Maximum Crowe: Far Side of the World: In Print Page Nine

Master and Commander: Far Side of the World / In Print Page Nine

|| Time Magazine 11/10/03 ||

The Bold Man and The Sea
By Josh Tyrangiel
Photos: Tim Bauer
Time Magazine, November 10, 2003

Is Russell Crowe, star of Master and Commander and cinema's current hunk in a funk, really a sweetie after all? Nope. But he is full of surprises

The first glimpse I had of what Russell Crowe's friends call Crowe's "intensity" was on the green waves of Sydney Harbor. In advance of our meeting, Crowe's publicist announced that her client had a surprise for me: he had rented a tall ship—like the one he captains in his new movie, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World—for the sake of a photo shoot and our introductory chat. It seemed a bit obvious—ship movie, ship interview—and I wondered if it wasn't a clumsy gesture designed to focus the conversation on knots and fathoms rather than more interesting matters like bar brawls and love affairs. But soon there were other surprises to ponder.

As we toddled into the harbor aboard the Svanen, a 120-ft. oak beauty, Crowe was nowhere to be found, and our crew became suspiciously quiet. Once we were past the commuter ferries and tourist boats, the Svanen's engine yawned, and I was told to look toward land.

Squinting, I could just make out two shapes bobbing on the waves. One was a woman; the other was Crowe. "This is the real surprise!" said Crowe's publicist. "He's kayaking out to meet you with his personal trainer!" I was surprised, or rather, confused. Was I supposed to be impressed that he could kayak? Or swept away by the strange, albeit larger-than-life gesture?

I was still stumped when Crowe scaled the ship's ladder, grumbled something to the photographer who had been taking pictures of his approach and disappeared into the hold. "He told me to f___ off," said the photographer nervously. "I was breaking his concentration." Ten minutes later, Crowe emerged, having changed into loose-fitting Levi's and a dark sweater. He posed for a few more pictures and waved grandly to a boat across the way, joking, "My service to Australian tourism." Then he grabbed a bag of Doritos and sat down cross-legged for a chat about rugby. He was smart, funny and spontaneous. With his hair cut short, a week's worth of growth crowding his round face and his chubby hand digging in the chip bag, he looked like a very comfortable bear. After a while, Crowe suggested we paddle back to his apartment on the Woolloomooloo wharf. Moments later, the two of us were slicing through the waves. "I've got a wet ass," he shouted across the water.

It was an odd day.

This, in microcosm, is what Crowe has been doing to moviegoers since his breakout performance in 1997's L.A. Confidential. He jerks them around with surliness, then seduces them with immense talent and charm. "Russell is very unpredictable," says Master director Peter Weir. "In life and on the screen you're never quite sure what he's going to do in any situation. It keeps you watching." Says Ron Howard, Crowe's friend and the director of 2001's A Beautiful Mind: "He's a pretty intense guy. And he is definitely, uh, well, the mood can shift on you—I'll put it that way."

At 39, Crowe is a three-time Academy Award nominee (he won Best Actor for 2000's Gladiator). He is not yet the biggest box-office draw on the planet (that's Tom Cruise), but he has jumped Cruise and Tom Hanks in many directors' casting wish lists. "He gets offered everything—or everything good—first," says an agent. (Crowe turned down the Hugh Grant part in About a Boy, the Laurence Fishburne part in The Matrix and Viggo Mortensen's role in The Lord of the Rings, among others.) But where Hanks and Cruise insinuated their way into moviegoers' hearts by exuding amiability on- and offscreen, Crowe has pulled off a far more unlikely trick: he is one of the world's biggest stars and is frequently perceived as one of the world's biggest jerks.

