Everywhere I Look (30 page)

And the talent! It overflows. Guy Pearce as the idealistic prig, that porcelain face he's got, the vulnerable rimless glasses; Kevin Spacey as the celebrity crime stopper, his level, insolent, flat-eyed stare. Crowe, the violent crusader with the wounded soul, is at ease in this league. He has earned his place in these superbly lit montages of expressionless men in suits, painterly group shots of casual beauty, with a thick soundtrack of shifting feet and murmuring voices and, somewhere out of shot, a man sobbing.

For disgraced Officer Bud White in
LA Confidential
I am prepared to forgive 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. I will even overlook the documented existence of a song called ‘Swallow My Gift'. Go, Russ, go! Let Kim Basinger drive you to Arizona, and learn to be happy.

Now we come to the problem of Ron Howard's
A Beautiful Mind
. Why am I so reluctant to see it again? I don't know, but my resistance is adamantine. I try hard to remember what bugged me about it. I don't much like biopics. There's a scenery-chewing element to movies about ‘the triumph of the human spirit' that I can't hack. Also, my week with Russell is running out and I've still got to plough through
Master and Commander
,
The Insider
and
Gladiator
. This isn't supposed to be encyclopaedic. If it were I'd have had to go back to
Neighbours
.

Life is short. Pass. And I'm only pretending to be sorry.

You can't talk about an actor's
oeuvre
. Directors have
oeuvres
. Actors have jobs. They have skills, they have luck, they have reputations, they have things they are known for doing well—and they risk getting stuck in their own groove. What Crowe does best is a certain sort of maleness: he is really good at violence, and at only just managing to hold back from violence. The thin veneer of his character's self-command is what makes him exciting to watch, if you like that sort of thing—and a woman can get pretty sick of the bloodletting that seems inseparable from Hollywood's narrow concepts of manliness.

Peter Weir's
Master and Commander
, concerning as it does the adventures of men and boys in the early nineteenth-century navy, turns on male codes and encompasses a great deal of violence, but in its flexible ideas of what manliness might be it displays a genial maturity. Its screenplay, issuing from a series of highly literate novels, holds firm, against the horrid brutality of a naval life, the formal starch of what is still eighteenth-century speech. Fourteen minutes in, the decks are running with blood and the ship is holed and wallowing, but ‘If you please', they say, or ‘May I beg you?' A tiny midshipman comforts the ship's doctor with the gift of a beetle. At table, officers burst into melodious song. The idea that a man might be an intellectual without losing face is given full worth.

Crowe as Captain Aubrey is a new proposition altogether. He's carrying a bit of weight—you could almost say embonpoint. The long hair in its queue and the newly rounded face suit him, as does the flattering three-cornered hat. And what are these smiles? These flashes of benevolence and good humour? I had got past my hostility to Crowe, I had even begun to admire him; but this was the first time I'd liked him. When he picked up his fiddle and sat down to play a duet with the doctor, I waited for a shudder of embarrassment to spoil it for me. It didn't come. I sat there in front of the TV thinking: He's even made me
believe in the violin
. I pressed pause, ran to the cupboard, and poured myself a glass of port.

What could one drink to make Ridley Scott's
Gladiator
bearable? Unable despite my best efforts to suspend disbelief, I was tormented by carping thoughts. Did they really have cafés in those Roman colonnades? How did Maximus keep his hair always at the perfect length, and who twirled those little kiss curls across his brow?

I enjoyed the Nuremberg-style extravaganzas. I was thrilled by the movie's gorgeousness, its subtle colours, the extraordinary palette of blues. When they carried Maximus's body away a fat tear plopped into my packet of bullets. But as soon as anyone spoke I had to get up and do some deep breathing. Those creaking rhetorical flourishes! ‘You shall watch as I bathe in their blood.' ‘The time for half-measures is over, Senator.' ‘It takes a Nemperor to rule a Nempire.' ‘It vexes me. I'm terribly
vexed
.' Coming to
Gladiator
as I did five years too late, I felt like Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus, all perfumed and fresh and
maquillé
, galloping up to his father Marcus Aurelius moments after the great greasy blackened brutes of Germania's army have been routed by the Romans at untellable expense of life and limb.

