The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (114 page)

Hoffa
was a boxoffice failure, widely attacked for its departures from the facts. These are important failures, for we live in a time when biopics carry a great burden in preserving a popular grasp of history. But
Hoffa
is an epic film, enormously daring in its crowd scenes, and just as dynamic in its portrayal of a flawed charismatic. DeVito handled the raging vitality of Jack Nicholson, the delicate symbolism of two scenes involving Karen Young, and the eventual truth of Hoffa’s life. It was like a movie from the seventies.

He has acted in
Other People’s Money
(91, Norman Jewison); J
ack the Bear
(93, Marshall Herskovitz);
Renaissance Man
(94, Penny Marshall);
Get Shorty
(95, Barry Sonnenfeld);
Mars Attacks!
(96, Burton);
L.A. Confidential
(97, Curtis Hanson);
The Rainmaker
(97, Francis Coppola);
Living Out Loud
(98, Richard LaGravenese);
The Virgin Suicides
(99, Sofia Coppola);
The Big Kahuna
(99, John Swanbeck);
Man on the Moon
(99, Forman);
Drowning Mona
(00, Nick Gomez).

His company, Jersey Films, has been an important producer:
Pulp Fiction
(94, Quentin Tarantino);
Reality Bites
(94, Ben Stiller);
Get Shorty; Gattaca
(97, Andrew Niccol);
Out of Sight
(98, Steven Soderbergh);
Erin Brockovich
(00, Soderbergh);
Screwed
(00, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski);
What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
(01, Sam Weisman);
Heist
(01, David Mamet);
Anything Else
(03, Woody Allen);
Big Fish
(03, Tim Burton).

In recent years, his touch has gone missing:
Christmas in Love
(04, Neri Parenti); he produced
Be Cool
(05, F. Gary Gray);
Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing & Charm School
(05, Randall Miller);
Relative Strangers
(06, Greg Glienna);
Even Money
(06, Mark Rydell);
The Oh in Ohio
(06, Billy Kent);
Deck the Halls
(06, John Whitesell);
The Good Night
(07, Jake Paltrow);
Reno 911!: Miami
(07, Robert Ben Garant);
Just Add Water
(07, Hart Bochner);
Nobel Son
(07, Miller). He’s also back on TV in
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
.

Cameron Diaz
, b. San Diego, California, 1972
There was a moment at least when Cameron Diaz meant the sight of her blond forelock stiff with semen in
There’s Something About Mary
(98, Bobby and Peter Farrelly). A great start—or an impossible obstacle? She’s a terrific looker with an exceptionally fresh, vivid face—she was doing a lot of commercials between Long Beach Polytechnic High and getting the girl’s part opposite Jim Carrey in
The Mask
(94, Charles Russell). She showed a good comic touch in
My Best Friend’s Wedding
(97, P. J. Hogan) and held her own with the far mightier Julia Roberts. But just as Roberts has credibly grown into being a woman in her thirties, so Diaz has to show us that she’s more than a knockout; there are so many knockout women around:
Feeling Minnesota
(96, Steven Baigelman);
The Last Supper
(96, Stacy Tittle);
She’s the One
(96, Edward Burns); not very convincing as Harvey Keitel’s wife in
Head Above Water
(96, Jim Wilson);
A Life Less Ordinary
(97, Danny Boyle);
Very Bad Things
(98, Peter Berg); looking quite different in
Being John Malkovich
(99, Spike Jonze), and tougher than usual as the young team owner in
Any Given Sunday
(99, Oliver Stone).

It’s hard for people like Diaz, and
Charlie’s Angels
(00, McG) was no help. She was good in
The Invisible Circus
(01, Adam Brooks), but so few saw it. Then came
Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
(01, Rodrigo García); the heroine’s voice in
Shrek
(01, Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jensen);
Vanilla Sky
(01, Cameron Crowe), where she was battling to survive the nonsense;
The Sweetest Thing
(02, Roger Kumble);
Gangs of New York
(02, Martin Scorsese);
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
(03, McG).

She has survived as the voice of the princess in the
Shrek
films, and she has been seen in
In Her Shoes
(05, Curtis Hanson);
The Holiday
(06, Nancy Meyers);
What Happens in Vegas
(08, Tom Vaughn);
My Sister’s Keeper
(09, Nick Cassavetes);
The Box
(09, Richard Kelly).

