At last, Harrison Ford the anti-hero

2000
Toronto Sun
by Geoff Pevere

Of all the suspense riffs copped from Hitchcock in What Lies Beneath, the one that performs most expertly is the movie's calculated casting against type. In a manner similar to the way Sir Alfred used to pitch audience expectations against dramatic developments by playing a star's persona against their character, director Robert Zemeckis ratchets up the discomfort level in this otherwise 100-per-cent recycled haunted house movie by casting Harrison Ford as a man with a past that only grows darker with each twist of the plot.

So well does the ploy work, it makes What Lies Beneath almost unthinkable without the man formerly known as Indy at its centre. Not only does the presence of Ford give the movie's rather clinical mounting of second-hand spine-tinglers an emotional charge they would surely otherwise lack - and just who in the world really needs another Hitchcock homage? - it actually suspends our suspension of disbelief. Not that we believe what we're seeing, of course. The point is we can't believe that Harrison Ford - Harrison Ford - could be capable of such dark shenanigans. (Clearly, this would be trickier with Harvey Keitel.)  The contra-casting maintains viewer vulnerability and, as Hitchcock knew, suspense is all about keeping your audience in a state of sublime discomfort.

In What Lies Beneath, this is intensified by the fact that it's Ford, a man whose immense international stardom was decidedly not built on the calculated taking of whimsical creative flyers. On the contrary, like Robert Redford, Mel Gibson, Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks, Ford is an actor who has exercised utmost care in the selection of roles that do not thwart public expectations of him. And, like these other famous gentlemen, he has become something of a bore for it. It's as though Ford had accepted his function as a product or brand and, like all responsible senior retail managers, is loath to let that product stray too far from its ``core values.'' Thus, if it's the slightly stoic, self-deprecating man of action and decency we'd come to expect from Ford, that's more or less precisely what we've got. Until now. While it would be presumptuous to speculate on the motivation behind this infamously image-protective actor's decision to play it less safe than usual (though I suspect the words Random Hearts might have something to do with it), you've got to applaud the final result. Not the performance - which, incidentally, is pretty good: supple and surprising - but the motivation.

Whenever an actor decides to wade against expectations it proves there's still a spark of playfulness at work. And without that spark - no matter how big or bright the star - something vital in a performer flatlines. After all, why act if not out of an impulse to play, to seduce or surprise? Beyond that, it's a lifetime of judges, dead presidents and Biblical patriarchs.

And when you're commanding better than $20 million a movie, there's got to be some heavy pressure to navigate the sucker safely into the black. It's not really your talent or creativity that's being paid for, it's your brand on the product, your presence on the package. God knows, having cashed a cheque with that many zeroes, it would be most unseemly to suddenly go all artistic. Perhaps this is why we see so little of this these days, why it takes an actor like Harrison Ford over 20 years to allow that quality of impish duplicity - a quality evident in movies like The Conversation, Apocalypse Now and even American Graffiti - to slip out again. When your personal industry gets as big as Ford's, you're reluctant to tinker too much with factory formula. Even if you know, as actors must know better than most, that all work and no play definitely makes a dull boy.

You've got to wonder if the sheer scale of contemporary stardom is what accounts for the fact that not only are some of the biggest stars in the world today so passionately conservative in their professional choices, they were way more interesting before they became big stars. Mel Gibson was never more adventurous as an actor than he was in his Road Warrior/Year Of Living Dangerously/Mrs. Soffel phase. And it's truly hard to imagine that Robert Redford, an actor so carefully protective of his image he makes Ford look like Sean Penn, ever played anything but magic-hour heartland demigods. And, I don't care what anybody says, Tom Hanks pretty well went kaput as an interesting actor (and never more interesting than in Big) the minute they handed him that statuette for Philadelphia. From that moment forward, it was mission time: time to save Private Ryan. (That's why I hope Jim Carrey, whose performance as the two-two-two-cops-in-one in Me, Myself And Irene is a marvel of comic energy and ingenuity, lets the Oscar thing go.)

Besides, the ironic thing about classic Hitchcockian countercasting is that, despite the fact that he so brilliantly tweaked the star personas of people like Stewart, Grant and Fonda for purposes of maximum audience manipulation, it was far more common for actors to mess with their personas 40 or 50 years ago than it is today. Clark Gable, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster: each of these stars had boldly defined personas, yet each made intermittent forays into roles that confounded those images, deriving dramatic resonance from the fact that they chafed against our expectations. While What Lies Beneath is far from a great movie, and while Harrison Ford is hardly great in it, one hopes it does well, if only to encourage the guy to loosen up, take more risks and have fun. In too many recent movies, Ford seemed to be using movies as a political platform: to run for office.

And while it's easy to imagine that within the heart of all politicians there beats a frustrated actor, it's deadly when an actor starts to think like a politician.

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