by Helen Garner
The Insider. Missed it. Don’t know why.
That was about the size of it. ‘And wasn’t there an Australian movie called The Crossing, way back?’ said my daughter. ‘Russell Crowe stood out. I thought, he’s got something.’
So I loaded up at the video shop, shut myself into the house and drew the blinds for a week. Outside the window each day my son-in-law was digging and laying out our new vegetable patch, with his eighteen-month-old son strapped to his back. Whenever I took a break I could hear them out there in the sun, singing and making silly noises and laughing quietly. I was embarrassed by the sounds of warped manliness I imagined reaching them from my closed-in room: the shatter of gunfire, the growling of wild beasts, the screams of the dismembered, the oafish grunts and curses of skinheads, the occasional staccato outbreak of foul speech. There was something perverse about it, on a clean spring morning.
George Ogilvie’s The Crossing takes place on Anzac Day in a country town. Bugles at dawn, Crowe and girlfriend asleep in a hayshed after making love, interiors smoky with golden light. Crowe’s widowed mother is a clingy, sentimental drunk. How can he be a man? A nature boy, he’s got the sweat sheen, the muscles, the scowl; he juts his jaw and fires guns into the air and poses wide-legged against a fierce blue sky; but he says ‘chahnce’ and wears tight white jeans, even when hunched under the open bonnet of a ute. Fast forward—but wait. Who’s that playing his girlfriend? Woh! It’s Danielle Spencer, the woman who’s now his wife.
The most interesting thing about her, here, is that she looks like him. The broad forehead, the eyebrows in a permanent inverted V of earnestness. The meaty nose. The rare smile. Impertinent psychologising possessed me while the film redeemed itself with a splendidly Shakespearean car and train smash.
Proof, written and directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, whose screenplay based on the novel Eucalyptus Crowe would years later allegedly feel competent to rewrite, is unusually inward and intense for an Australian movie—a triangle of emotional distortion and manipulation. Crowe plays a young kitchenhand in a restaurant with red-checked tablecloths. On the video case his eyes are a startling, innocent blue, something I haven’t noticed on screen.
He, of course, is the Eros figure of the piece—the untutored bogan who brings a blast of freshness into the lives of a nasty Camberwell pair, a blind man played by Hugo Weaving and his spiteful housekeeper Genevieve Picot. Crowe, as a physical worker, is again covered in a sheen of sweat. While Weaving lectures him on aesthetics he gazes up intently, showing us big features, juicily indented lips, a dimpled chin, an interesting breadth of brow. There is a little quality here, some nameless thing. ‘Everybody lies!’ he says to the neurotic Weaving, who suspects and thus meets betrayal everywhere; ‘but not all the time, and that’s the point!’ In Crowe’s roguish company Weaving laughs for the first time, an unnervingly jerky, nasal sound.
What the hell was Crowe doing in Mark Joffe’s Spotswood, that same year? Gee, it was a sweet movie—hopelessly old-fashioned but warm and funny. Anthony Hopkins as the time-and-motion man politely subdues his greatness, but for the first time I feel that Crowe, as the salesman, is biding his time. Technically one can’t fault him, but he’s not engaged. He’s already somewhere else.
My daughter found a letter I’d written her in 1992 after seeing Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper. Seems I liked it. ‘Russell Crowe was the leader of the skins, the one who’d read Mein Kampf etc. He sounded more like a Scotch College boy than a psychopath—rounded vowels, strong inner self.’ I wrote disdainfully of David Stratton’s refusal even to see the movie. But now, at second viewing, I couldn’t believe how much screen time is taken up with crane shots of boys running wildly in single file down narrow Footscray lanes. The brawl scenes too are interminable, adolescently gloried-in: later I noticed that the credits named five nurses. I started to fidget in my seat.
Crowe looms over the tale, unmodulated, with face of stone. He gets expression by jerking his jaw, swinging it from side to side. There’s a fabulous final scene on a beach. Crowe does a grand death, twitching and spewing blood, and he leaves a pretty corpse, but the standout in Romper Stomper is mad-faced Daniel Pollock, who in real life died not long after. What a loss Pollock is: that delicacy, a puzzled complexity just starting to grow.
