the most rollicking time ever. Newman is so relaxed, so charming, so unapologetic about strutting around as one half of the handsomest outlaw duo ever, it appears that this is when he truly began to take pleasure in his profession, realising that being a matinee idol wasn’t necessarily an intractable evil and certainly not an impediment to being a good performer. It’s almost as if, after all the merciless self-flagellation in The Hustler and Hud and Cool Hand Luke, Newman had nothing left to prove about his commitment to his craft, and now he could ease into becoming what he was born to be: a big star, beloved by millions, who knew how to wink at the gallery even as he worked hard at roles that, if not consistent in quality, were unforgettable nonetheless because his quality was always consistent.

And that, you could say, is the cornerstone of the Newman legend – not just that he appeared in all those great movies, but that he was great in the many not-so-great ones that followed. The films he made from the seventies onwards are hardly what you’d call masterpiece material, but they offer the one thing most of us look for when we go to the movies: the promise of pure and simple entertainment. Newman gave himself over, heart and soul, to guilty-pleasure cheese-fests like The Towering Inferno (USP: Newman takes on a skyscraper on fire!), cotton-candy capers like The Sting (Newman and Redford take on a mob boss!) and hokily earnest morality plays like Absence of Malice (Newman takes on a murder rap!). Along the way, there were genuine showstoppers like The Verdict and The Color of Money (for which he finally snagged that Oscar), and a fine series of late-career performances – The Hudsucker Proxy, Twilight, Message in a Bottle, Road to Perdition and especially Nobody’s Fool (watching him flirt with the decades-younger Melanie Griffith makes you wonder what further heights of stardom he’d have scaled had he dedicated himself solely to romantic leading man roles) – where he proved he didn’t always have to be at the centre of a film in order to walk away with it.

Newman wasn’t on screen all that much of late, so he’s not going to be “missed” in the Heath Ledger sense – there isn’t that nagging question of what could have been in Newman’s case. But still, on an ever-so-tangential note, it’s startling the depth of feeling invoked in us by the loss of such a major movie star. You know he lived to a good old age, you know he had a great marriage (about not straying from longtime wife Joanne Woodward, he commented, “I have steak at home, why go out for hamburger?”), you know he was successful beyond the wildest dreams of most of us, you know he made millions, you know he was loved by millions, not just his fans but also his peers, and you know he’s, in a sense, immortal, ageless, because you only have to slip in a DVD of one of his films to recapture his prime – and therefore, there’s little, really, to be sad about. Then why the heartbreak that makes the eyes mist over when you read Redford’s tribute? (“There is a point where feelings go beyond words. I have lost a real friend.”) When a writer or a painter or a poet passes away, we do register the loss, but doesn’t the sense of the loss appear so much more magnified when it comes to a movie star, as if the size of the emotion were directly proportional to the size of the medium? Or perhaps it’s just those of us who feel ridiculously intimate about cinema end up feeling this way, and perhaps there are those out there to whom a movie is just a movie and to whom Newman was just an actor they vaguely remember seeing in a film whose name escapes them, but, yeah, he did have the bluest eyes ever.

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