Up The Arts

WALKEN IN THE TWILIGHT

October 6, 2009 – 8:21 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

I can’t help it, I love Christopher Walken. He is a freak, an utterly unique actor, inimitable, a treasure of American cinema. There are very few actors – with the exception of Crispin Glover – who can so comfortably span roles ranging from terrifyingly evil to campy (and often evil), and at the same time give believable life to personalities so incredibly bizarre their psyches could not possibly exist in our mundane world. To call Walken a character actor would be to do him a disservice – most character actors rely on the same accents and mannerisms whomever they play (Jack Nicholson and Robert de Niro are character actors on steroids). Walken, on the other hand, can take the most banal line and gives it a dramatic wallop and singular diction that no other human being can – and one not even approaching natural. There’s nothing natural about him – the hair, people, the hair. That unnatural artifice, ladies and gentlemen, is called acting – none of that ‘Method’ nonsense here.

Walken was born on March 31, 1943 in Queens, and began his theatrical career, bizarrely enough, as child performer and then a New York chorus boy. This makes complete sense when you consider his exquisite dance routine in Pennies From Heaven (1981), turning a simple cameo role into a major show stopper. He is, of course, best known for playing villains and eccentrics – and most often, eccentric villains, once describing himself to a journalist as “a malevolent WASP”. While filming The Comfort of Strangers (1991) he told director Paul Schraeder (at the time lighting him from below for that campfire ghost story malevolence effect), “I don’t need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own”. Boy, can he ever.

Previously audiences had seen Walken in Annie Hall (1977) as Diane Keaton’s scary brother, the suicide-obsessed driver (reminiscent of Yepihodov in Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard) who turns out to be Woody Allen’s ride home. Even then it was just a glimpse, a single one gag scene so that Allen can make a joke of someone else’s neuroses (which is not so much ironic as hypocritical). Who can forget the line: “Sometimes when I’m driving – on the road, at night – I see two headlights coming toward me – fast, I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly…” Well, who hasn’t?

In 1978, however, the public got to see him as Nick in The Deer Hunter. His startling portrayal of a shattered soul and those Russian roulette scenes justly earned him an Oscar for Supporting Actor, making him a contender in Hollywood, although he was well stage-seasoned by then and had performed in memorable minor roles in The Anderson Tapes and The Happiness Cage (1972), and Next Stop and Greenwich Village (1976). We briefly pass over Heaven’s Gate – it’s hardly Walken’s fault that this brilliant immigrant-focussed anti-capitalist western went down with US audiences like (as we say in the Antipodes) a cup of cold sick. He is disturbing as the telepathic protagonist John Smith in The Dead Zone (1983) – a plot which Stephen King, no auteur, insisted on reusing in Kingdom Hospital, his 2004 butchering of Lars von Trier’s Riget (1994). But then King does that in his televisual works; his Rose Red (2002) owes its most interesting aspects to The Haunting (the 1993 remake of the 1963 movie of the original play). Walken’s role in The Dead Zone is unusual in that it seems written for a more ‘regular guy’ actor – which Walken is definitely not. Nor do we think of the actor in sympathetic roles, so the whole experience strikes one as slightly odd.

He is grossly underrated as the evil father initiating his son into a life of crime in At Close Range (1986). This is Walken’s first significant non-cerebral and less spectral role. “See, most people that drive through here – they see farms – houses and fields and… shit. I see money. Everywhere I go I see money. I see things that can move, anything that can move’s got my name writ on it. ‘Brad Whitewood! Please hooold for delivery!’” As ‘Big Brad’, Walken starts acting below the neck. To prepare for the role of Pennsylvania tractor thief he drove to the filming location in a pick-up truck with co-star Sean Penn (the son, ‘Little Brad’) and adopted an accent that seems to be pseudo-Tupelo with a hint of Phildelphia. Walken told Film Comment that the character was “a hillbilly Lucifer. He was sort of the dark side of the moon of Elvis.” Brilliant, but when does a hillbilly Lucifer find time to have a stylist put highlights in his afro.

As the campy Aryan Bond villain Max Zorin in A View to a Kill (1985) he set the precedent for playing the archetypal summer movie arch-villain. Recall his early face off with Roger Moore’s 007 in which he delivers the line “You amuse me, Mr Bond” with the genuine smile of one not feeling at all threatened (and no doubt planning an elaborate demise for his nemesis). Max Zorin ultimately evolves into Max Shreck[1] (note the matching platinum-white, aerodynamic, Gabor-esque bouffants) in Batman Returns (1992). In both roles, he looks effortlessly elegant and sharp, as if the Great Gatsby had sold his soul to Satan (which is what Fitzgerald meant metaphorically).

