The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (59 page)

In the eighties, she did what she could and what she had to do. She was closely associated with the Actors Studio (as spokesperson and leader), and sometimes in her movies she seemed to be too much an advocate of “acting”: very good in
Resurrection
(80, Daniel Petrie);
The Silence of the North
(81, Allan Winton King); as the convicted killer on TV in
The People vs. Jean Harris
(81, George Schaefer), catching Harris’s self-destructive loftiness;
The Ambassador
(84, J. Lee Thompson);
Surviving
(85, Waris Hussein);
Into Thin Air
(85, Roger Young);
Twice in a Lifetime
(85, Bud Yorkin);
Act of Vengeance
(86, John Mackenzie);
Something in Common
(86, Glenn Jordan); beautifully suburban-net-curtained as the unwitting neighbor to spies in
Pack of Lies
(87, Anthony Page);
Hanna’s War
(88, Menahem Golan);
When You Remember Me
(90, Harry Winer);
Dying Young
(91, Joel Schumacher); and excellent in
The Cemetery Club
(93, Bill Duke).

Burstyn is by now our most daring old lady—it is hard to think of anyone who could so lower her defenses as she did in the harrowing
Requiem for a Dream
(00, Darren Aronofsky). But such commitment isn’t often rewarded, and Burstyn has more than her share of TV sentimentality:
Getting Out
(94, John Korty);
Getting Gotti
(94, Young);
Trick of the Eye
(94, Ed Kaplan);
When a Man Loves a Woman
(94, Luis Mandoki);
The Color of Evening
(94, Stephan Stafford);
Roommates
(95, Peter Yates);
The Baby-Sitters Club
(95, Melanie Mayron);
How to Make an American Quilt
(95, Jocelyn Moorhouse);
My Brother’s Keeper
(95, Jordan);
Follow the River
(95, Martin Davidson);
The Spitfire Grill
(96, Lee David Zlotoff);
Deceiver
(97, Jonas and Joshua Pate);
The Patron Saint of Liars
(98, Stephen Gyllenhaal);
Playing by Heart
(98, Willard Carroll);
Flash
(98, Simon Wincer);
Night Ride Home
(99, Jordan);
The Yards
(00, James Gray);
Mermaid
(00, Peter Masterson);
Walking Across Egypt
(00, Arthur Allan Seidelman);
Dodson’s Journey
(01, Gregg Champion);
Within These Walls
(01, Mike Robe);
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
(02, Callie Khouri);
Cross the Line
(02, Jamal Joseph);
Red Dragon
(02, Brett Ratner);
Brush with Fate
(03, Brent Shields).

She has never worked harder than as an older woman:
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
(04, Lloyd Kramer);
Mrs. Harris
(05, Phyllis Nagy);
Down in the Valley
(05, David Jacobson);
The Fountain
(06, Aronofsky);
The Wicker Man
(06, Neil LaBute);
The Elephant King
(06, Seth Grossman);
The Stone Angel
(07, Kari Skogland); as Barbara Bush in
W
(08, Oliver Stone); winning an Emmy on
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit
(08);
Greta
(09, Nancy Bardawil).

Richard Burton
(Richard Walter Jenkins Jr.) (1925–84), b. Pontrhdyfen, Wales
Educated at Port Talbot and Oxford, and in the RAF from 1944 to 1947, he made his stage debut in 1943 and by the mid-1950s had established himself as one of the more exciting young actors on the British stage. His film career had begun in 1948 with
The Last Days of Dolwyn
(Emlyn Williams), and he made
Now Barabbas Was a Robber
(49, Gordon Parry),
Waterfront
(50, Michael Anderson),
The Woman With No Name
(51, Ladislas Vajda), and
Green Grow the Rushes
(51, Derek Twist) before Fox called him to Hollywood. Thus after the ponderously romantic
My Cousin Rachel
(52), Burton starred in the first CinemaScope picture,
The Robe
(53)—both films directed by Henry Koster. Arguably, Burton was never able to shake off the image of a latter-day Barrymore, and he gradually succumbed to the quantity of costume drama he was asked to play in. That is to say nothing of his meeting with Elizabeth Taylor while campaigning on
Cleopatra
(63, Joseph L. Mankiewicz), their marriage, and the lugubrious pairing of them in so many films. A man beset by obstacles and probably always a little contemptuous of the cinema, Burton had the equipment, in voice and face, demanded by the screen. But only once, and then in one of his least noted films, did his talent really show itself: as the fatalistic officer in Nicholas Ray’s
Bitter Victory
(58).