I hunted out my 1994 review of The Sum of Us, directed by Kevin Dowling and Geoff Burton. Crowe plays Jeff, a gay plumber. The blue singlet? A mullet? How hard it is, now, to imagine this: ‘Jeff, a sweet-natured hulking boy whose self-esteem has taken a knock from a recent broken heart, comes home from the pub late on Friday night with a young gardener in tow.’ Should I scour the video shops? But ‘after a tantalising dip into a darker complexity it bounces straight back up to the surface and becomes what its provenance fates it to be—a sentimental exercise about love and family loyalty.’ Okay, pass, though a small warmth lingers.
Here I skipped forward to 1997, Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential. Twenty minutes in and Crowe, as Officer Bud White, has beaten up a couple of creeps, torn the Christmas decorations off the house-front of a wife-bashing parole violator, and pressed money into the grateful victim’s hand. Though I’m interested in detectives, I eschew them on screen; but LA Confidential, humming with the highly worked and disciplined craziness of the James Ellroy novel it’s based on, is something else.
For a start it’s beautiful. Every shot, every juxtaposition makes you gasp. The long, pale cars. The cream and white interiors of Kim Basinger’s apartment, her private bedroom all sunny and embroidered. Hanson cuts away from Crowe (in a singlet) beating the shit out of a perp in a blind-dimmed room to an exterior shot of a sunlit skyscraper which is so blatantly, glowingly phallic that it’s almost comical.
And the talent! It overflows. Guy Pearce as the idealistic prig, that porcelain face he’s got, the vulnerable rimless glasses; Kevin Spacey as the celebrity crime stopper, his level, insolent, flat-eyed stare. Crowe, the violent crusader with the wounded soul, is at ease in this league. He has earned his place in these superbly lit montages of expressionless men in suits, painterly group shots of casual beauty, with a thick soundtrack of shifting feet and murmuring voices and, somewhere out of shot, a man sobbing.
For disgraced Officer Bud White in LA Confidential I am prepared to forgive 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. I will even overlook the documented existence of a song called ‘Swallow My Gift’. Go, Russ, go! Let Kim Basinger drive you to Arizona, and learn to be happy.
Now we come to the problem of Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind. Why am I so reluctant to see it again? I don’t know, but my resistance is adamantine. I try hard to remember what bugged me about it. I don’t much like biopics. There’s a scenery-chewing element to movies about ‘the triumph of the human spirit’ that I can’t hack. Also, my week with Russell is running out and I’ve still got to plough through Master and Commander, The Insider and Gladiator. This isn’t supposed to be encyclopaedic. If it were I’d have had to go back to Neighbours.
Life is short. Pass. And I’m only pretending to be sorry.
You can’t talk about an actor’s oeuvre. Directors have oeuvres. Actors have jobs. They have skills, they have luck, they have reputations, they have things they are known for doing well—and they risk getting stuck in their own groove. What Crowe does best is a certain sort of maleness: he is really good at violence, and at only just managing to hold back from violence. The thin veneer of his character’s self-command is what makes him exciting to watch, if you like that sort of thing—and a woman can get pretty sick of the bloodletting that seems inseparable from Hollywood’s narrow concepts of manliness.
Peter Weir’s Master and Commander, concerning as it does the adventures of men and boys in the early nineteenth-century navy, turns on male codes and encompasses a great deal of violence, but in its flexible ideas of what manliness might be it displays a genial maturity. Its screenplay, issuing from a series of highly literate novels, holds firm, against the horrid brutality of a naval life, the formal starch of what is
still eighteenth-century speech. Fourteen minutes in, the decks are running with blood and the ship is holed and wallowing, but ‘If you please’, they say, or ‘May I beg you?’ A tiny midshipman comforts the ship’s doctor with the gift of a beetle. At table, officers burst into melodious song. The idea that a man might be an intellectual without losing face is given full worth.
Crowe as Captain Aubrey is a new proposition altogether. He’s carrying a bit of weight—you could almost say embonpoint. The long hair in its queue and the newly rounded face suit him, as does the flattering three-cornered hat. And what are these smiles? These flashes of benevolence and good humour? I had got past my hostility to Crowe, I had even begun to admire him; but this was the first time I’d liked him. When he picked up his fiddle and sat down to play a duet with the doctor, I waited for a shudder of embarrassment to spoil it for me. It didn’t come. I sat there in front of the TV thinking: He’s even made me believe in the violin. I pressed pause, ran to the cupboard, and poured myself a glass of port.
