To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Arts & Entertainment May 12, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/1999/05/12/mcgregor 20th century boy It's Ewan McGregor's old-time Hollywood charm that's making him a big-time Hollywood star. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Stephanie Zacharek There's something profoundly fitting, if twisted, about the fact that an actor who first came to the world's attention playing an alarmingly vital junkie has named Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant as the performers he revered as he was growing up. When we first see Ewan McGregor as Mark Renton in "Trainspotting," he's running for his life down a city street, pursued by someone we can't see. The pursuer is beside the point. Renton, wiry and whippet thin, seems motivated less by a determination to escape, or even by fear, than by the innate drive you see in a greyhound at the track: a simple need to run. His rubbery physicality is the first thing that gets you. There's no elegance in the way he moves -- he's in too much of a hurry for that. He's less like a thoroughbred than a gangly boy hellbent on reaching the finish line. And when he does (he smacks into a car hood), he looks straight into the camera with a bawdy, demented grin. There's no trace of Gable, Stewart or Grant in this punk -- no sophistication, no apparent subtlety, no suave charm nor aw-shucks congeniality. But the more we see of Renton, the more obvious it becomes that McGregor has plenty in common with his American idols, and less with, say, the later generation of actors -- Brando, Dean, De Niro -- who might be more easily connected with Renton's streetwise demeanor, his seemingly completely modern edginess. As Renton -- and in almost any of the roles he's played since then, from Iggy Pop-style rock star Curt Wild in "Velvet Goldmine" to the simple-minded bird-keeper, Billy, in "Little Voice" to the hapless kidnapper Robert in "A Life Less Ordinary" -- McGregor shows an astonishing subtlety, an almost disconcerting inner gravity, that owes more to old Hollywood than to its more recent past. In "Trainspotting" in particular, he is, quite simply, a joy to watch -- in the way consternation crosses his face as gently as a cloud drifting across the landscape, or the way his features soften and open up, like time-lapse photography of flowers unfolding, when he takes a hit. You see some fragility in the way McGregor carries his round-shouldered, lanky frame (he dieted down to 140 pounds for the role), but the resolute bounce in his gait also betrays an almost shockingly buoyant confidence. There's a visceral quality to his charm that's both timeless and completely modern: He conjures average-guy sweetness without shambling. He transmits a crackling erotic charge, though he's too much of a goofball to really smolder. The intelligence in his eyes is always readable, and his comic timing shows the agility of an acrobat. But all that said, McGregor is also maddeningly elusive. I've adored every single one of the performances I've seen, and I've watched him closely, but I find myself dumbstruck in trying to get a handle on him. For that reason alone, it makes sense that McGregor should play the sapling Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas' "Star Wars" prequel, "The Phantom Menace." McGregor and Alec Guinness (who played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original "Star Wars") are completely disparate actors -- Guinness has always traded heavily on understatement, and always makes a graceful bow to formality; McGregor, far more casual, just seems to wing it, with stellar results. There's a prevailing notion that McGregor generally plays high-strung, vaguely scruffy vulnerable guys, but even the performances that fit that description in the most basic way are all radically different. Guinness is the kind of actor whose looks are hard to pin down -- it always seems as if he could be anyone. McGregor has star quality in spades, but he's always able to slip that quietly into a role, to flesh out all its dimensions without shouting, stretching or wriggling. There's also something admirable about McGregor's choice of roles: "Phantom Menace" is the first project he's done that could conceivably make him a star in the big-time Hollywood sense. He's done some 15 movies in five years, generally working with lesser-known directors (prior to "Trainspotting," he'd appeared in Danny Boyle's earlier feature "Shallow Grave") or doing small-budget pictures like Mark Herman's "Brassed Off" and Peter Greenaway's "The Pillow Book." His guest appearance on "ER," as the robber of a convenience store who gradually reveals so much vulnerability and inner turmoil that it takes you apart, was so staggering that it busted the seams of a television show that more often than not trades on manufactured drama. And in March McGregor ended a run onstage