Otherwise, there is not much to choose between his early costume romances—
The Prince of Players
(54, Philip Dunne),
Rains of Ranchipur
(55, Jean Negulesco), and Rossen’s
Alexander the Great
(55)—and the international prestige packages:
The Taming of the Shrew
(67, Franco Zeffirelli);
Dr. Faustus
(67), directed by Burton and Neville Coghill; and
Anne of the Thousand Days
(70, Charles Jarrott). As these films show, Burton was all too willing to dress up and indulge in a rather hollow, grand manner of acting. He was just as evasive in those films with his wife that were marketed as a vicarious peep into one of the notorious romances of the 1960s:
The V.I.P.s
(63, Anthony Asquith); Minnelli’s
The Sandpiper
(65); Mike Nichols’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(66);
The Comedians
(67, Peter Glenville); even the Losey/Tennessee Williams
Boom!
(68).

From his earliest days in Hollywood, Burton preserved the illusion of independence, working when he wanted in the theatre, returning to England for a few films, and finding time to watch rugby matches. But the films seldom proved worthwhile:
Seawife
(57, Bob McNaught);
Look Back in Anger
(59, Tony Richardson);
Dr. Faustus;
and Donen’s
Staircase
(69). Just as Burton seemed to shrink from conventional roles, so he never established a firm screen character. There are only glimpses of what it might be in such as
The Desert Rats
(53, Robert Wise);
Bitter Victory; The Bramble Bush
(60, Daniel Petrie); Huston’s
The Night of the Iguana
(64), Martin Ritt’s
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
(65); and
The Assassination of Trotsky
(72, Joseph Losey). In the seventies, he gave himself up to a run of uniquely unsatisfying films:
Villain
(71, Michael Tuchner);
Raid on Rommel
(71, Henry Hathaway);
Hammersmith Is Out
(72, Peter Ustinov);
Bluebeard
(72, Edward Dmytryk); for TV, the ridiculous
Divorce His, Divorce Hers
(72, Waris Hussein), shown only weeks before he and Taylor drifted into noisy separation;
The Journey
(74, Vittorio de Sica);
Rappresaglia
(74, Georges Pan Cosmatos);
The Klansman
(74, Terence Young);
The Medusa Touch
(78, Jack Gold);
The Wild Geese
(78, Andrew V. McLaglen); and
Breakthrough
(79, McLaglen).

Notoriety, fatigue, and alcohol kept him off the screen for a few years and he returned with a new, uncomfortable brand of haggard, aghast tension in
Exorcist II: The Heretic
(77, John Boorman) and
Equus
(77, Sidney Lumet), which brought him close enough to a sentimental Oscar for the public humiliation of “… and the winner is Richard … Dreyfuss,” whereupon he gave his most reserved rendering of pain in years.

Little was left in the last years but the eyes—still lovely, but horrified—and the voice, which had turned into the rasp of mortification:
Lovespell
(79, Tom Donovan);
Circle of Two
(80, Jules Dassin);
Absolution
(81, Anthony Page); for TV,
Wagner
(83, Tony Palmer) and
Ellis Island
(84, Jerry London); and the interrogator in
1984
(84, Michael Radford).

Tim Burton
, b. Burbank, California, 1960
1982:
Vincent
(s). 1983:
Hansel and Gretel
(s). 1984:
Frankenweenie
(s); “Aladdin,” an episode in
Faerie Tale Theatre
. 1985:
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure
. 1988:
Beetlejuice
. 1989:
Batman
. 1990:
Edward Scissorhands
. 1992:
Batman Returns
. 1994:
Ed Wood
. 1996:
Mars Attacks!
. 1999:
Sleepy Hollow
. 2001:
Planet of the Apes
. 2003:
Big Fish
. 2005:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
. 2007:
Sweeney Todd
. 2010:
Alice in Wonderland
.

