The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (364 page)

Rudolph is the son of director Oscar Rudolph. He was in the Director’s Guild training program, and he grew up artistically with Robert Altman as an assistant director on
California Split
and
Nashville
, and as cowriter on
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
(76). Thus, in a strange way, this child of Los Angeles has always been at cross-purposes with Hollywood’s sense of the city and its task. Rudolph could do anything, but it is surely reasonable to hope for another one or two off-the-wall triumphs.

I liked
Mrs. Parker
, though I’m not sure I could have found a circle of admiration for it.
Afterglow
was clearly fond of its cast—but, if so, why not offer them a better script?
Breakfast of Champions
and
Trixie
were among the poorest things Rudolph had done.

Mark Ruffalo
, b. Kenosha, Wisconsin, 1967
If you’re wondering where you’ve heard of Kenosha before, think of where Orson Welles was born—and Ruffalo might play Welles: he has the bulk and the very youthful face. But he shows evidence of being a subtler actor than Orson, and not too sympathetic to his ham and bluster. I have heard directors say that Ruffalo is in danger of being too gentle or too sensitive in times where maleness is often blunt and mindless. He has labored hard to do the kind of work he believes in, and there is little sign of Ruffalo selling out—though he could probably play romantic heroes in films aimed at women.

He moved to California, studied at the Stella Adler school and worked for years as a barman, waiting for his big break in the theatre. It came when he got a part in Kenneth Lonergan’s play
This Is Our Youth
. But Ruffalo has not yet starred in a big picture, so the matter of his “break” is still unresolved.

His debut was in
Rough Trade
(92, Christopher Speidel), but it hardly got released, and this pattern would be repeated:
A Song for You
(93, Ken Martin);
A Gift from Heaven
(94, Jack Lucarelli);
Mirror, Mirror II: Raven Dance
(94, Jimmy Lifton);
There Goes My Baby
(94, Floyd Mutrux);
Mirror, Mirror III: The Voyeur
(95, Rachel Gordon and Virginia Perili);
The Destiny of Marty Fine
(96, Michael Head), which Ruffalo helped write;
Blood Money
(96, John Shepphird);
The Dentist
(96, Brian Yuzna);
The Last Big Thing
(96, Adam Zukovic).

One has to add that Ruffalo was also later diagnosed as having a brain tumor (it proved to be benign), and he had a brother who was killed in a shooting. His fortunes began to improve with
Ride With the Devil
(99, Ang Lee);
Committed
(00, Lisa Krueger); and then a lead part in Kenneth Lonergan’s debut
—You Can Count On Me
(00). The talent was suddenly clear and he began to be noticed:
Life/Drawing
(01, Dan Bootzin);
The Last Castle
(01, Rod Lurie);
XX/XY
(02, Austin Chick);
Windtalkers
(02, John Woo); with Sarah Polley in
My Life Without Me
(03, Isabel Coixet);
View from the Top
(03, Bruno Barreto); as the cop in
In the Cut
(03, Jane Campion). You could argue that he was miscast in that last one—the man needed to be tougher—but he matched up to the rare sensual demands of that picture.

He was outstanding with Laura Dern in
We Don’t Live Here Anymore
(04, John Curran);
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(04, Michel Gondry);
13 Going on 30
(04, Gary Winick);
Collateral
(04, Michael Mann);
Just Like Heaven
(05, Mark Waters);
All the King’s Men
(00, Steven Zaillian);
Zodiac
(07, David Fincher);
Reservation Road
(07, Terry George);
Blindness
(08, Fernando Meirelles);
The Brothers Bloom
(08, Rian Johnson);
What Doesn’t Kill You
(09, Brice Goodman);
Shutter Island
(10, Martin Scorsese);
The Kids Are All Right
(10, Lisa Cholodenko).

Raúl Ruiz
, b. Puerto Montt, Chile, 1941
If this book were as honest as its claims for itself, as reliable and as dull, it would already have started this entry with an immense list of films. Aged sixty as I write (my own age), Ruiz has made close to one hundred films, he says—some short, some unfinished, some never shown, some not much more than gestures towards films, or acts of defiance against what Hollywood, say (not that he flat-out loathes American film), likes to regard as a movie. But the list is obsessive, ridiculous, a diversion, so this time I’ll set it aside. You can find the list in other places, and have as little reason to trust or comprehend it as if I had printed it here.

