Willem Dafoe is Gene Hackman
14/10/07 21:28 Filed in: Cable
Guys
Willem Dafoe, photo from WireImage.
I love my wacky movies and I love my silly movies, and it's utterly surreal to find Willem Dafoe inhabiting both worlds.
In one week I viewed Mr Bean's Holiday, an artless, almost wordless comedy of spastic limbs and wide-eyed wonder starring Rowan Atkinson. His nemesis in the film, apart from his studious lack of understanding of anything that normal humans can do, is...Willem Dafoe. In Holiday, Dafoe plays Carson Clay, a self-obsessed director who is in Paris to direct a commercial and introduce his new film at Cannes.
He is, along with everyone else in the film, Atkinson's straightman, so when everyone else is goodnaturedly bending with the crazed flow of the star's jitters and shakes, Willem Dafoe is a solid, slow moving moon that orbits the out of control comedy comet that Atkinson portrays.
In Autofocus, playing John Carpenter, he is the endlessly eager buddy, in a much tighter orbit around Greg Kinnear's earnest, all-American sex addict Bob Crane, the murdered star of Hogan's Heroes.
Directed by Paul Schrader, Autofocus is a surprisingly warm retelling of the circumstantial information known about the late star's enthusiasm for both sex with his attractive fans and for first photographing and later videotaping his romps with them.
Dafoe's take on the character, a spookily crafty drift between backslapping partner in crime and anally probing sex buddy is the most riveting thing in the film, a black hole of amorality that relentlessly sucks Kinnear's vacillating Crane into a world of mini-skirted dance party decadence.
He's been in all kinds of movies, in big-budget special effects extravaganzas like Spiderman and in luxuriant art romances like The English Patient.
As of this writing, Dafoe has six new films in production and he will be competent and capable in all of them. Like Gene Hackman, he takes the jobs and keeps working, his skilful reading of the characters he inhabits as cool and engaging as watching a chameleon change colour and disappear into its surroundings.
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