The opening shot of North Dallas Forty shows Nick Nolte lying face down, his pillow stained with the blood that leaked out of his nose overnight. But the sheets look like they were pretty filthy already. Slowly, Nolte stirs to life, pulling himself out of bed and trudging down the hallway in his tighty-whities to the bathroom. He can barely move — he’s a pro football player, a wide receiver for the North Dallas Bulls, and every movement of his limbs causes him to wince and recall with sudden, brutal clarity a different, punishing hit from the previous night’s game. He takes a swig from one of the several half-empty beer bottles littering his home, pausing by a window plastered with J&B labels. He fills the bathtub with hot water, rolls himself a joint, and lets the warmth and the pot ease the agony of his body for just a few moments. North Dallas Forty was one of Nolte’s first significant film roles, and already he was playing a wreck. He was 37, and his performance at once suggests an actor eager to prove himself onscreen and a character all but ground down by injuries, booze, and all the bullshit with his coach and the front-office assholes that gets in the way of the pure joy he derives from playing football. He doesn’t much like practising or training — he brings a cigarette into the weightroom with him — and he shows only disdain for his coach’s attempts to wield authority over him. He’s a problem player, but he’s also haunted by his fumbles — he spends the film haunted by an easy pass he dropped the previous week. His kneecap feels like there’s gravel in it, he needs half his body to be taped up before each game, and his knee is so shot up with painkillers that he can barely feel his leg.
Nolte makes being hurt — not just hurt, but vulnerable, aching, living with the bruises and the joints that you yourself have rendered half-useless by your very choice of profession — seem like the noblest state of being imaginable. It doesn’t matter that all that pain was earned in service of some stupid fucking game, and it doesn’t matter that the men who employ you care only about putting numbers on the board. As is the case with the heroes so many ’70s movies, the pointlessness of Nolte’s sacrifices is itself the point. Of course, he also gets to sleep with a bunch of gorgeous women — including Dayle Haddon, a Canadian actress who’s the epitome of smart ’70s brunette foxiness — so life isn’t all bad. He’s the ideal man. I don’t even like football, but I’d switch places with him in an instant, bad knee and all.
* * * * *
I watched another early Nolte film performance this week, as one of the quirky denizens of a decrepit small town on the California coast in the 1930s in David S. Ward’s film version of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. His character, Doc, doesn’t seem to have much in common with Phil Elliott, the football player from North Dallas Forty — he’s a buttoned-up amateur marine biologist who would rather spend time with the octopus swimming around in the tank in his makeshift lab than with a woman. (The octopus’ brain is much easier to figure out.) But as it turns out, Doc is actually an pro athlete himself, a retired baseball pitcher with one of the best fastballs in the majors. He’s got scars too — although Doc’s are psychological rather than physical. Years ago, one of those fastballs went awry and knocked a batter out cold. The guy woke up, but he was never the same. A horrible thought — no matter how badly Phil’s body got battered, his brain remained unaffected. (He remained the same asshole he always was.) Nolte plays aging and retired athletes with the gravitas of veteran soldiers — he understands that these guys have been hardened by battle too.Nolte fits into the stylized period setting of Cannery Row just as naturally as the scruffy, vulgar contemporary setting of North Dallas Forty. To some degree, Doc is a gawky, boyish, Jimmy Stewart kind of role, but Nolte’s strong physical presence makes it into something fresh and new, especially in his scenes with Debra Winger, as a tomboyish misfit who has decided, to make this decaying town her new home. In my favourite scene in the film, Winger challenges him to show off his dance moves, and they begin swing-dancing right there in the shabby little room she’s renting, while “In the Mood” plays on her phonograph. It’s part dance routine and part wrestling match — Winger keeps kicking her feet alarmingly close to Nolte’s head, and when Nolte grabs her by the waist and lifts her up in the air, you half-expect him to throw her through the wall. They’re not even good dancers, but their clumsiness complements each other. They can barely catch their breath to insult each other, they’re working so hard.
I wouldn’t blame anyone who feels Cannery Row lays on the whimsy a little heavily, especially in the scenes involving a bunch of cheerfully unemployable wharf rats led by M. Emmet Walsh. This is a film, after all, where the female leads winds up moving out of her hotel and into an abandoned boiler. But Nolte and Winger’s screwball chemistry, together with John Huston’s perfectly pitched voiceover narration and Sven Nykvist’s ability to find poetry amidst the rocks and rust of Monterey, do cast a certain salt-water spell over you. Life can’t help but be a constant state of shambles, says Cannery Row, and isn’t that kind of wonderful? It helps, of course, to be Nick Nolte — few actors ever made the prospect of falling apart look so appealing.
0 Yorumlar