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It’s funny what sticks in a person’s head about an actor, but when you have a career as long and varied as Robert Duvall’s, maybe that makes sense. He was in “The Godfather,” of course, need I say more, and literally started his movie career as Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I mean, c’mon now, and is the guy who said he loved the smell of napalm in the morning in “Apocalypse Now,” for god’s sake, and yet I find myself thinking about the disaster movie “Deep Impact.” There’s a scene where Duvall’s astronaut is at a barbecue and drinking a beer with the NASA flight director (Kurtwood Smith), who is wearing a tropical print shirt, and talking about the crew for the big mission and expressing his fear and the whole thing can’t help but feel faintly ridiculous (did I mention Kurtwood Smith is wearing a tropical print shirt?) and yet Duvall just effortlessly speckles over it with this good-natured chuckle. He had a great chuckle, you know; Robert Duvall’s chuckle was as much an American national treasure as the late Gene Hackman’s. That’s not my favorite Duvall memory, though. No, my favorite Duvall memory comes from the same year, as chance would have it, 1998, in “A Civil Action,” where he’s playing the defense attorney who treats the law not as the rules and regulations helping bind together The Great Experiment but as the rules of a game that can be manipulated to engender a favorable outcome. (5 out of 4 Supreme Court justices rate him as their favorite movie lawyer.) Mostly, though, I just like the scene where he excoriates a clerk for daring to interrupt his lunch break, an argument and elegy for finding shelter from the capitalist storm. It’s the greatest courtroom movie speech of all time and it’s not even in a courtroom.
“You know, I’d make a point of taking an hour or so away from all the noise and insanity of this place. I’d find a place that was relatively quiet and peaceful, have a sandwich, read a magazine. Maybe listen to a game if one was on. I’d make sure everyone knew not to disturb me during that hour. Because that would be my time – my own private time, which no one, if they had any sense of self-preservation, would dare interrupt.”
After reading that Duvall had died at the age of 95, I reached for my copy of David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film to see what he had to say on the actor. He starts by talking about Duvall’s role as consigliere Tom Hagen in “The Godfather,” as I suppose one would, writing that Robert Duvall the actor “relates to high stardom like an Irishman among Italians. He is not beautiful or forceful enough to carry a big film. But stars and Italians alike depend on his efficiency, his tidying up around their grand gestures, his being perfect shortstop on a team full of personality sluggers.” There’s a lot of truth to this, and oddly enough, it’s as much epitomized as it is refuted in Duvall’s great passion project, 1997’s “The Apostle,” which he wrote and directed and starred in as a Pentecostal preacher. Indeed, though the name Elmer Gantry might have Irish roots, Duvall is making the Irishman version of that movie, at least, in the way Thomson is cheekily defining it, resisting the obvious stereotypes, effortlessly evincing firm belief in and devotion to the Almighty despite all the baggage the character otherwise brings. It’s Duvall’s version of a personality slugger.
Kevin Costner’s 2003 western “Open Range” has a climactic gunfight that tends to get cited as one of the genre’s best shootouts, but I have always preferred the moment just before the shooting begins when Duvall’s cattleman, Boss Spearman, goes into a drug store right before the shooting begins. “My friend and me got a hankering for Switzerland chocolate and a good smoke,” he says. No one ever seized the day with so little fuss. Costner directed, produced, and co-starred in “Open Range,” yet he downplays, to his own detriment even, ceding the stage to Duvall who in his easygoing jocularity appropriately suggests Walter Brennan taking the lead in a John Wayne joint. Costner might lay the American pioneer spirit on thick, but in the end, the movie is less a sentimental ode to American fortitude and independence than a lasting monument to his co-star.
