A virtual thanks to Peter Suderman, part of the collective over at The American Scene (an interesting blog with an unusually heterogeneous mix of ideological impulses), for bringing my (and now your) attention to this passage from a review of the latest Russell Crowe movie:
Russell Crowe’s career may have hit a speed bump, but I’m still convinced he’s the star of our time. He makes masculine anger noble, investing it with the black-hat mystique of someone who has grown wise by doing ignoble things. It’s that saint/bruiser complexity that’s so commanding. Just look at Crowe’s eyes: The left one is steady, centered, square in intent, but the right one is all squinty, off-kilter attitude. As the deadly, elegant sharpshooter Wade, whom Glenn Ford played in the original with a dimply corporate lethality, Crowe carves out his own relaxed space, and then molds the movie to it. He makes the character an aesthete (he’s always sketching things), a Bible-quoting gentleman. He’s so courteous that at first you think he’s being ironically nice. Then you realize he means it. Wade has been a criminal for so long, and holds himself so far above ordinary folks, that he actually has pity for them. He doesn’t want to kill Evans, a debt-ridden rancher who lost part of his leg in the Civil War. He wants to escape by buying him off — and, in the process, giving the weaker man a taste of personal power. He’s a bow-lipped Nietzschean in a black vest.
It’s the second sentence here — "He makes masculine anger noble, investing it with the black-hat mystique of someone who has grown wise by doing ignoble things" — that’s key, I think. Crowe’s performance in LA Confidential was really the apotheosis of this noble, masculine, sin-cultivated wise anger, though his work in Gladiator was the more flashy version.
Crowe also raises the interesting question of why Australians have established such dominance in the realm of rugged film masculinity in the last ten or fifteen years. They’ve done not just the Gladiator, but The Hulk (Eric Bana), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), the more butch of the gay shepherds in Brokeback Mountain (Heath Ledger), and William Wallace (Mel Gibson). There seems to be some sort of access that Australian actors have to a deep masculine wellspring that American actors lost some time around 1975, or whenever it was that Marlon Brando crossed the line from crazy brilliant to just crazy crazy.
