Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
"Mary, Mother of Jesus" (1999) is an abysmal TV movie featuring a Linda Ronstadt look-alike as the Holy Mother of God, saying dumbed-down, made-for-TV, Bible-epic schlock like "Is this world mad? Where's God?" and, "Why the suffering? I beg you for an answer! How can I ease this suffering? What can I do?" Bale, with sandals and neck beard, gives his most generous, spiritual smile and pats the knee of a little Aramaic girl with Down syndrome in the first scene he's in. "He's nice," she lisps to her mom, pointing at the Christ.
Even in a schlock monster like this heap, Bale, consummate professional, gives it up. He is suffused with raw compassion. As Jesus, he is surprisingly wild: by turns broody, tortured, savage and ecstatic. He plays it more like a classic John the Baptist, so the John the Baptist had to overcompensate by screaming his entire performance like John Cleese with a loincloth full of scorpions. Carrying his cross to Golgotha, Bale is in suspiciously awesome shape for a desert-dwelling guy; he bares his blue-white teeth in anguish, straining his shining, bloody pectorals and ripped Nautilus obliques. All in all, Bale's Jesus was more a Warrior Christ of the Apocalypse than a peaceful Lamb of God, but he was the only saving grace in a movie that otherwise should have been flayed, skinned alive and crucified Mel Gibson-style.
I think a lot of people probably didn't see "American Psycho" (2000) because the tedious and disgusting book it was based on suggested a dumb, bloody and stomach-churningly misogynistic film. The movie is an exponentially better piece of art, and Bale, as the Psycho, is world-slicing, laser perfection. Poetry. Riveting. A firebird. So perfect it kind of makes your stomach turn inside out watching him, like when you're watching a once-in-a-lifetime opera with a perfect cast; a rare convergence of talent at its apex and the ideal opportunity. This is a movie not to rent, but to own -- when I am Supreme Dictator, I will demand that all Americans watch it every Christmas morning.
For starters, he looks beyond incredible, like "Brad who?," gasp, rend your clothing and wail like an eighth-grade Bay City Rollers groupie incredible. Just from a Soloflex, gym-slut centerfold perspective, he is in Triple Crown racehorse condition. The best thing about that movie, though, is how incredibly funny he is. The scene in which he puts on a transparent raincoat and hacks a co-worker to death in his living room with a shiny ax while doing some very prissy interpretive tap dancing and giving an edge-free, Parade magazine-style fluff-piece oration on the Huey Lewis and the News song "It's Hip to Be Square" is, I think, one of the great comic scenes of the 20th century.
"I have to return some videos," he says, at three different points in the movie, and every time he says it, it rolls around slimy in his mouth like some foreign animal innard. If you can't appreciate Christian Bale after "American Psycho," well, I'm sorry, but you just can't have Christmas anymore.
"Reign of Fire" (2002) is a curiously dark, post-apocalyptic dragon movie in which Bale has a macho dick-unrolling contest with the hilariously heavy-handed Matthew McConaughey, who looks like Fidel Castro re-imagined as a tattooed bodybuilder by Tom of Finland. Bale has a rather scraggly, unbeautiful beard and a Cockney accent, and he retains the one rudder of sanity throughout a film where the director was clearly telling everyone to go for melodramatic, hair-tearing, chest-pounding hysteria -- McConaughey (who is supposed to be the cool guy), by comparison, ends up looking like he's acting in a gay Mexican soap opera.
In "Laurel Canyon" (2002) Bale puts on his uptight-white-guy face again as the beleaguered fiancé of Kate Beckinsale and the devoured son of the fabulously narcissistic Frances McDormand. He is tempted by the fruit of another, in this case a sultry Eastern European co-worker played by the ravishing and very underrated Natascha McElhone. There is a highly steamy conversation in the front seat of her car, which starts with Bale festooned with awful guilt for thinking impure thoughts about her:
"I think about you too, Sarah. A lot. Trust me."
"How do you think about me? Do you think about having sex with me?"
He is shocked. "[Gulp] Yuh."
"How?"
"How do I think about having sex with you?" (He is shocked, bemused, shocked again, blushing, thrilled, a little petrified.)
"Yeah. Do you think about me going down on you?"
The look in his eyes, here, is so turned-on, it looks like he might start to cry. But there's a whole lot more going on in his face, too:
In short, he went for some very complicated thinking and feeling when all he really had to do was look sort of vapidly present and give her a solid, open-mouthed kiss. But it gets better. McElhone delivers a Dietrich-worthy sex chat that would fog the windows of an Airbus, and Bale plays along more than willingly -- the scene is about 50 times sexier than 92 percent of all film scenes in which both actors are fully or partially naked, and worth the price of the DVD.
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