What could one drink to make Ridley Scott’s Gladiator bearable? Unable despite my best efforts to suspend disbelief, I was tormented by carping thoughts. Did they really have cafés in those Roman colonnades? How did Maximus keep his hair always at the perfect length, and who twirled those little kiss curls across his brow?
I enjoyed the Nuremberg-style extravaganzas. I was thrilled by the movie’s gorgeousness, its subtle colours, the extraordinary palette of blues. When they carried Maximus’s body away a fat tear plopped into my packet of bullets. But as soon as anyone spoke I had to get up and do some deep breathing. Those creaking rhetorical flourishes! ‘You shall watch as I bathe in their blood.’ ‘The time for half-measures is over, Senator.’ ‘It takes a Nemperor to rule a Nempire.’ ‘It vexes me. I’m terribly vexed.’ Coming to Gladiator as I did five years too late, I felt like Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus, all perfumed and fresh and maquillé, galloping up to his father Marcus Aurelius moments after the great greasy blackened brutes of Germania’s army have been routed by the Romans at untellable expense of life and limb.
‘Have I missed it?’ lisps Commodus, springing out of his chariot. ‘Have I missed the battle?’
His father regards him wryly. ‘You’ve missed the war.’
The Insider I saved for last. I had managed since 1999 to avoid knowing the first thing about it. I didn’t even know that Al Pacino, at whose shrine I have worshipped since The Godfather II, was in it. Again Crowe’s character is struggling for honour in the world of men. This time he plays a man of science, Dr Jeffrey Wigand, a researcher for a giant tobacco company who is threatened with litigation if he breaks a confidentiality agreement about the harmful properties of their products.
‘Tobacco’s a sales culture,’ says Pacino, as the tough 60 Minutes producer who wants Wigand to spit the dummy on TV. ‘Why’d you work for them?’
‘They paid me a lot o’ money.’
Treated with outrageous insolence by the company executives, Wigand begins to seethe with the desire to break his promise, cleanse himself of his compromises, and wreak revenge. But his only way of doing this is to put himself at the mercy of the commercial TV network CBS. Even a battle-hardened journalist like Pacino’s Lowell Bergman, with his dark-circled eyes and husky voice, can’t predict or control the treachery of his employers.
Can this blundering naïf, this tormented whistleblower, be Russell Crowe? He is unrecognisable, leached of vanity and self-regard. By holding his persona in check, he quadruples his power. His body, in the flapping suit, has grown all massive and square. Although his hair is grey, his eyes behind the unfashionable glasses are those of an unhappy, nerdish boy. His mouth is jammed hard in a straight line. His neck is rigid with suppressed emotion.
And the deep texture of the film! The camera always sliding at things from a surprising angle! The music—that countertenor soaring while Crowe, off his head with anger, belts a thousand white golf balls all over the driving range! What’s going on here? My notebook and pencil slide to the floor.
The tobacco company finds a way to gag Wigand in Kentucky: he is threatened with prison if he speaks in court. The cynical brutality he’s up against paralyses him, thickens the movie’s air. Crowe’s face is big, stunned, wounded, like a peasant’s. ‘How does one go to jail?’ he asks the journalist. Outside the courthouse, watched by the hawkish Pacino, he paces on green grass. His loneliness is appalling. Cars pass in silence. All sound is suspended, except a mandolin strumming soft and fast. Nothing breathes. Then he speaks: ‘Fuck it. Let’s go to court.’ The soundtrack explodes back into reality. That’s when I started howling, and hardly stopped till the credits rolled. It’s a splendid movie, grand and serious, and Crowe is the aching centre of it.
What has he gone through, what has he put others through, to get to this eminence? I roamed around the internet and found an interview with the director of The Insider, Michael Mann. ‘How did you work with Crowe?’ they ask him. Mann dodges it. ‘I don’t talk about some of that. Some of this stuff, it’s just not right to be public about.’