‘Have I missed it?' lisps Commodus, springing out of his chariot. ‘Have I missed the battle?'

His father regards him wryly. ‘You've missed the war.'

The Insider
I saved for last. I had managed since 1999 to avoid knowing the first thing about it. I didn't even know that Al Pacino, at whose shrine I have worshipped since
The Godfather II
, was in it. Again Crowe's character is struggling for honour in the world of men. This time he plays a man of science, Dr Jeffrey Wigand, a researcher for a giant tobacco company who is threatened with litigation if he breaks a confidentiality agreement about the harmful properties of their products.

‘Tobacco's a sales culture,' says Pacino, as the tough
60 Minutes
producer who wants Wigand to spit the dummy on TV. ‘Why'd you work for them?'

‘They paid me a lot o' money.'

Treated with outrageous insolence by the company executives, Wigand begins to seethe with the desire to break his promise, cleanse himself of his compromises, and wreak revenge. But his only way of doing this is to put himself at the mercy of the commercial TV network CBS. Even a battle-hardened journalist like Pacino's Lowell Bergman, with his dark-circled eyes and husky voice, can't predict or control the treachery of his employers.

Can this blundering naïf, this tormented whistleblower, be Russell Crowe? He is unrecognisable, leached of vanity and self-regard. By holding his persona in check, he quadruples his power. His body, in the flapping suit, has grown all massive and square. Although his hair is grey, his eyes behind the unfashionable glasses are those of an unhappy, nerdish boy. His mouth is jammed hard in a straight line. His neck is rigid with suppressed emotion.

And the deep texture of the film! The camera always sliding at things from a surprising angle! The music—that countertenor soaring while Crowe, off his head with anger, belts a thousand white golf balls all over the driving range! What's going on here? My notebook and pencil slide to the floor.

The tobacco company finds a way to gag Wigand in Kentucky: he is threatened with prison if he speaks in court. The cynical brutality he's up against paralyses him, thickens the movie's air. Crowe's face is big, stunned, wounded, like a peasant's. ‘How does one go to jail?' he asks the journalist. Outside the courthouse, watched by the hawkish Pacino, he paces on green grass. His loneliness is appalling. Cars pass in silence. All sound is suspended, except a mandolin strumming soft and fast. Nothing breathes. Then he speaks: ‘Fuck it. Let's go to court.' The soundtrack explodes back into reality. That's when I started howling, and hardly stopped till the credits rolled. It's a splendid movie, grand and serious, and Crowe is the aching centre of it.

What has he gone through, what has he put others through, to get to this eminence? I roamed around the internet and found an interview with the director of
The Insider
, Michael Mann. ‘How did you work with Crowe?' they ask him. Mann dodges it. ‘I don't talk about some of that. Some of this stuff, it's just not right to be public about.'

I felt frustrated and abashed, as if I'd been caught snooping. When I told a friend I was writing a piece about Crowe, he fired up: ‘Where do you get off? You've never met him, have you?' ‘I'm only writing about his movies,' I said, miffed, and that's what I set out to do. But Crowe's public persona, noisy and humourless and strutting, is forever making rude gestures in the corner of my eye, demanding attention and cursing those who give it. The only way to block it out is to turn to his work, to watch with joy as he steps away into that free place where art happens.

2005

PART SIX

In the Wings

My First Baby

THIS isn't really a story. I'm just telling you what happened one summer when I was young. It was 1961, my first year away from home. I lived at Melbourne University, in a women's college on a beautiful elm-lined boulevard. I was free and happy. Everyone was clever and so was I.

When summer came and exams were over, I went home to Geelong. I could have hung around the house all day with my sisters and my brother. I could have gone swimming or read books. But I was a student now, and students had jobs. I typed on my little Hermes portable a neat letter of application to Bright and Hitchcocks, Geelong's biggest department store. They hired me for the Christmas rush. I could hardly wait to start.

They sent me to the basement. I went down a staircase with brass banisters, through the gardening and camping section, and into a stuffy dead-end corner. I had imagined books or cosmetics or nice cotton underwear, but I was to sell toys.

