Tuesday, May 13, 2008
All bow before the young British actor with more going on than any American actor, ever -- Garland, Brando, Sinatra, you name it. And he's not even a major star (yet).
Oct 26, 2004 | Christian Bale almost didn't get the treatment.
I was leery of writing about him, since he's on the cusp of mega-stardom, having beaten out the ubiquitous Ben Affleck and similarly Afflected über-celebs to be the new blockbuster "Batman." When I decided I was going to write about him, it was because I was doing it with a decidedly hairy eyeball -- I was not a believer.
I had been annoyed by him in "Velvet Goldmine," but I was morbidly, Robby-Benson, Tiger-Beat curious about him after seeing the teen-girl-Internet-cult Disney musical "Newsies." My curiosity was further piqued by his eccentric performance as an emotionally damaged and somewhat retarded person in "All the Little Animals."
What a strange range batch of roles, I thought. What weird career choices.
This week, Bale opened in "The Machinist," a role for which he pulled an Adrien Brody anorexia-thon and lost one-third of his body weight, making him 6'2" and 120 pounds. This horrific act of discipline alone is bound to win him points in Hollywood, where weight loss or gain has long been interpreted as acting skill, since they have no other apparent means of recognizing it.
I decided to write about him, because I wasn't what you'd call a fan. I didn't care about Christian Bale -- I figured he was just one of Britain's pretty boys who could sort of act -- the U.K.'s version of Brad Pitt, maybe.
About three DVDs into my bale of Bale, I began genuflecting deeply to my laptop, a changed harridan. I watched, over hours, the proverbial sword get pulled from the stone. Hear ye, and believe it or not: Christian Bale is the Arthur Rex of leading men -- the Once and Future King, born to rule the light-projected dimension of the silver screen in a natural, inalienable, yes, maybe even holy way; a real honest-to-God fucking star, with a frightening load of multiple talents, dazzling instincts, deadly beauty, cannonball cojones, a killer sense of comic timing, deeply empathic humanity and effortless authority that no actor in this country could get within 1,000 miles of, even in a Hummer.
It alarms me to say it, but I can't even think of an American actor in any era who, in his heyday, had as much mojo going on as many different cylinders, as Christian Bale ... Judy Garland? Nope, too screwed up; she didn't own herself. Marlon Brando? Nope, too flawed, too egomaniacal, too limited ... Frank Sinatra? Same ... Fred Astaire? Not sexy enough ... Buster Keaton? Not chameleon enough ... It's scary, but true. I think Bale is legitimately superhuman -- an advanced, evolutionary leap into Future Movie Stardom. He's the Michael Jordan of film actors -- the übermensch who takes the sport so much further than it was possible to conceive of its being taken, in one generation, that it changes the face of the game forever. And nobody really knows it yet.
Bale has done the more or less impossible: He was a child star who successfully became an adolescent star (while avoiding becoming a teen idol, incredibly) who successfully made the turn into being a serious adult actor. He is a virtual shape-shifter, shamanic and stealthy -- he comes and goes, he leaves a hook in your consciousness with some druidic act of goose-bump-raising screen voodoo, he vanishes; he reappears years later, wholly transformed, doing something completely different, but equally mind-boggling. I realized, re-watching the films I thought he sucked in, that even when he looks like he's sucking, he's brilliant -- once you've seen two or three other examples of his possibly limitless range, you realize that in roles where he isn't obviously hurting your eyes with his ultra-bright Apollo gleam, he is transmitting his role from the dark part of a distant planet, doing the kind of hard thespian thinking that is a real privilege to see, in a dunced-out medium like the movies.
Those of you who read my columns scanning for choice mud balls of character assassination had best bail out here (no pun intended): I don't bandy it around much, and I hate to hurl it at beautiful people, and I especially hate to use it on beautiful people who are currently rocketing to the top of the A-list, but I have to use the G-word -- Christian Bale is a friggin' genius.
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