Artificial Cheese

I’ve been alive 20-some years, and over that time I’ve had the opportunity to watch some young people get old. When I was younger, I had a more restricted view on the impact of age on a person’s career. Athletes, movie stars, television personalities…no one ever seemed to age. Michael Jordan was always Michael Jordan, Harrison Ford was always Harrison Ford, and Bob Barker was always Bob Barker.

Now that I have a few years under my belt, I have developed the ability to acknowledge a person’s scope in relation to time. I understand that people grow older, and I know how people can change as years pass. Most people simply degrade as time goes on, they begin to lose their abilities in whatever field they practice. Athletes retire because they can’t run anymore, TV people retire because they can’t fake their smiles anymore…but not film stars.

Actors and Actresses never seem to leave their professions with grace. So many of these film stars age only to mold themselves into caricatures of characters they may have played or personas they may have exhibited in their younger years.

Sylvester Stallone tried with Copland, but he can’t play a character that doesn’t have boxing gloves and a mouth full of novacaine. Sean Connery broke out of the James Bond type-casting only to fall into his loose fitting self-made Scottish/British/Irish hybrid capable-old-man character. Robert DeNiro never stopped playing slight variations of his Al Capone character from The Untouchables despite the great start to his career.

Al Pacino, an actor who was versatile enough to play Michael Corleone in one year, a cop in Serpico the next year, then a Cuban drug lord in Scarface, is now the same exact character in every movie he makes. Somewhere between Dick Tracy and Godfather III, Al Pacino turned into that raspy-voiced angry old man that makes it hard to take anything seriously.

What causes these actors to crawl into their familiar characters and never come back out? It could be just a sound business plan that guarantees income, but how could someone in such an artistic field think along those terms?

Its possible that I don’t have enough years to see exactly how people change their attitudes on such a matter, but it would be unfortunate to see the current generation of actors and actresses fall into the same pattern. Actors like Johnny Depp and Edward Norton could end up playing the same characters year after year…its just not easy to imagine.