Better to realize that one Ruiz is thrilled by sheer quantity (earlier in life he set out to write one hundred plays by the age of twenty), while another revels in the suggestion that some, or many, of his films are not very good. As if that mattered when, for Ruiz, virtually every experience or encounter in life is like the challenge to make a film. Or write a story (granted his own special definition of what constitutes story).

I was criticized a few years ago, very reasonably, by Jonathan Rosenbaum for important maverick and foreign figures left out of this book. But I refuse to include them all, and I am always happiest to find a new way of sizing up a person—let alone one as torrential as Raúl Ruiz. For the last edition, I felt daunted by having seen so few of his scores of films. I have only seen a few more now, but I feel more comfortable facing him—because we are the same age, maybe, and because, I think, we are as torn between film and literature. And I have always known that for me, this book was in part a way of staying loyal to writing in face of the nearly total seduction the movies had made of me. I feel stronger about that struggle now, and more than ever certain that this thing, in your hands, is and must be a book. And in part that’s because of the beautiful depiction of Proust in what may be Ruiz’s first (and only) great film—
Time Regained
(99), a work that leaves the much vaunted Pinter script looking schoolboyish. (And surely in Pinter there has always been a Flashman of silences.) Not the least thing about
Time Regained
is the grudging admission by Ruiz that if trapped into a corner, with enough money offered, he can put together a film as sumptuous as Visconti (actually far more elegant) and as epic and commonplace as Proust, with stunning performances from such as John Malkovich (as Charlus), Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, and so on. It is a little like Picasso drawing as well as Ingres and Rembrandt, once in his life. Which, of course, only guides us gently into reexamining all the various experiments with form, line, and story that Ruiz has attempted over the years.

His cover for this was obvious and sound: it is, more or less, that film should by now have got beyond the novel. It should be the journal, the daybook, the confessional of the mind that is always looking, and always tempted by that astonishing insolence with which appearance vulgarizes essence. After all, isn’t that the crushing vulgarity (launched with photography) that has ended literature, language, humanism, et cetera? And isn’t it the constant self-torture of the enlightened man of modern times—am I thinking movie because the vulgarity got me, or is it that I have no talent as a writer? (You see, I take it as a given that virtually every person in this book who is a filmmaker wanted to be a writer first and found it too hard.) Ruiz is brilliantly educated, irresistibly drawn to the confusion of languages and the exigencies of being an émigré. So, Chilean once, he could no more resist the role of exile than the rapturous tracking shots he loves. Thus driven, film or the attempt at film became his notebook. But he abhorred that chestnut about story depending on conflict, and he shied away from every orthodoxy about how to film things, faces, and action. He actually sees action as a kind of mathematical principle—an
x
that happens to other people and which permits, from time to time, the illusion of story. Except that in life (as in Musil and Joyce and Proust and Borges) the storyness of it all is really far more telling for us impatient souls than any long-winded narrative.

So Ruiz was for years a natural (in that he could make a film on nothing) at festivals: he was funny, he could be magical realist or grade-B noirish. He resembled Guillermo Cabrera Infante in his obsessiveness and his straightfaced comedy. He seemed incapable of pausing, reflecting, or ever making a whole or finished or normal film. That said, you could have a terrific time with, at least,
The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting
(78),
On Top of the Whale
(81),
Three Crowns of the Sailor
(82), and
City of Pirates
(83).

There were also insufferable or impossible Ruiz films, and that imbalance was the intimidating thing: it made you feel you needed to see the whole oeuvre. You don’t. You can pass by on the other side of the street. But, especially if you’re American, Ruiz is one of those figures you owe it to yourself to sample, to become obsessed with, for all the wonderful non-American ways he knows of holding the screen and turning your passing involvement into a critical model of what it is to be you.

You see, no country but America would have achieved such an hegemony in film and then starved the medium so.

