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A Perfect Villain
Shedding Light on Michael Douglas
BY LARRY TERENZI
Film Nation
The doorknob turns while the bolt slides away with a flat metallic click. Slowly, mysteriously, half a double door draws back, opening a gap barely big enough for a body to squeeze through. A hand creeps in, searching along the door's surface, followed by the prowling figure of a man hugging the wall with the alacrity of an intruder.
"How's that for an entrance?" asks Michael Douglas, slapping a pack of Marlboros on the table and settling easily into a chair.
Consummate, considering his new film A Perfect Murder has him playing a ruthless, bankrupted master of the universe plotting to kill his unfaithful trophy wife and secure her trust fund. Costarring Gwyneth Paltrow and Viggo Mortenson, and directed by Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), the psychological thriller is more of a how-done-it than a who-done-it, riffing on Dial M for Murder, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 classic.
| "I was in the middle of a divorce, so it seemed appropriate to do a movie about killing your wife." |
"I was in the middle of a divorce," Douglas says, "so it seemed appropriate to do a movie about killing your wife."
Silence except for nervous laughter, which I determine to be mine. Somewhere, I imagine, the sun's last light dissolves into the gloom of a forest, a biting wind blasts across a hard landscape, vapors rise over a black lake, wolves howl under a full moon. The Prince of Darkness has risen; he speaks with a voice of gravel, wears designer cashmere, and likes to show his butt on-screen. Here's a guy who specializes in the evil that men do, in exposing the flaws of the human psyche, in taking us to the frustrated and erotically perverse edge of the staid Everyman. He's the bloodless Jimmy Stewart, jacked-up, spun-around and fueled with a combustible mix of aggression and fear.
Douglas insists it's nothing personal. He considers the change of his persona (from that of timid gas-pumping college dropout, the sensitive hippie son of Kirk Douglas who didn't try acting until he was 21, to confident star and the slick embodiment of wealth gone bad) to be a cultural transformation, rather than an individual one. "I like to think that I'm sort of a barometer of the country," he says.
| "I like to think that I'm sort of a barometer of the country," |
Sadly, he may be right. Although he became a double threat early in his career, producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest while appearing on television's The Streets of San Francisco, it took him a long time to come into his own. The truth is, it wasn't until he portrayed the epitome of the predatory Reaganomic financier in Wall Street — which won him a Best Actor Oscar — and the philandering husband in Fatal Attraction that Douglas became universally acknowledged as an actor — and as an unlikely, bad-boy heartthrob. "I was surprised at how quickly [women] forgave me in Fatal. You can get to be a bad guy without any guilt."
But Douglas must have an affinity for controversy. A Perfect Murder is just the latest of a spate of recent movies that pairs up aging male actors with hot young actresses who are usually less than half their age. "It's been around as long as civilization has," he says, denying evidence of a trend. "Older, successful, wealthy people, whether they were kings or shahs, had younger attractive women in their lives. You also have some guys in pretty good shape — going up to Sean Connery, Bob Redford, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, then you have Harrison [Ford], myself. So you've got a lot of older leading men who really aren't ready or willing to just go off into the sunset to play character parts. Society still allows us the convention, whether it's real or not."
Plus, the casting of Paltrow — who Douglas knew when she was a child — as his wife raised more than a few eyebrows. "Did I question early on doing a movie with a little girl I used to sit on my lap? Yeah, but it made total sense and I understood it. She's a big girl."
If you think building a career with sleaze — even smart sleaze — is easy, think Mickey Rourke. Yet Douglas' reputation as an audience fave grew with each potentially unsympathetic role. From the lascivious cop in Basic Instinct to the uptight time bomb in Falling Down to the self-absorbed millionaire in The Game, his very arrogance in these parts served something deeper, gave them more heft than maybe they deserved. It acted as a critique of the characters themselves, a comment on their depravity and the society that spawned them.
"I've always chosen from the heart, out of passion, initially. Then I go back and read the script and make sure that it's supported structurally. I've always gone from emotion. "
| "I get the pictures where you have to talk a lot. There aren't a lot of actors who can do dialogue." |
He agrees with the suggestion that he has a penchant for making timely, politically charged films, but shrugs off the notion that he is a political actor. "The roles have never been a strategic decision," he says. "I get the pictures where you have to talk a lot. There aren't a lot of actors who can do dialogue."
Which probably makes him overqualified for his next movie, a submarine action-thriller due out next year called U-571 that has him playing, against all odds, the hero. And beyond that? "I haven't played with a lady for a little while. I could do a romantic comedy. Something light, then get back to the darkness."
Douglas has more than emerged from his father's lengthy shadow to become a bona fide Hollywood player. "You've got to be humble. Or try to be, anyway," he says and smiles. It's a bright, warming smile.
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