I liked it down there. The toys in those days were made of wood and paper and metal and cloth. We wrapped each purchase in a sheet of thick brown paper, and tied the parcel with string from a heavy ball that hung above the register. There wasn't time for scissors: you ran the string around your forefinger in a special loop and snapped it back against itself. I wore a white blouse and a big gathered cotton skirt with stiff petticoats, pulled in at the waist by a brown dog-collar belt. And stockings attached to a suspender belt, and shoes called ‘flatties' which gave no support. My feet ached that summer. They ached rhythmically, like string quartets of pain, and, by the end of each day, like a great screaming Wagnerian orchestra.

But this is about another kind of pain.

On a certain shelf in our department stood the dolls. The goggle-eyed, sissy ones bored me. I despised their stiff hair and aprons, their tiny white shoes, their pink and useless feet. I sold a lot of them. I worked scornfully, packing and wrapping the ridiculous things in their cellophane-fronted boxes. I fancied myself an intellectual when aunts and mothers tilted their permed heads this way and that and smiled and went, ‘Aaaaaah!'

But there was one doll that I did like. It lay flat on its back in a cardboard box. It was naked but for a nappy. Its torso was soft, its head was heavy. When you picked it up, its eyelids slid shut, its limbs flopped loosely and its head dropped back, exactly like a real baby. You had to hold it properly.

I came to feel that the doll was private and personal to me. I thought of buying it, but it was very expensive—and imagine an intellectual turning up at home with a doll. I didn't want anyone else to buy it. Nobody showed any lasting interest in it, but I kept stowing it behind other items, just in case. Every afternoon at 5.30, before I went home, I made sure the doll was still safe, at the back of the shelf.

The Christmas rush became intense. We sweated down there in our stuffy department. I had less and less time for the doll. Entire days would pass when I didn't go looking for it. Then one afternoon I saw a middle-aged woman lurking behind the shelf where it was kept. She stayed there for a suspiciously long time. In a lull, I slid over to see what she was up to.

She had dug the doll out of its box, and she was holding it in her arms. Her head was bent over it. She didn't even notice I was there. I couldn't see her face but there was something about her posture that made me pause. Even with her back to me, she was radiating ‘keep off '.

I returned to the cash register. She stayed behind the shelf for ten minutes, fifteen minutes. I was seething with jealousy. She didn't bring anything to the counter. After a while, she emerged from behind the shelf and disappeared up the stairs. Every day at the same time, she came back. She never looked at us or spoke to us. She made a beeline through the crowd of Christmas shoppers to the shelf where the doll was kept, took it out of the box, and held it in her arms. If any of us had to pass her, she turned her face away. She had a limp perm and her clothes were drab. I looked at her hand, but I can't remember now whether she was wearing a ring.

I was nineteen and I thought of her as old. She had no right to be cuddling a doll. It was indecent. It mortified and enraged me. But once as I passed, in my jealousy, she glanced up and our eyes met. She held my gaze for a moment, with my doll in her arms, and flashed me a tiny, embarrassed smile. Her face was tired. It was absolutely ordinary. And into my head shot the thought: her real baby died, years ago, and she will never get over it.

I walked quickly past. Soon she put the doll down and drifted away up the stairs.

I don't remember what happened to the doll. Within three years I'd had two abortions, and within eight years, a child. The abortions I went into briskly, without conscious regret. But now I'm in my fifties, they've come back to haunt me. I've had to grieve for them, and mourn them. I never expected this to happen. It was awful, and it took a long time. When it first surged up in me, I remembered the woman in the toy department, and the look she gave me. For the first time I understood it, and I grieved for her as well.

2000

Big Brass Bed

EVERYONE was upset when the café changed hands. For years it had stood reticently on our main street. In winter a wood stove warmed it. Herbs grew in tubs along the path to the toilet. The quiet souls who ran it supplied toys and colouring books, and fresh copies of the
Guardian Weekly
and the
Financial Review
as well as the essential celebrity trash. They knew our names and were patient, pad in hand, with children's struggles to read the menu for themselves. They baked and served the most sensational savoury muffins. And their coffee was always perfect. On the last day nobody wanted to leave. Some of us cried.