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CINEMA: Good News and Bad News____________________

Long way from Pasadena Playhouse

After 40 years and 130 films, Hoffman and Hackman unite on the silver screen

By Barrett Hooper

Forty years ago, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman were struggling stage actors sharing a tiny New York apartment. Now, with more than 130 film credits and 12 Academy Award nominations (and four wins) between them, the two are finally sharing the screen together in Runaway Jury.

Photo: Dustin Hoffman

Sitting with the two actors for an interview, one discovers they have more in common than a shared Least Likely to Succeed Award from the Pasadena Playhouse, where Hackman and Hoffman cut their teeth. For example, Hoffman burst on the scene with an Oscar nomination for 1967's The Graduate and later co-starred in the unacclaimed Ishtar, with Warren Beatty, while Hackman's first big-screen success was his Oscar-nominated turn as Buck Barrow in 1967's Bonnie and Clyde with Beatty, a role Hackman landed after being fired from his part as Hoffman's father in The Graduate. And both worked as waiters at a Howard Johnson restaurant near Times Square (although only Hoffman was fired from the job).

Did you guys ever imagine the level of stardom you would achieve?

GH: I would've been happy with an off, off Broadway job and that's what happened. We both started in something like that.

Photo: Gene Hackman

DH: Back then, [Robert Duvall] was working all night at the post office, Gene was working for the Greenwich Village Moving Company, I didn't have a job yet, and the three of us went out together for years. Each one had a different acting gig and this was coming off of the days with Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson and Troy Donahue and good looking guys and Bonanza and we were character types, meaning we're ugly.

GH: Speak for yourself.

DH: Well, I was more ugly.

What changed to allow you guys to be stars?

DH: A decline in the culture.

Photo: Actor Dustin Hoffman sits on a bed during an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles. (AP/Stephanie Diani)

GH: Everyone has a chance, if you're lucky enough to find the property, and we all three individually were very fortunate.

Gene, why did you get fired from The Graduate?

DH: He's not a good actor.

GH: I got fired, I think, because I just didn't fulfill the director's and the writer's idea of what the part should've been.

What most surprised the two of you about working with the other?

GH: It's funny, I wasn't surprised at all. I felt like we had worked together.

DH: We did -- in school.

GH: At Pasadena Playhouse, we did Mice and Men.

DH: He was a brilliant Lenny.

GH: We also were double cast in Taming of the Shrew -- we played the same role.

DH: We both played Petruchio.

GH: I had to wear his tights. I played in the first act and then Dustin came out and played the same character in the second act. It must've startled people.

What was it like shooting the scene where your characters face off against each other?

DH: [The director] decided to shoot the scene, the bathroom scene, the last day of the shoot. But Gene finished his work weeks before and I finished my work weeks before and now we have to sit every day, waiting as the clock ticks and it's always nice to have a film over with. We show up to do the scene the day before here in New Orleans and we admit to each other that we hadn't slept the night before, how fucking nervous we were. We had to shoot eight pages, and we weren't going to get through it, and so we did the first take and we were terrible, both of us, and yet we embraced each other because we got through it. It was intimidating. It's a freak accident that we became stars. There is a part of us that always feels like we're a fraud. That's enough to make you nervous.

GH: I still, when I'm getting ready to do a scene, have a kind of opening night jitters or whatever, but I like that. That's part of the reason that I'm still in the business. There's something at stake, you're not just showing up, you're not a day player, you're not just trying to make a living. The thrill of that is that there's nothing like it, absolutely nothing like it.

Can you talk about working with John Cusack?

DH: Make that answer quick so you can get back to talking about me.

GH: John's an interesting actor ...

DH: Next question!

How do you approach a character like this after doing it so many times before?

GH: I think that pretty much says it all, in a way. I always try to find in these bad guys something that's human that makes them even more diabolical. If you see someone that's all bad, you kind of just put them in the monster category, but if you see someone who is really bad, but is also a father and a grandfather and all of that, that's even worse, I think.

Have you ever served on a jury?

GH: No. I've never been called, actually.

DH: He has a shady background.

Dustin, have you been called?

DH: I got called, in the first time in my memory, right before I came here and I said, "I have to publicize a movie."

What films do you think defined each other's career?

DH: I thought The French Connection, Scarecrow, The Conversation.

GH: I like Tootsie and there are a couple others. What else did you do?

I assume that you guys still love to work.

GH: It's still kind of a narcotic. You show up on a set and there are 80 people there waiting for you to do something fun and the pressure of that is fun for me. I don't know, do you like that?

DH: There is something about coming from the stage. It's a different way of acting because you don't have to reach the last person in the audience. I mean, everyone in the movie is sitting in the first row. We knew we were going to be unsuccessful, that was the beauty of it. It frees you.