Much of the negativity stems from an insane gauntlet Crowe ran at the onset of fame, when, in short order, he had to deal with a highly publicized affair with Meg Ryan; rumored (and denied) trysts with Courtney Love, Jodie Foster, Nicole Kidman and Sarah Ferguson; countless apparent losses of temper; and a kidnapping threat serious enough that he needed a dozen security escorts with him on the night he won his Oscar. Crowe did not handle any of this particularly well. Instead of expressing amused bewilderment at the peculiarity of fame—a strategy Colin Farrell has perfected—he was defiant, his Maximusian scowl declaring "How dare you be intrigued by me, ungrateful rabbling dogs!" Soon he was being parodied as a great marauding sourpuss on South Park.

Crowe's life is now significantly calmer. In the study of his vast apartment, where we lunch on calamari and ginger beer, there is a picture of Danielle Spencer, the Australian singer and actress he married this past April. Spencer is pregnant with Crowe's first child, a son, due in January. I ask if domesticity has calmed him, and he raises a hand: Eat, then interview.

When lunch is over, he says, "I'm sure regardless of my marriage and impending fatherhood, certain things shift just because of age." One of those things is that he no longer goes out to bars simply to prove that he is not too famous to go out to bars. "I am a famous actor," he says with the grim acceptance of a recovering addict.

Crowe has been working as an actor since age 6, when his father, a hotel manager and film-set caterer, got him a job on a TV show. "I didn't work continuously when I was a young fella, just little bits and pieces," he says, "enough to formulate the desire. And I was never a child star, just a child extra, so I was learning and observing without pressure." After school, Crowe wanted to attend college to study history. But his father was out of work, so instead he hit the market and got jobs in repertory productions of Grease and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and sang in a moderately successful band, Roman Antix. After enduring the usual amateur lows—including a job as the star of a Seventh-Day Adventist in-house video—he caught his first big break at 25, when he was cast in a low-budget film, The Crossing. The director, George Ogilvie, says he asked Crowe which role he wanted to play. "All of them," Crowe responded.

Acting for Crowe is the synthesis of two passions: he loves performing, and he also approaches each role as a chance to design his own curriculum and make up for his lost higher education. To play Master and Commander's Jack Aubrey, he spent months learning the violin and studying the linguistic origins of his character's accent. "But the vast majority of it is reading," he says, guiding me to a sagging bookcase. "You've got Sailing for Dummies ..." He laughs, but there it is, next to several dozen more sophisticated volumes on naval history, one of which—Nelson: Love & Fame, by Edgar Vincent—is almost in tatters. Admiral Nelson is mentioned only briefly in the film, yet Crowe highlighted and Post-it-noted the text like a grad student. "I wanted to have an intimate knowledge about Nelson," he says. "I wanted to feel the sense of him, because Jack served with him as a very young man, at least that's the legend of the fictitious character. None of this research is a burden," he adds. "I'm just inquisitive."

Crowe is not a Method actor ("I work between 'Action!' and 'Cut!'"), but he does take his preparatory obsessiveness to the set. On the first day of Master and Commander, he handed out three shirts to each cast member and ordered them to return in 24 hours with name tags sewn on them as a way of getting them used to taking orders from him. "It was kind of done with a wink," says co-star Billy Boyd, who plays a coxswain. "Kind of not, too." Crowe says he does this kind of thing a lot and that it is part of his "work on behalf of the character," but some directors have complained about his free-lancing. "On A Beautiful Mind he was intensely adamant about expressing himself and trying his ideas, and if you tried to squelch them he'd resent the hell out of it," says Howard, who will work with Crowe again on next year's The Cinderella Man, a boxing movie. "But early on he said something like, 'Look, don't get caught in my vortex of darkness. I am moody, and I may get dark, but do your job. Direct me. I'm here to serve the movie.' And he gave me 110% on my choices. He'd say, 'I don't buy it, Ron. You'll hate this in the editing room.' But he'd nail it."

Peter Weir, who directed Harrison Ford in Witness and The Mosquito Coast, and Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, admits to being fascinated and a bit frustrated by his leading man: "One evening when we'd just had a spectacular week of dailies, I looked over at him and said, 'How do you do it?' And he shot back, 'I don't know. How do you?' That's about as deep as we got. I think I knew Jack Aubrey better than I knew Russell Crowe."

