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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
Here's one of the few rules in movies which matter: an actor won't last as a leading man unless he plays characters who want something passionately. Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster want power, and Buster Keaton and Clark Gable want girls. Gary Cooper and James Stewart seek justice; John Wayne and Clint Eastwood seek revenge. Humphrey Bogart and George Clooney demand candor from a duplicitous world. Fred Astaire wants to dance. Woody Allen has an incorrigible desire to make a joke, and Jim Carrey longs to turn his face and body into rubber. But what does Jude Law want? He is too honorable to just draw on his lascivious-cherub good looks. In the remake of "Alfie," playing a cheap stud, he was rueful and easy-tempered, and he seemed eager to cheer himself up--you could sense his discomfort. He has hidden behind makeup, in "Road to Perdition," and has played diffident men, in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "All the King's Men." In "Cold Mountain," he wanted to get home, but he was war-weary, rather than impassioned.
In Anthony Minghella's "Breaking and Entering," Law still has an exploratory quality. His Will Francis, a fashionable London landscape architect, is an irresolute young man--kindly, generous, and fair-minded, but also egotistical and careless. He's pulled in different directions, yet Law shows some anger this time, and some desire,...
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