Ray of Light

I have been reading Glenn Kenny’s excellent “Made Men”, a gift from My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife. And while its subtitle, “The Making of Goodfellas and the Reboot of the American Gangster Picture”, holds true, it proves to be even more, like the Cinema Interruptus sessions Roger Ebert used to host at the Conference on World Affairs, where he and an audience would go through a movie virtually shot-by-shot. Kenny uses the page to dissect “Goodfellas” in a similar manner, scene-by-scene, frame-by-frame, using those to go off on other tangents, like the backstory of Johnny Roastbeef or why making a prop prison ledger is not as easy as it sounds. That includes a digression on Kevin Corrigan, playing the younger brother to Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill. Corrigan was just 20 years old, wide-eyed and an avowed Scorsese fan, telling Scorsese he was a Scorsese fan in his audition. And in describing his experiences on the set, Kenny quotes Corrigan in full, a monologue I have reprinted below for your reading pleasure. (Then go buy the book!) I reprint it because it is so, utterly, wondrously, Corrigan-esque, especially that first sentence (italics his), which I strongly encourage you to read in his voice in your head.

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“Exhilaration is an apt term. I was so excited it took me out of the story, I felt like a bat boy on the Yankees during the World Series, just being allowed to walk out on the field, it was vivid on the set. When I watch the movie now and I see all the colors in the movie, all those dark red hues, I remember walking through those colors and being in it and being aware I was in it, and walking through the looking glass, into ‘Alice in Wonderland’, it was Scorsese Wonderland.”

Kevin Corrigan: Even As a Star, Still In Support

Of the 1997 film “Kicked in the Head” the late great Roger Ebert wrote it’s “one of those movies where you wish the story was about the supporting characters.” That in and of itself isn’t necessarily noteworthy. There are a lot of films you wish were about the supporting characters, as the quote implies. Why it’s of particular interest to us, however, is because of “Kicked in the Head’s” leading man – namely, Kevin Corrigan. If Ebert wanted the story to be solely about the supporting characters then that would imply they had more affability than Corrigan’s main character. But then, that’s the whole deal with Corrigan, his lack of affability. He’s the oddball, the unconventional duckling, less Johnny Cash than Luther Perkins with a Fender Esquire that doesn’t really work right.

I’ve said many times before that if I ran Hollywood then Kevin Corrigan would be Brad Pitt. It’s to suggest that in a Hollywood under my no doubt ludicrous command someone as eccentric as Mr. Corrigan could be both a heartthrob and a top-billed star. But then, as Ebert seemed to suggest, Corrigan wasn’t built to be a leading man. And really, neither was Brad Pitt. Oh, Brad Pitt was born to be a leading man; yes, of course, obviously. But despite his obligatory Movie Star Roles, he’s found a truer niche for himself as a wonky supporting guy, like the fitness wackadoo in “Burn After Reading” or the Stetson-wearing philosophizer in “The Counselor” or even all the way back to “12 Monkeys” where his mental case is just a red herring. He so often gets top billing and a prominent place on the poster, yet he functions more effectively on the periphery, even in something like as gargantuan as the “Ocean’s” movies, letting Clooney sit in the throne while consuming meatball sandwiches off to the side.

Kevin Corrigan is all off to the side. That’s why he could never be the Leo part in “The Departed”; he could only ever be “the jerk off fucking cousin.” In “The Slums of Beverly Hills” he’s his own idiosyncratic version of The Boy Next Door, the slacker John Truett to Natasha Lyonne’s Esther Smith. That’s why there was something so grandly poetic in “Scotland, PA”, the modern day re-telling of Macbeth, in which he was tasked with playing modernized Banquo. “Whatever your highness commands me to do, it is always my duty to do it.” He takes instructions from the leading man and then takes the shiv.

All this is why the recently released “Results” suggests something of a Corrigan-ish coronation, like it’s the role to which the litany of IMDb stepping stones has been building. He is, in essence, finally a leading man. That’s the tack taken by Mark Olsen in his piece for the L.A. Times, writing “Kevin Corrigan gets ‘Results’ with a winning lead rom-com role.” And, yes, in some ways, he is the leading man. His character, Danny, incites the action. Wheezy and red-faced, he enters a gym on something of a whim in order to get in shape. He develops eyes for his comely personal trainer (Cobie Smulders). But the personal trainer might actually like her boss (Guy Pearce). And while it comes on like a rom-com, angled like a love triangle, it resists that neat packaging, much like Danny ultimately resists the ethos of exercise. “You and I have different ideas of what constitutes healthy,” he says.

That line might also aptly summarize Corrigan’s own viewpoint of what constitutes a leading man. After all, “Results”, as Olsen writes, “reveals itself to be a rom-com almost like a magic trick, handing off its focus from Corrigan's Danny to Pearce's Trevor somewhere along the way.” In other words, a piece centered around Corrigan finally earning and running with a leading role admits that eventually that leading role cedes center stage to the real leading role – the leading role played by Guy Pearce at his physical peak, chiseled and aerobicized to perfection. Corrigan just kinda stays sorta flabby.

And at film’s end, Pearce gets a dance with Smulders while Corrigan dances by himself off to the side.

Results

Trevor (Guy Pearce), a tanned, muscled proprietor of a startup gym, has coined his own personal fitness mantra, Power4Life, stipulating an improvement of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. It doesn’t sound so much like a crock as over-earnest cluelessness. Still, Trevor really believes it. He’s prone to “actualizing.” He can stand in the facility that will house his dream gym and “actualize” how it will all look, right down to the smoothie bar. He stresses selecting a specific goal and working hard to attain it. Yet if Andrew Bujalski’s snappy little film illustrates anything, it’s that the “Results” achieved aren’t always identical to those intended. It’s one of those films where it truly feels as if the characters are dictating the story rather than vice-versa, and that’s to suggest that life itself is shaping and re-arranging the characters. Power4Life is powerless in the face of Shit Happening.