Audiences are frequently left with the same impression. Crowe enjoys the trappings of celebrity: he has had nights out in Brisbane with Bruce Springsteen, dinner parties in London with Emma Thompson and a series of odd phone calls from Michael Jackson. ("He used to put on these funny voices and then giggle, 'Oh, Russell, it's Michael.'") But Crowe has yet to fully make his peace with being famous. "I think in a lot of ways I'm my own worst enemy, because I won't answer simple questions," he says. "And it's not because I'm arrogant necessarily—though I know now that if I say, 'These questions are tedious,' it will indicate that I am arrogant—but there's just some things that I think run counter to the whole gig that I'm doing. As far as I'm concerned, the reality of Russell Crowe should be vanilla, and the viewer can add whatever it is they need to make it work for them."

This is a wise strategy if the goal is a diverse career. Hanks, Cruise and ladies' champ Julia Roberts are the gracious wits audiences like to imagine themselves as, but they are also prisoners of their own goodwill, condemned to deliver endless variations on the same performance. Crowe can play anything because he has conditioned audiences to expect anything. He is smart enough to possibly be given credit for premeditating this eremitic media strategy; he is also obstreperous enough simply to hate having his privacy invaded. Either way, Crowe's desire not to be known reads as petulance, and that, as much as anything, feeds his jerky image. It's not as though he never considered the possibility that he might become a movie star, right?

"You know, I got in trouble a while ago when I said, 'Look, I don't want to be one of your movie stars.' I quoted Sinatra: 'I owe you my best work, but I don't owe you the time of day,' which is"—he pauses—"not exactly how I feel. But there is some merit in that. Let me just do my work. I just do the work. I'll make movies, and you go to the cinema. Why can't we just keep it at that?"

Recognizing that he has to give up something about himself, Crowe sometimes offers a true, if somewhat diversionary, narrative: Russell Crowe, simple bloke. Asked what advice he would give to an actor playing him, he says, "I'd tell them to get another job. It wouldn't be worth doing. I'm very boring." It must be said that Crowe's normal-guy credentials are impeccable. He loves rugby, throwing back a pint and working on his 800-acre farm near Coffs Harbor, six hours north of Sydney. He also loves playing with his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. The actor-band is an unfortunate cliché of celebrity culture, but TOFOG, as Crowe's group is known, existed well before its lead singer became a household name. (Crowe and guitarist Dean Cochran have been playing together since their teens.) Nevertheless, the six-man group, essentially a very good bar band, has become an easy target and now exists almost in spite of Crowe's fame. "The vast majority of people who talk about us have never even heard us," says TOFOG drummer Dave Kelly. "'Russell Crowe's band? I heard they suck.' It's frustrating. But Russell's always been in the band. We can't imagine it any other way."

Nor can Crowe. He's a good singer, and he savors the every-dude camaraderie shown on the band's DVD, Texas, in which the members of TOFOG drink, fart and strum their way through the Lone Star State. But TOFOG is not Crowe's reality so much as his escape from reality. "The subject of his celebrity never really comes up," says Kelly. "Like that kidnapping thing: I don't think we found out about it until we heard about it on the news. He tends to keep those kinds of troubles to himself."

While his screen characters are magnificently nuanced, Crowe seems paralyzed by the thought of integrating his various selves into an honest public persona. "It is strange," says Weir. "Just when you think you see him as a kind of an Aussie simple man—you know, what you see is what you get—there'll be a flash from those eyes, he'll say something penetrating or precise, and you'll remember that he is a savant of some kind. It reminds you how little you know the man."