Start with
Time Regained
(whether or not you know Proust). Absorb the fluent mix of tracking shots (as beguiling as Ophüls) with all the clever ways the people and the scenery are slid in and out of view (which is like Godard or Syberberg or Fritz Lang showing his own workings). Then dwell in the magical conclusion in which we have two or three ages of Proust mingling with his own characters, like Welles taking you on a conducted tour of the Xanadu junk collection before he strikes the match.

Geoffrey Rush
, b. Toowoomba, Australia, 1951
It was only at the age of forty-five—as David Helfgott in the very bizarre
Shine
(96, Scott Hicks)—that Geoffrey Rush broke through as a movie actor. Prior to that, after studying at the University of Queensland and being part of the Queensland Theatre Company, he had worked on stage and in television in Australia. His Helfgott was a bravura piece of impersonation, including the mastery of neurotic speech patterns and extreme emotional instability. It was a performance that won the best actor Oscar, and drew enormous attention, but it left some people cold as being no more than eccentric behavior in a dead end. So Rush’s second best actor nomination, as Sade in
Quills
(00, Philip Kaufman), was actually far more impressive, because it offered an extremist whose every action reflected on the common realities of love, desire, and lust. The brilliance was no less, but it was serving a purpose and helping us see that Rush might be one of those actors who reach nearly any extreme. He played Sir Andrew Aguecheek, yet who could say that Falstaff was not within his reach?

He had played in
Children of the Revolution
(96, Peter Duncan) before
Shine
. Since then, he has been the narrator on
Oscar and Lucinda
(97, Gillian Armstrong);
A Little Bit of Soul
(98, Duncan); Javert in
Les Misérables
(98, Bille August); Walsingham in
Elizabeth
(98, Shekhar Kapur); Henslowe in
Shakespeare in Love
(98, John Madden);
Mystery Men
(99, Kinka Usher);
House on Haunted Hill
(99, William Malone);
The Tailor of Panama
(01, John Boorman);
Lantana
(01, Ray Lawrence).

He was Trotsky in
Frida
(02, Julie Taymor); not very convincing in
The Banger Sisters
(02, Bob Dolman);
Swimming Upstream
(03, Russell Mulcahy); as the cop after
Ned Kelly
(03, Gregor Jordan);
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
(03, Gore Verbinski);
Intolerable Cruelty
(03, Joel and Ethan Coen); and in a great challenge, as the lead, in
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
(04, Stephen Hopkins).

After
Munich
(05, Steven Spielberg), he did two more
Pirates
pictures
—Dead Man’s Chest
and
At World’s End
—both by Verbinski, which helped establish him as a clown. There was also
Candy
(06, Neil Armfield); as Walsingham again in
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
(07, Kapur); $9.99 (08, Talia Rosenthal);
Bran Nue Dae
(10, Rachel Perkins);
The Warrior’s Way
(10, Sngmoo Lee).

David O
. (Owen)
Russell
, b. New York, 1958
1990:
Hairway to the Stars
. 1994:
Spanking the Monkey
. 1996:
Flirting with Disaster
. 1999:
Three Kings
. 2004:
I Heart Huckabee’s
. 2010:
Nailed
.

Three Kings
is exactly the kind of movie that the American system is supposedly incapable of producing: personal but far-ranging; stylistically innovative—if only by virtue of the toxic color photography that manages to be new and beautiful as well as a poetic warning of peril; the screwball regard for that hallowed military component the unit; and a thriving satirical attitude towards American foreign policy as well as the wit and wisdom that turns pratfall into the historical record. And all this—no matter the decisive support of George Clooney—came from a young writer-director whose earlier films could easily be mistaken as witty festival fodder. By which I mean to say that they are funny, novel, but not quite disturbing. Whereas it felt as if someone new, or more confident, had sprung up to do
Three Kings
. So it’s a little unsettling that Russell seems to have paused for a moment—as if success had made his edginess more questionable. Of course, since
Three Kings
our foreign affairs have taken a turn that would probably have prevented the film from being made if it had reached us five years earlier.