“Results” begins with Danny (Kevin Corrigan), a flabby, moody oddball of a man, newly rich and just divorced, entering the office of Trevor and expressing in a peculiarly roundabout way that he wants to get in shape. So Trevor dispatches Kat (Cobie Smulders), an intense to the extreme personal trainer. Trevor and Kat once had a fling but called it off, ostensibly because it was “unprofessional”, but maybe more because Trevor simply prefers the solitude of his own statuesque physique. (He has a daughter. She’s never seen and only referred to twice.) Or maybe it’s because Kat is too uncompromising to handle, like a Trump-ish trainer who only sees the world in terms of successes and total losers. Really, though, she doesn’t seem to work out to stay in shape so much as burn off excessive torrents of stress and anger, and so it never feels like a stretch when Danny, his work ethic already apparently dubious, asks if she wants to smoke a little pot. She agrees, and this sends the trio spinning through the revolving door of romance.

It’s a love triangle, but one viewed from an oblique angle. Everyone’s feelings for other the person are never quite explicit, not even to themselves, specifically because these characters emotions and attitudes tread such shaky ground. Though its rom com formula, it’s not based on the usual misunderstandings and idiot plots but on the characters various anxieties and foolish certainties. Even though you know the film is tracking toward a happy ending, you’re never quite certain how the screenplay is going about reaching it, as if it’s taking an unfamiliar alternate route. And what begins as a love triangle eventually gives way to something else, professional complications that yield emotional awakenings. Nothing is all terribly surprising but you believe the characters have, in their respective ways, surprised themselves. Trevor, Kat and Danny repeatedly push each other way, yet come to realize that in strange ways they are entirely dependent upon one another.

A film so centered on behavior is keyed by its performance and each actor here is great. Pierce goes all in on positivity. A character like this could have been a lunkhead, but Pierce turns him into a ray of light, while Smulders constant fury is never overbearing, just an acute case of confusion expressed through excessive temper. Corrigan, though, long an under-the-radar if gloriously, entertainingly eccentric character actor, is a revelation. 100% vanity free, he’s flabby, sweaty, creepy, and his hair is constantly askew. He’s repugnant yet endearing because his character turns out to be the most comfortable in his own skin, illustrated by the wonderful closing-credits sequence that finds a red-faced Corrigan blissfully and unashamedly cutting a rug, seemingly to the beat inside his own head, which is the same plain on which the whole off-kilter performance rests.

This last scene feels exactly right, suggesting a change from within rather than on the outside, a man settling into his own body. Trevor and Kat, meanwhile, give themselves over to impulses as opposed to “actualized” plans in a glorious rejection of absolutes and an embracing of the unknown. The conclusion feels more like a way station, one part of a longer evolution, as if you could check in with them again in five, ten years and realize they have wound up somewhere completely different. Results are always pending.

5 Actors Who Should Be In Everything

I was listening to the most recent episode of Ryan McNeil’s superb Matineecast and while there was much enjoyment and much information to be gleaned within its hour-plus, one sort of offhand remark, as is so often the case, struck my fancy. In discussing the Steve Carrell-starring magician opus “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone”, Ryan made mention of co-star Alan Arkin and remarked that Arkin should be in everything.

That, as it had to, totally got me to thinking: what actors/actresses should be in everything? Today I crack the case.

5 Actors Who Should Be In Everything

Bruce McGill. Most recently glimpsed as Edwin Stanton, “Lincoln’s” Secretary of War, McGill has been acting since the year I was born. Mostly (always?) seen in supporting parts, he is not so much a chameleon as a utility man, willing to lend wherever and do whatever is necessary to make a finished film crackle. I don't necessarily go into a movie thinking "Gee, I hope Bruce McGill is in this" but every time I leave a movie featuring Bruce McGill I think "Why isn't he in everything?"

Mark Ruffalo. You know how back in your party-going days (apologies to those still in their party-going days) there was always that one dude who was at EVERY party? Like, even if you saw him, said goodbye, left the party and cut across town to this other party, he would somehow have already materialized at this other party? Mark Ruffalo is that guy but for actors. If you bought a ticket for a heavy-handed drama but then theater jumped the rest of the day and saw a rom com and an action adventure on the high seas of yore, he would somehow be in all three movies. Make that, he should be in all three movies, because he should be in everything.

Hope Davis. Adept, beautiful, charming and quirkily charismatic, it makes absolutely no sense to me why Hope Davis is not a Star's Star (which, of course, is precisely why it makes complete sense to me). If I ran Hollywood, Hope Davis would be Julia Roberts. And I would decree that Hope Davis should be in everything.

Kevin Corrigan. I confess I am possibly blurring the line between Actors Who Should Be In Everything and Actors I’m Always Happy To See. But then doesn't every film need that ne'er-do-well miscreant lurking in the shadows and off to the side? Or, at the very least, a shady copier repairman or a Proust-loving garbageman or an off-kilter bartender or the unemployed dude just sitting on the stoop? Of course it does. And that's why Kevin Corrigan should be in everything.

Marisa Tomei. Plain and simple and without discussion, Marisa Tomei should be in everything. No, no, no. You clearly don’t understand. Marisa Tomei should be in E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.

My work here is done.