On the second day of our acquaintance, Crowe pulled some strings and arranged for us to chat on the stage of Sydney's famed Opera House. It was a grand and generous gesture—a movie-star gesture—but like the boat and kayak it seemed designed to simultaneously impress, overwhelm and create some distance. Still, Crowe was interested in discussing how the game of celebrity hide-and-seek is played by others. Staring at the acoustical tiles he asked me, "Do you ever ask, when you're doing interviews with musicians, the what-are-your-influences question?" I do. "Because it's one of the most tedious questions to have to answer." He caught his tone and changed it. "It's just the funniest question, because you're supposed to take it seriously, but music is influenced by many other things. It's just such a gigantic question. I've never found a satisfactorily glib answer that can deal with it and put it away."

Outside, a phalanx of paparazzi had gathered. With Nicole Kidman living in New York City, Crowe is the biggest local meal ticket, and long lenses follow his every move. Gamely, he tried to affect the air of a man enduring a comic nuisance, like birds he just can't seem to shoo off his lawn. He didn't quite pull it off. "I really try not to think about these f______ c__ks," he said while settling in for a coffee at an outdoor cafe. "We could go, but they've already got me. I should—no, I won't. There's been too many photographs of me giving people the finger."

Inevitably the conversation turns to the fact that a lot of people are interested in seeing photos of him sipping a macchiato and that there are worse problems in the world. "Yes, you've got to be philosophical about it to a certain degree," he says. "You can bang your head against the wall for a long time, but it feels really good when you stop." Then he heard a shutter click—"Oh, this one thinks he's being sneaky, f______ c__k!"—and the mood shifted. "But should I be hounded because I don't see it's my gig to live up to what I do on the screen? I mean, that's what a lot of people hound me for, right? Because I won't become an icon or a block of wood and behave at all times like a movie star." Then: "I think the most interesting thing about Daniel Day-Lewis is that he's strong enough as a man to say, 'Uh, I'm not going to make a movie for a few years. Let all this die away.'"

Crowe admits he's not strong enough—or loves acting too much—to let it all die away. And there is a middle ground between being a block of wood and disappearing. But until Crowe finds it, he'll be stuck paddling out to amiability, and telling it to ... you know.

Critical Opinion
Why Russell Ranks High
By Richard Corliss
Time, November 10, 2003

John Aubrey is a captain for all winds. His bravery is seasoned by intelligence; his initiative is tempered by loyalty to the Crown and its naval legend Lord Nelson. Aubrey commands his frigate, the Surprise, with strength, not bravado, and an ease and rigor that win the respect of his men. He also has what any bunch of superstitious sailors needs in a boss: a nose for good fortune. They call him Lucky Jack. His nickname is a prayer to the fickle Fates that rule the sea, his presence a guarantee that the crew's lives are in the best hands.

The real Russell Crowe is not quite Aubrey, the unambiguously heroic fellow he plays in Peter Weir's splendidly bracing sea epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Sometimes, the actor comes off as a brute, a primitive: Crowe Magnon Man. So we gladly cede to others the honor of carousing or canoodling with him. We might lock up our daughters at his approach. We would not care to be within striking distance of his coiled wrath.

But then, we don't have to be. For a critic or a filmgoer, an actor's private life should be irrelevant to the art and glamour he can create onscreen. And there, alchemy occurs. Crowe is often magnificent: attractive, complex, subtle. Watching him slip inside a role is a matter not of forgiving but of forgetting all the tabloid baggage. The lout of a thousand headlines vanishes, and the superb movie actor appears magically in his place. When Crowe is at the helm of a movie, we're proud to sail with him.

He shares some of his gifts with other Australian-bred stars, from Nicole Kidman to Hugh Jackman, who have lately taken over Hollywood. They must hide within plain sight. Plain sound, rather: to suppress their native whine, they have to "act" every time they open their mouths.