Walken has a remarkable comedic sensibility, ably demonstrated in his Saturday Night Live appearances with Adam Sandler, as the oddball drill sergeant in Biloxi Blues (1988), and as Death pretending to be a scientist (with the overly symbolic name of ‘Morty’) in the otherwise ghastly Click (also with Sandler, 2006). This is a side of him all too rarely seen, as is his warm and very human television performances in Sarah, Plain and Tall (1991, with Glenn Close) and its sequel Skylark (1993). All too often, though, Walken is cast in malevolent roles like the ice-cold gangster-cum-philanthropist in the exceedingly violent King of New York (1990), the mobster who interrogates Dennis Hopper in True Romance and as the narcissistic record producer in Wayne’s World 2 (both movies 1993). As Frank White in King of New York, Walken commits ultra-violent acts with incredible panache and style (as he does in all of his collaborations with director Abel Ferrara), such as when inviting the guys back to his hotel while shooting bullets into a corpse.

For me, Walken’s most discomforting role – apart from schlock like Brainstorm (1983), Communion (1989) and the straight to video Antz (1998) – was as Bruno Buckingham (with a shiny black bob) in Wild Side (1995). “Put it on straight, punk” – that’s Buckingham ordering his chauffeur-turned-traitor (Steven Bauer) to put a condom on him so that Walker’s character can sodomize him in front of love interest Anne Heche. I’m not sure why. In the end (pardon the pun) Walken doesn’t follow through and instead skips around the prostrate Bauer with a cigar in his mouth and a gun in his hand, whipping Bauer with his own tighty whities and spouting nonsense like “You’re lucky ‘cos you’re peachy! You’re lucky ‘cos you’re fucky”. This has to be a stand-alone ‘what-the-fuck?’ moments in Walken’s career, but he can pull it off – he’s a man so comfortable with his own sexuality that he can execute the his most perverse characters with complete aplomb. Consider Walken in The Comfort of Strangers (1990) – Harold Pinter’s adaption of Ian McEwan’s novel, set against the claustrophobic decadence of Venice. Walken plays the wealthy Robert, who suffers from a complex lust/murder reaction (there’s probably a German word for it, but for the moment it escapes me) with Rupert Everett’s Colin (but then again, Everett has that effect on everyone). Walken is suavity personified, a dagger draped in Armani. Al Pacino nearly played the role, so thank God for small mercies.

So magnificent is Walken, that he can cause me to watch things I wouldn’t dream of seeing. My personal taste aside, Walken has been in some dogs of movies, like Basquiat (1996 – but it must be said, Julian Schnabel is a better filmmaker than a painter) and The Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000), but he shines.I loathe Tarantino movies – I think they’re absurd, illiterate, overblown, self-indulgent fanboy nonsense, but I ate up Walken as Captain Koons in Pulp Fiction (1994). When he delivered the monologue (Tarantino loves monologues) in which he passes on to Bruce Willis his POW father’s watch, I squirted coke through my nose and into my popcorn. “Five long years, he wore this watch – up his ass. Then – he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass two years. Then… after seven years, I was sent home to my family. Now – little man? I give the watch to you.” What a magnificent hybrid of the sentimental and the sordid. Walken was in True Romance (1993) with Dennis Hopper and I suspect the former may have modelled his delivery on the latter.

In Sleepy Hollow (1999 – a fairly simple narrative made excessively confusing by Tim Burton’s abandon), Walken’s pre-Headless Horseman manages to evoke terror, and occasionally even sympathy without uttering a word and teeth filed to points – and manages to hold his own, bookended  by the charismatic tsunami that is Johnny Depp. There is, perhaps, no actor better suited to play a supernatural denizen of Hell – but then all of Walken’s characters have something of the fallen angel about them. Sleepy Hollow contains no less than seventeen decapitations – eighteen, if you count the witch sawing the head off a bat in the séance scene.

Walken is no stranger to masticating scenery and the younger leads sometimes seem to struggling with the effort of keeping up; vade Walken as Leonardo DiCaprio’s father in Catch Me if You Can (2002). I have never understood DiCaprio’s appeal – he seems to lack any secondary male characteristics – but his character’s entire motivation is a severely deranged attempt to make the Walken character proud. Walken as Frank Abagnale is a deceiver seen by his son as the successful businessman with the beautiful French wife (Nathalie Baye), with the IRS waiting around the corner. What is impressive about Walken in this role – after a few years of sweet Fanny Adams with Abel Ferrara – is his poignant portrayal of sorrow once his Frank realises how he has contributed to his son’s madness and criminality. Frank Abagnale is the mirror inversion of Big Brad.

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[1] The name ‘Max Schreck’ is presumably taken from the silent screen actor who so famously played Nosferatu, although (as in the case of the cartoon Hollywood ogre) Schreck is also German for ‘terror’.