in London as Scrawdyke in David Halliwell's 1964 play, "Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs," directed by McGregor's uncle, Denis Lawson -- who had a small role in the original "Star Wars," and whom McGregor has cited as being influential in his career choice. The play, about student revolutionaries who come to see the phoniness of their enterprise, starts out fully aware of (and able to laugh at) the naiveté of well-intentioned young people and ends up a tiresome screed. But in the performance I saw, at the end of the play's run, McGregor was flawless. Even in the laggard second half, his timing kept the action going like clockwork, and he managed to make even the play's most obvious message-board diatribes about the dangers of haphazard radicalism sound as if they were being spoken by a real person -- no small feat. What's more, it was clear that he did "Little Malcolm" simply because he wanted to, not because it was a good career move. "I did the show because I wanted to remember what it's like being totally frightened again," he told GQ. "The fear of being crap is always what makes you good." If McGregor ever feels any fear, it never shows. In "Little Voice," he's saddled with a dreadful role of male wallflower -- he's a pigeon keeper who falls for the movie's main character, LV (the magnificent Jane Horrocks), a withdrawn young girl with the uncanny ability to mimic go-for-broke singers like Judy Garland and Shirley Bassey -- but he elevates it without even trying. When he kisses one of his beloved birds on the head, or looks at LV with lovestruck wonder, his boyish innocence is miraculously easy and unforced; he hangs back just enough to make the performance work, whereas lesser actors would turn the tap on full blast. And he's the emotional anchor at the center of the feverish, messy and oddly wonderful "A Life Less Ordinary." He and his cohort Celine (Cameron Diaz) pause to kiss in the parking lot of a bank, just after they've robbed it. He happens to glance toward the back seat of their getaway car and suddenly has a premonition of her slumped down there, her stomach a bloody hole. He turns back to look at the real Celine, standing in one piece before him, and looks at her quizzically, forlornly: The wind has been knocked out of him by the prospect, glimpsed only in a brief hallucination, of losing her so soon after he's found her. It's a mystically lovely moment, one that encapsulates in a fragile bubble the sensation of suddenly realizing that you can't live without someone. In Todd Haynes' clumsy but well-intentioned "Velvet Goldmine," McGregor plays the quintessential bad-boy rock star, only badder. Onstage, scrawny, shirtless and raw, he's the picture of voraciously omnisexual masculinity -- like Mick Jagger with balls instead of nuts. His Curt Wild is a naked ape who comes wrapped only in his own mythology. He grew up in a trailer park, had some vaguely defined relationship with a pack of wolves and was forced to undergo shock treatments as a kid ("to fry the fairy right out of him," according to one character). What's wonderful about the performance is the way McGregor balances the feral sexual menace of his character with a carefully veiled yet undeniable crushability. When Wild kisses Arthur (played by Christian Bale), it's his sexuality -- not necessarily his homosexuality -- that shines through. It's not that the homoerotic quality of his scenes is in any way denied or downplayed; it's just that McGregor is so believable as a lover, so free of awkwardness or shyness, that his character doesn't seem to be wearing any kind of a gay/straight/other ID label -- he's a sensual human being, plain and simple, a quality that's shockingly elusive in portrayals of gay, lesbian and straight characters in the movies these days. Strangely enough, maybe it's that sensual freedom that puts McGregor squarely in league with old-time Hollywood leading men. Movies are so different now. Comparatively, they're more open about sex and love and longing -- but they're not necessarily more honest. It's actors like McGregor who can keep them honest, who can be purely sexual in the way they speak and move, even as they clearly have no interest in the game-playing of machismo. Like his forebears, McGregor understands that sometimes the most deeply sensual gestures are the seemingly small ones, like the shy flicker of an eye or the tenderness in a smile. McGregor isn't a leading man in the old-fashioned sense -- he's far too visceral for that -- but even his rawest performances show a kind of delicacy. If the best acting is really just another kind of singing, a way of connecting with an audience in a way that's verbal on the surface but infinitely more complicated below it, then McGregor is both a rock star and a crooner, often at the same time -- and he knows how senseless it would be to even try to choose between the two. salon.com | May 12, 1999