There is a way in which Tim Burton’s life so far has been the opposite of the kind of story he wants to tell. For he keeps returning to the theme of a displaced or misshapen child who must try to make a way in a hostile world.
Vincent
, his first short (done when he was an animator at Disney, with narration by Vincent Price), set out to show the nightmarish inner life of an outwardly ordinary child;
Pee-Wee
is a classic dysfunctional child who goes around looking like an adult;
Beetlejuice
is a rogue sprite, a kind of Peter Pan whose shadow took a course in special effects;
Edward Scissorhands
is a classic inventor’s mistake; and then there is
Batman
, which in Burton’s two pictures has become a comic-book world for foundlings and repressed personalities, with the Penguin as a babe so hideous he is put in a closed basket and sent to the sewers—Moses in Harry Lime Land.

Meanwhile, Burton, still only in his forties, has gone from working-class Burbank and a childhood spent watching Vincent Price in Roger Corman movies, to teenage years on Super 8, to Disney and the California Institute of Arts … to amazing stories, untold fame, and residuals enough to fill the banks of Gotham. How can he stand such happiness?

Burton is the most clear-cut example of the movie brat made by an age of horror, fantasy, animation, and effects. There is not really a hint of the straight world in his films, and those who miss such things should face the possibility that Burton (and his contemporaries) have never noticed such a thing. In other words, photography for him is only a way of making effects. He does not understand that it was ever reckoned as a way of recording nature. Everything in a Burton film expresses the distorted feelings of inescapable loneliness—his world is constitutionally warped and explosive.

The picture business has elected to regard Burton as a genius who brings children and teenagers into the movie theatres. Yet his two biggest pictures, the
Batman
pair, are strangely dark and slyly adult. They are not content with the comic books or the TV
Batman
of the 1960s. They can be read as very disturbing films—or might be, if they were better organized. For Burton’s unquestioned visual genius has not yet mastered or found a way of doing without narrative.
Batman Returns
, especially, is an unlikely chaos of fascinating characters jostling and trying to make themselves heard in an incoherent story.

Not many futures are as eagerly awaited. The tragedy of
Edward Scissorhands
seems to me not just Burton’s best work so far, but the film most suited to his inclinations. However, can he insist on furthering that search when so many people in Hollywood tell him he is gold? Can he last as a lost, hurt child? Or does he become a woeful, burnt-out boy wonder, like Orson Welles?

Not too many Burton fans can be happy with recent developments. He did produce the very elegant
Nightmare Before Christmas
(93, Henry Selick), while
Ed Wood
was a rare and charmingly kind treatment of Hollywood lowlife. But the mix of visual extremism and deadpan attitude has not thrived—as witness the calamity of
Mars Attacks!
, the cliché prettiness of
Sleepy Hollow
, and the violent confusion of
Planet of the Apes
, which was so much less witty than the original series.

Big Fish
did not make too much impact on audiences or Oscars, but Burton fans adored it and it was hard not to be impressed by the visionary playfulness. It’s still clear, so many years after his debut, that Burton’s great successes have come nowhere near leaving him established or settled.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
was surprisingly uninvolving, and
Sweeney Todd
—with Depp and Mrs. Burton (Helena Bonham-Carter) was “perfect” but much less impressive than either the musical or its concert performance.

Steve Buscemi
, b. Brooklyn, New York, 1957
1992:
What Happened to Pete
(s). 1996:
Trees Lounge
. 2000:
Animal Factory
. 2005:
Lonesome Jim
. 2007:
Interview
. 2009: episodes of
Nurse Jackie
(TV).

There is now in America a group of excellent character actors who also direct—it includes Tom Noonan, Kevin Spacey, Sean Penn, and Steve Buscemi, who has also made himself one of the best-known faces in modern movies. As an actor, Buscemi is easily cast as hood, lowlife, baby-faced thug, sleazeball, scumbag—or as a kind of Brooklyn Peter Lorre (there is a poetic resemblance). But just as his acting is invariably spot on, so he has adjusted to directing without any sense of being intimidated or needing to show off.
Animal Factory
is a very tough look at prison life, while
Trees Lounge
had Buscemi as the lead in scenes from a Long Island bar (in a way, both are about being confined). In addition, he has done excellent work directing episodes from
Oz, Homicide
, and
The Sopranos
(he did the great lost-in-thewoods story).