I felt frustrated and abashed, as if I’d been caught snooping. When I told a friend I was writing a piece about Crowe, he fired up: ‘Where do you get off? You’ve never met him, have you?’ ‘I’m only writing about his movies,’ I said, miffed, and that’s what I set out to do. But Crowe’s public persona, noisy and humourless and strutting, is forever making rude gestures in the corner of my eye, demanding attention and cursing those who give it. The only way to block it out is to turn to his work, to watch with joy as he steps away into that free place where art happens.
2005
PART SIX
In the Wings
My First Baby
THIS isn’t really a story. I’m just telling you what happened one summer when I was young. It was 1961, my first year away from home. I lived at Melbourne University, in a women’s college on a beautiful elm-lined boulevard. I was free and happy. Everyone was clever and so was I.
When summer came and exams were over, I went home to Geelong. I could have hung around the house all day with my sisters and my brother. I could have gone swimming or read books. But I was a student now, and students had jobs. I typed on my little Hermes portable a neat letter of application to Bright and Hitchcocks, Geelong’s biggest department store. They hired me for the Christmas rush. I could hardly wait to start.
They sent me to the basement. I went down a staircase with brass banisters, through the gardening and camping section, and into a stuffy dead-end corner. I had imagined books or cosmetics or nice cotton underwear, but I was to sell toys.
I liked it down there. The toys in those days were made of wood and paper and metal and cloth. We wrapped each purchase in a sheet of thick brown paper, and tied the parcel with string from a heavy ball that hung above the register. There wasn’t time for scissors: you ran the string around your forefinger in a special loop and snapped it back against itself. I wore a white blouse and a big gathered cotton skirt with stiff petticoats, pulled in at the waist by a brown dog-collar belt. And stockings attached to a suspender belt, and shoes called ‘flatties’ which gave no support. My feet ached that summer. They ached rhythmically, like string quartets of pain, and, by the end of each day, like a great screaming Wagnerian orchestra.
But this is about another kind of pain.
On a certain shelf in our department stood the dolls. The goggle-eyed, sissy ones bored me. I despised their stiff hair and aprons, their tiny white shoes, their pink and useless feet. I sold a lot of them. I worked scornfully, packing and wrapping the ridiculous things in their cellophane-fronted boxes. I fancied myself an intellectual when aunts and mothers tilted their permed heads this way and that and smiled and went, ‘Aaaaaah!’
But there was one doll that I did like. It lay flat on its back in a cardboard box. It was naked but for a nappy. Its torso was soft, its head was heavy. When you picked it up, its eyelids slid shut, its limbs flopped loosely and its head dropped back
, exactly like a real baby. You had to hold it properly.
I came to feel that the doll was private and personal to me. I thought of buying it, but it was very expensive—and imagine an intellectual turning up at home with a doll. I didn’t want anyone else to buy it. Nobody showed any lasting interest in it, but I kept stowing it behind other items, just in case. Every afternoon at 5.30, before I went home, I made sure the doll was still safe, at the back of the shelf.
The Christmas rush became intense. We sweated down there in our stuffy department. I had less and less time for the doll. Entire days would pass when I didn’t go looking for it. Then one afternoon I saw a middle-aged woman lurking behind the shelf where it was kept. She stayed there for a suspiciously long time. In a lull, I slid over to see what she was up to.
She had dug the doll out of its box, and she was holding it in her arms. Her head was bent over it. She didn’t even notice I was there. I couldn’t see her face but there was something about her posture that made me pause. Even with her back to me, she was radiating ‘keep off ’.
I returned to the cash register. She stayed behind the shelf for ten minutes, fifteen minutes. I was seething with jealousy. She didn’t bring anything to the counter. After a while, she emerged from behind the shelf and disappeared up the stairs. Every day at the same time, she came back. She never looked at us or spoke to us. She made a beeline through the crowd of Christmas shoppers to the shelf where the doll was kept, took it out of the box, and held it in her arms. If any of us had to pass her, she turned her face away. She had a limp perm and her clothes were drab. I looked at her hand, but I can’t remember now whether she was wearing a ring.
I was nineteen and I thought of her as old. She had no right to be cuddling a doll. It was indecent. It mortified and enraged me. But once as I passed, in my jealousy, she glanced up and our eyes met. She held my gaze for a moment, with my doll in her arms, and flashed me a tiny, embarrassed smile. Her face was tired. It was absolutely ordinary. And into my head shot the thought: her real baby died, years ago, and she will never get over it.