Leonardo
(Wilhelm)
DiCaprio
, b. Los Angeles, 1974
DiCaprio earned at least $20 million to make
The Beach
(00, Danny Boyle), his drab follow-up to
Titanic
(97, James Cameron). And the picture’s box office dropped by over 70 percent after its second week. No one has ever quite been able to explain the success of
Titanic
(something that leaves the business the more jittery). But many believed it was because teenage girls went back to see “Leonardo” and his Caravaggio teen carnality over and over again. In which case, don’t knock the reality that those kids were different creatures, three years later, when
The Beach
reached their screens.

In the meantime, some gloom has overtaken the extraordinary actor. In two films—
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
(93, Lasse Hallström) and
This Boy’s Life
(93, Michael Caton-Jones)—DiCaprio had seemed brushed by genius. In
Gilbert Grape
, especially, where he said he had improvised much of the picture, there was a wild, poetic streak that seemed to promise so much. Add the fact that those two films were unusually interesting properties, well directed—in
Grape
, there is a rare spirit in the cast that included Johnny Depp and Juliette Lewis.

But now that he is past thirty-five, and beginning to look a touch puffy, there are those ready to dismiss DiCaprio. We’ll see how much creative stamina he possesses, but I fear a kind of fey magic has slipped from his face. The world does not seem to please him—whereas the kid in
Gilbert Grape
was intoxicated and enchanting. He made his debut in
Critters 3
(92, Kristine Peterson);
Poison Ivy
(92, Katt Shea Ruben), with Drew Barrymore; and then, after the breakthrough films—with a supporting actor nomination for
Gilbert Grape
—he started veering from the pretentious to the obvious: replacing River Phoenix in
The Basketball Diaries
(95, Scott Kalvert); and looking very unathletic;
The Quick and the Dead
(95, Sam Raimi); as Rimbaud in
Total Eclipse
(95, Agnieszka Holland);
Marvin’s
Room
(96, Jerry Zaks);
Romeo + Juliet
(96, Baz Luhrmann), the hit that set up
Titanic; The Man in the Iron Mask
(98, Randall Wallace), a significant failure;
Celebrity
(98, Woody Allen), a rather nasty revelation of some inner nature; and the virtually unreleased
Don’s Plum
(98, R. D. Robb and John Schindler).

There was a brief pause, as if he or his advisers might be arguing which way to go—even whether or not to act. Since then, there has been a steady attempt to build him up as an adventurous, romantic male lead. So far, I fear, it has failed, despite the loyal support of Martin Scorsese. Worst of all, he seems to have mislaid the magic he enjoyed as a teenager. DiCaprio at thirty-five shows all the signs of failing to mature that have afflicted Cruise and Depp.

He was lively and funny in
Catch Me If You Can
(02, Steven Spielberg)—a sign (so far ignored) of his humor. He was thoroughly outclassed in
Gangs of New York
(02, Scorsese); adrift as Hughes in
The Aviator
(04, Scorsese); doing his robust best in
Blood Diamond
(06, Edward Zwick); struggling in
The Departed
(06, Scorsese);
Body of Lies
(08, Ridley Scott); so defeated by character study in
Revolutionary Road
(08, Sam Mendes) that it was hard to recall how much he had once guided Kate Winslet;
Shutter Island
(10, Scorsese);
Inception
(10, Christopher Nolan).

Ernest R. Dickerson
, b. Newark, New Jersey, 1952
1992: J
uice
. 1994:
Surviving the Game
. 1995:
Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight
. 1996:
Bulletproof
. 1998:
Blind Faith; Ambushed; Futuresport
(TV). 1999:
Strange Justice
(TV). 2001:
Bones
. 2002:
Monday Night Mayhem
(TV). 2002:
Our America; Big Shot: Confessions of a Campus Bookie
(TV); 2003:
Good Fences
(TV). 2004:
Never Die Alone
. 2006:
For One Night
(TV).

Ernest Dickerson has made the shift from cameraman to director, but it has not been easy. In the last decade he has had to take jobs that became available
—Juice
was a striking, violent debut, but
Bulletproof
showed the same kind of material being jacked up for the box office to the point of absurdity.
Bones
was a good film, but it found no audience, so Dickerson had to go along with a conventional movie about Monday-night football. It is especially difficult for any black director to escape the bad habits and assumptions of black genre films—or to find fresh subjects. So Dickerson’s struggle serves to underline the special insistence of a man like Carl Franklin.