Yet like the rest of the world, the Aussies have been casing Hollywood movies since childhood. Because they know the territory, they can infiltrate an American character with a cat burglar's suaveness: entering without breaking. But Crowe has something more than an agreeable presence and technical precision. He can convey inner strength, rage and desperation without ever pushing it. People see this power and think Brando. No doubt Crowe has done so too. (In an earlier incarnation he went by the name Russ Le Roq and recorded a single called I Want to Be like Marlon Brando.) He's muscular as well, and it's earned bulk, not the pretty-boy sculpture of the body builder. Like Brando, Crowe could play a biker, a dockworker, a mafioso or Stanley Kowalski.

One big difference: you won't hear Crowe screaming "Stella!" He rarely raises his voice in films. As the neo-Nazi skinhead in his 1992 attention snagger Romper Stomper, he achieves his most menacing effects with a whisper and reads a passage from Mein Kampf as if it were a sacred bedtime story. The tough cop he played in the 1997 L.A. Confidential is another soft-spoken type: in lieu of shouting, he tattoos his fist on a suspect's face, grabs a man's genitals. Never does he strut or preen or pace nervously, Pacino-style. There's no spillage of energy. The Sea of Crowe has a surface calm; rancor roils a few fathoms below.

Sociopaths are the common coin of modern movie drama. Crowe sometimes finds gold in more remote parts. His Jeffrey Wigand, in The Insider, seems exhausted, neutered by the ethical choice facing him. Here is a man ready to implode, like a condemned building awaiting the dynamite. So his determination to air an inconvenient truth has the impact of a half-man willing himself to be whole. John Nash in A Beautiful Mind is many men—too many, for the film's conflict—and several of its characters are in his crowded, confused head. Crowe shows here, and so often, that the interior life is the most absorbing life there is, and the most frightening.

Master and Commander is in Crowe's burly heroic mode, like his Maximus in Gladiator. But Jack Aubrey has no bloodlust for vengeance. He wants to serve his country. It is his duty, in a distant corner of the Napoleonic Wars, to engage an enemy ship, the Acheron, off the east coast of South America. It is his inspiration to track this state-of-naval-art devil ship to the other side, near the Galàpagos Islands. The film is full of inspiration too. Not since Jaws, or maybe Pinocchio, has there been a sea-chase epic of such craft, brio and good comradeship.

Like Crowe, Weir has often made films that seek the heart of darkness beneath the tough skin of the adventure genre: The Last Wave, Gallipoli, The Mosquito Coast. But in the journey of adapting (with writer John Collee) and filming the Patrick O'Brian saga—in his long sail, figuratively, from Gallipoli to the Galàpagos—Weir has reconciled a traditional war story with modern, mature film attitudes. He has done something daring for an intellectual director: celebrate military heroism.

Aubrey, of course, is one such hero—and a new kind for Crowe. Other Crowe film figures are renegades; Jack, who is sure of his own authority and of those above him, is a dedicated company man, a genius of a middle manager. Crowe plays him straight, flicking charm in a quick smile or, when wounded in battle, silently summoning the will to fight on.

But he is no solitary saint, fighting a balky crew. In a way, the crew is the collective hero. Four episodes reveal how sailors prove their mettle by risking or ending their lives. Two of these are the boy officer Lord Blakeney (Max Pirkis, a child actor with a scary mixture of poise and beauty), who bravely bears having an infected arm sawed off; and Aubrey's closest friend, ship's doctor Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), who astonishingly confronts his own dire surgery by heeding the medical dictum "Physician, heal thyself."

The film, which combines two O'Brian books, tells its stories with a wonderful efficiency; its briskly sketched characters have the detail of full portraits. Blakeney, for instance, is given two opposite role models: the warrior Aubrey and the intellectual Maturin. The boy is beguiled by the doctor's love of the natural world and the fantastic creatures in it. Yet after a great battle, when Blakeney visits Maturin, who is absorbed again in his books, we can tell that the boy has been matured by combat; he sees that his destiny is to be not a man of science but a man of war. All this is revealed, not by dialogue but in a brief shot of Pirkis' pensive face.