Yeah, we were out of the Kerouac generation and Ginsberg and the beat generation. We were going to spend a lifetime being anti-establishment. That was the pretense, On the Road, that's the generation that we'd come from. I've always said, as I'm sure that Gene has, "If you become an actor to make it, you're crazy."

What about the shock of becoming of a success when you're prepared to be a failure?

GH: Look, they're not even.

DH: There's that thing that goes around with the Oscar, be careful what you wish for because careers sometimes slide downward after an Oscar, whether it's a director or an actor. In this country, the thing about success and failure, it's odd because that becomes the be all and end all. It all has to do with money. You're a failure if you don't make money, you're a success if you make a lot of money. No one ever looks at the substance of what you're doing. What if you do a film that's a failure and it's good work, and I must say that's what we came from and that doesn't change. That part doesn't change. You try to do good work, it's a food in itself.

What's the secret to your longevity?

DH: It is amazing how we've retained our youth physically. And it's mostly testosterone, I would say.

Trials and manipulations

Runaway Jury a solid timewaster

By Christopher Knight

The novels of John Grisham are like cinematic Sea Monkey kits: just add film and the freeze-dried characters jump to life, creating a solid timewaster that's not terribly memorable. Runaway Jury won't leave you feeling cheated out of two hours and $12, but it's not going to help you reach a higher plane, either.

Photo: GOOD V. EVIL: Good-hearted lawyer of the people Wendall Rohr (Dustin Hoffman), left, confronts evil jury consultant Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman) in Runaway Jury.

The movie packs its courtroom with some fairly big names -- even some of the secondary characters are medium-sized, B+list talent like Jennifer Beals and Jeremy Piven. The story starts with one of those senseless workplace shootings by a recently fired employee, and then cuts to two years later and the start of a trial that pits the widow of one of the victims against the gun manufacturer. In the novel it's big tobacco, but the filmmakers apparently found first-hand bullets a more visceral threat than second-hand smoke. Dustin Hoffman plays a goodhearted lawyer of the people, so of course he represents the plaintiff and dresses down. I find as he ages he more and more resembles Tootsie in drag, and his Southern accent just adds to that impression. On the evil side is Gene Hackman, hired by a consortium of cigar-smoking, jowly suits to do whatever it takes for the gun company to win this case. He strides into the courtroom in an early scene and inhales: "Furniture polish, cheap cologne and body odour," he says, relishing the stink. He's in love with the idea that people can be divided into the wicked and the stupid, and it's clear where he places himself.

Enter John Cusack, wearing that pouty, confused look his fans demand no matter the role. He and Rachel Weisz are the wild cards in this stacked deck -- while Hoffman's lawyer puts his faith in justice and Hackman in his evil tricks, these two hatch a scheme to control the outcome from the inside, for a price. Cusack uses reverse psychology to get on the jury, and Weisz starts phoning Hoffman and Hackman, telling them $10-million will buy them the verdict of their choice. Director Gary Fleder, conscious that courtrooms involve a lot of sitting around, never keeps the camera still for more than a few seconds. The first 30 minutes of Runaway Jury rush by like an episode of The West Wing, where conversations can only continue as long as people are striding purposefully down corridors, or at the very least riding in cars. Even when characters have to take the stand or sit down to eat, the camera continues to whirl dizzily about the room. It's the only dizzifying thing about the film, however. Plotting and exposition are arrow-straight, and any twist is as clearly signposted as a gas station on the Trans-Canada. Even a little gag about the blind juror who becomes the foreman is announced twice, with a shot of the blind figure of Justice in front of the courtroom, then by the fellow juror who remarks, "Sure he's blind, but so's Justice!" This is a movie where you can duck out to refill your giant cup of cola beverage, certain you'll be able to pick up the thread when you return.

Still, it's fun to watch everyone sail through this story. Hackman barks orders, grinds his teeth and throws telephones around, and sets up his command centre with giant plasma screens where a lesser evil character would make do with boxy computer monitors -- no sense in rigging the jury with jury-rigged equipment. None of the leads are required to stretch, so they look relaxed in their roles, which isn't a bad thing. We get a few little plot twists, a bit of overly moral speechifyin' by Hoffman, and some satisfying gavel-banging by the judge. Movie adjourned.