As a film student at New York University, Dickerson became the house cameraman for a generation of independent movies:
Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads
(83, Spike Lee);
The Brother from Another Planet
(84, John Sayles);
Krush Groove
(85, Michael Schultz);
She’s Gotta Have It
(86, Lee);
Enemy Territory
(87, Peter Manoogian);
Eddie Murphy Raw
(87, Robert Townsend);
School Daze
(88, Lee);
Do the Right Thing
(89, Lee), which is unique in its sense of the colors of urban heat;
Def by Temptation
(90, James Bond III);
Mo’ Better Blues
(90, Lee);
Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll
(91, John McNaughton); J
ungle Fever
(91, Lee);
Malcolm X
(92, Lee);
Cousin Bobby
(92, Jonathan Demme).

Angie Dickinson
(Angeline Brown), b. Kulm, North Dakota, 1931
The author is torn between his duty to everyone from Thorold Dickinson to Zinnemann and the plain fact that Angie is his favorite actress. Not that one thousand words of analysis would carry more weight than a well-chosen still. Many people think of her as TV’s
Police Woman
rather than as an actress. Her career never gathered proper momentum; and nor has she seemed too distressed by having to make dull movies. Her virtues are probably not those of a leading actress, and it is significant that in her best film,
Rio Bravo
(59), she appeared very happy with Hawks’s masculine code and ensemble playing. But equally, her Feathers in that film could be defended as a portrait of an intelligent, nervous, attractive woman that perfectly embodies the director’s philosophy. For all that the role seems restricted to genre, Feathers is one of the truest female characters in modern cinema. And it characterized Angie’s ability to inhabit a man’s world without asking for concessions and without needing to rock the conventions.

She began in very small parts:
Lucky Me
(55, Jack Donohue);
Man With the Gun
(55, Richard Wilson);
Tennessee’s Partner
(55, Allan Dwan);
Gun the Man Down
(56, Andrew McLaglen); and
Tension at Table Rock
(56, Charles Marquis Warren). But she came to life in Samuel Fuller’s
China Gate
(57) as the half-caste girl, and as Steiger’s girlfriend in
Cry Terror
(58, Andrew L. Stone). That led to
Rio Bravo
, which in turn was the prelude to a career in which she has often seemed much more assured than her films. But, given reason and good company, she is totally compelling:
The Bramble Bush
(60, Daniel Petrie);
Ocean’s 11
(60, Lewis Milestone);
A Fever in the Blood
(61, Vincent Sherman);
Rachel Cade
(61, Gordon Douglas);
Lovers Must Learn
(62, Delmer Daves); J
essica
(62, Jean Negulesco);
Captain Newman, M.D
. (63, David Miller); treacherous, but still endearing, in
The Killers
(64, Don Siegel);
The Art of Love
(65, Norman Jewison); as Brando’s wife in
The Chase
(66, Arthur Penn);
Cast a Giant Shadow
(66, Melville Shavelson);
The Pistolero of Red River
(67, Richard Thorpe); rising to her dangerous decoy mission in
Point Blank
(67, John Boorman);
Sam Whiskey
(69, Arnold Laven);
Young Billy Young
(69, Burt Kennedy);
Pretty Maids All in a Row
(71, Roger Vadim);
Un Homme est Mort
(72, Jacques Deray); and
Big Bad Mama
(74, Steve Carver).

Not even my adoration has kept Angie’s career from some slippage. I notice, too, that she is a little older—thank God I have not suffered in the same way. Still, readers not sure whether to believe what they are reading should immediately get themselves in a position to see
Rio Bravo, China Gate, The Killers, Point Blank
, and
The Chase
. Meanwhile, Dickinson has been in
L’Homme en Colore
(79, Claude Pinoteau);
Jack London’s Klondike Fever
(79, Peter Carter);
The Suicide’s Wife
(79, John Newland);
Dressed to Kill
(80, Brian De Palma), using a body double;
Death Hunt
(81, Peter R. Hunt);
Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen
(81, Clive Donner); and
Big Bad Mama II
(87, Jim Wynorski).