Crowe has many of these moments too—secrets of remorse, doubt and longing, never spoken, shared only with the camera. For all the movie's perfect storms and burly skirmishes, its art is in the creation of people the audience comes to know so well after two hours that it can read their thoughts. So Master and Commander is to movies what Russell Crowe is to acting. With subtlety and power, it explores the complexities of men at war, even with themselves. It puts the passion into action, and the thrill into thought.

At the Heart Of the Ocean
How Patrick O'Brian invented a naval saga and a life
By Richard Lacayo
Time Magazine, November 10, 2003

Fame and wealth came late for Patrick O'Brian. He was already 55 in 1970 when he published Master and Commander, the first of what would be 20 volumes in his irresistible naval saga set in the time of the Napoleonic wars. But by the time the last volume appeared in 1999, O'Brian's tales of Captain Jack Aubrey and his shipmate Dr. Stephen Maturin had become Harry Potter for grownups. Each new book was a heavily anticipated publishing event among not only weekend sailors but also people whose only prior encounter with seafaring had been Sloop John B. By now 8 million copies have been sold. And at O'Brian's death in 2000, William F. Buckley called him "the most evocative writer on the sea since Homer."

Russell Crowe's film will expand the O'Brian cult. But new readers drawn by the cannon fire may be surprised to discover how complex the books truly are. Their spiritual through line is the friendship of Aubrey and Maturin, a classic concord of opposed natures. Aubrey is gruff, blocky, pragmatic; Maturin is lean, reserved and cerebral, though stalwart enough to amputate limbs without the niceties of general anesthetic or clean instruments. Both men are moved by music. Maturin plays cello, while Aubrey scrapes along on violin, and their shared attempts at Locatelli or Boccherini are their ultimate expression of comradeship.

The books have a music of their own, though occasionally compressed into passages that are a trial by vocabulary for shore-hugging readers ("and then these futtock-plates at the rim here hold the dead-eyes for the topmast shrouds"). The books are action-adventures, true, but also peerless novels of 19th century manners, detailing the mores of Regency England while instructing in the finer points of how to cannonade a French corsair or master seas that can body slam mere frigates into splinters.

O'Brian was fascinated with feints and deceptions, with warships that disguise themselves or fly false colors. Was that because he flew false colors himself? He wasn't Irish; his name wasn't even O'Brian. He was born Richard Russ, the last of nine children of a bankrupt English physician who dispersed the family after his wife died. As a young man, Russ/O'Brian abandoned a wife, son and dying infant daughter to pursue a writer's life. When fame arrived and the world tracked him to the south of France, where he had lived since 1950 with his second wife, he invented a new past. But a biography by Dean King published just after O'Brian's death revealed that despite O'Brian's claims, he was never a pilot in the Royal Air Force or a student at Oxford. What we know for sure is that he was a minor master of 20th century literature. His books will sail on.

But in the Book ...
O'Brian readers are legion and can be persnickety. So what are they going to think of the film? One sounds off:
By Michael Elliott

Posted Sunday, November 2, 2003

WHAT IT GOT RIGHT

Jack Aubrey's hat
Though the books are set in a time when most officers of the Royal Navy wore their hats with peaks at front and back, Aubrey always wore his sideways, the old-fashioned way.

Killick
Aubrey's steward is to the life: cantankerous, odd speech patterns and—nice touch—always serving toasted cheese to the duo before they play music.

Trepanning
Maturin's on-deck medical tour de force—taking the top off a patient's skull to release pressure and inserting a silver coin under the wound—is well depicted.

WHAT IT GOT WRONG

Maturin
Oh, dear. The film has him as nothing more than a doctor and naturalist who happens to be Aubrey's best friend. In fact, he was proudly Irish (with a touch of Catalan), a spy for the British, not handsome and utterly incapable of doing anything shipshape.

Midshipman Hollom (SPOILER ALERT)
In the book he doesn't commit suicide but is presumed killed by a hand with whose wife he was having an affair.

Dates
'Tis a small thing, but the novel is set in the War of 1812; the film is set in 1805.