Paltrow plays suicidal poet Sylvia Plath

A dreary film bio that offers little insight

By DAVID GERMAIN

Photo: Gwyneth Paltrow, in a 2002 photo.(AP)

No disrespect intended, but you may never be happier to see a writer carted out of her home feet-first than you will with Sylvia. That moment signals the end is mercifully at hand to this dreary film biography that offers little insight into the character of suicidal poet Sylvia Plath. Sylvia, with Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role, presents a woman so unswervingly bound for death by her own hand that her terrible journey ends up feeling monotonous and her actual suicide anti-climatic. When she's not trying to kill herself, Paltrow's Plath talks about doing the deed, recounting past failed attempts at suicide and spouting such cheery lines as, "Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well." No one expects a trip to Disney World in a biopic about Plath. But there has to be more to the woman than the relentless gloom and single-minded devotion to self-annihilation presented by director Christine Jeffs. Only early on, with Plath's whirlwind romance and marriage in 1956 to future British poet laureate Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig), does Sylvia rise above a suicide watch. Here, Paltrow and Craig capture moments of passion -- and the few signs of a poet's soul Sylvia possesses -- as they engage in speed recitations with friends or float by boat along a stream, with Plath calling lines of Chaucer in Middle English to cows on the bank.

Plath and Hughes' relationship soured amid his philandering, her depression and her jealousy over his early publishing success. But John Brownlow's screenplay leaves viewers to conclude that was all there was to the marriage. Their young daughter and son are barely present, their two years living in Plath's native Massachusetts is depicted in just a few scenes and her time in therapy while in America is ignored. Sylvia mostly settles for giving Paltrow showy moments to rail against Hughes or play the moody emotional martyr in introspective moments. We all know Plath killed herself. Sylvia provides the facts and external circumstances -- death by carbon-monoxide poisoning from her gas oven in February 1963, a month after her book The Bell Jar was published. The movie traces the contributing factors -- a bad marriage, artistic frustration, critical neglect of her work. Yet the root causes remain generally unexplored. The film never leaves any sense of her real inner world and what made her predisposed to suicide. In one scene, Plath's mother (played by Paltrow's real-life mom, Blythe Danner) recounts young Sylvia's early suicide attempt, when she took sleeping pills then hid in a cubbyhole beneath the house, where she was not found until three days later. Again, we're given the effect, not the cause.

The filmmakers seem to think Plath is such a poster-poet for depression that it's enough simply to proclaim her as suicidal without exploring why. New Zealand-born director Jeffs struck a delicate chord with her promising debut feature Rain in 2001, a moody, perceptive study of a teenage girl's transition to adulthood amid troubled family times. Sylvia needed more of Rain's gossamer inward gaze and less of the let's-win-Gwyneth-another-Oscar histrionics.

She's a Renegade with no Deadline

By Katrina Onstad

Movies have always confused journalists with cops, and maybe the comparison isn't far off: Both jobs appear to be about unravelling mysteries, but both are really about paperwork. The difference, however, is that cops get shot more often. Not to belittle those journalists who put their lives on the line daily, but their movie brethren are a Hollywood fantasy of tough-talking, street-walking renegades without deadlines. Meet the patron saint of fantasy journalists: Veronica Guerin, real-life crime columnist for the Sunday Independent who was shot to death in 1996 for digging too deep into Dublin's drug trade. As played by Cate Blanchett, she's professionally relentless, meaning she'll wear black stilettos to get her story or storm into a room of junkies and announce, "I'm Veronica. Where did you get the gear?" Movie Guerin also never takes a single note or uses a tape recorder.

Photo: WAR OF WORDS Blanchett plays risk-taking Irish journalist Guer

When she's shot in the first few minutes -- the movie is one big flashback -- one wonders if the killers are revenge-seeking fact checkers. The hack coating that clings to this compelling story is courtesy of director Joel Schumacher. The man behind Bad Company and the two worst Batmans (yes, he made the respectable war pic Tigerland, but he'll have to give us several dozen Tigerlands to make up for Flawless) is a cinematic bully; his greatest pleasure is to get in his audience's face and roar, filling every possibly thoughtful moment with a loud noise. Schumacher is faithless; he doesn't believe moviegoers could care about Veronica Guerin unless those out to get her are cackling cartoon baddies.

The drug-addled city is in the palm of John Gilligan (Gerard McSorley), an explosive gangster with a fondness for horses. He's surrounded by grunting leather-jacketed thugs, each indistinguishable from the next. To get to Gilligan, Guerin uses her favourite source, John Traynor (Ciarán Hinds), a low-level hood with a hunger for publicity. Their relationship is the most interesting in the film: each parasitic, each slightly enamoured with the other. Blanchett, who plays Guerin as an overly sparky plug, doesn't really connect with anyone the way she does this greasy guy with the bad dye job. Her husband is a shadowy chastiser who says almost nothing except "be careful." Which begs the question: How exactly is it different for a woman to play the hero? According to this film, it's no different; absent mother is just like absent father. 

Photo: 'HEAVEN' FORBIDDING Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi cut to the chase.