Farrell dog

Ignore his penchant for prostitutes, those "Alexander" wigs and that ubiquitous sex tape: Colin Farrell is more than the sum of his headlines.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment Features

Colin Farrell in "Ask the Dust."

March 10, 2006 | By all rights there should have been few more ridiculous sequences in the 2004 moviegoing year than the one in which Colin Farrell, in the title role of Oliver Stone's psychohistorical epic "Alexander," confronts Jared Leto's lovesick Hephaistion. The picture has strongly hinted, but not literally shown, that Alexander and Hephaistion have been lovers. Now it's Alexander's wedding night, and Hephaistion, his eyes rimmed in rock-chick kohl -- you can almost smell the patchouli wafting off him -- creeps to Alexander's chambers with a gift for him, a ring, obviously a desperate grab for the great warrior's affection.

Alexander, now a married man, can no longer partake of such youthful high jinks, and he gazes helplessly at the face of his dearest friend. Farrell's hair has been molded into a ludicrous dyed-blond helmet, and it's deal-breaking hair -- he looks more like a St. Louis soccer mom than a world beater. But in this scene with Leto, in particular, he's so ardently grave that you can't laugh at him. There's tenderness in his gaze, but also a solemn eroticism; his Alexander isn't disowning Hephaistion but merely attempting, with a wistfulness he can't hide, to free him from his painfully unrealistic expectations.

Farrell isn't what you'd call, strictly speaking, a Method actor (although the heroes he often cites in interviews, like Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, are). But here we see in action one of the tenets of Method acting: Farrell is playing objectives, not emotions. We describe what we see in his face in terms of emotion because that's the handiest way to grasp it, but he's really showing us, with neither embarrassment nor sentimentality, the history of a love affair in a single glance.

Meanwhile, the movie around him is crap.

Time and again lousy, or even just inexperienced, directors have gotten gold out of Colin Farrell. And even in his latest picture, Robert Towne's meticulously crafted but ultimately flat adaptation of John Fante's "Ask the Dust," Farrell has moments that resonate -- the problems posed by the performance have more to do with poor casting than with Farrell's commitment to the role.

But perhaps largely because of the loose-cannon quality of the interviews he's given, people seem to think of Farrell as a celebrity who just happens to get movie roles; a good-looking, scruffy Irish mug with a big personality attached -- in other words, a movie star who never really gets his hands dirty with the business of acting. The surfacing last summer of a sex video Farrell made with his then-girlfriend Nicole Narain didn't help. While so many of us claim to be liberal about drinking, drug use and casual sex (the smoking of plain old cigarettes is probably where we gouge the deepest line in the sand), it's so much easier to make sense of the world by using tried-and-true puritanical assessments, and we all fall prey to them now and then. Even though we think we have completely separate compartments for what actors do on-screen and what goes on in their private lives, we still find ourselves wondering, Should an actor who has spoken candidly about moderate heroin use and the pleasures of engaging prostitutes ever be taken seriously?

But that, right there, is the great puzzle of Farrell, and the thing that sets him apart from the Brad Pitts and the Tom Cruises of the world, occasionally appealing actors who now and then are able to pull off a stunt that somewhat resembles a performance. Farrell has given bad performances and terrific ones. But I've never seen him coast through a role -- not even in a throwaway action movie -- as if cushioned by the certainty that good looks and swagger will get him everything he wants out of life. He's a bad boy whose work betrays a sterling work ethic, and as a nation of celebrity watchers and movie lovers, we have no idea what to make of that.

With his black-caterpillar eyebrows and velvet-brown eyes, Farrell has the distinction of being both regular and extraordinary. He's a receptive actor more than an emotive one; even when he's talking, as opposed to listening, you get the sense he's attuned to every signal around him. But Farrell's finer qualities are sometimes veiled by his choice of material: His career choices so far don't seem to have been guided by making money first, banking on the hopes that he can get better, subtler roles later. His strategy seems to be that of grabbing everything at once -- one year he'll do a dumb action picture like "S.W.A.T."; the next, he'll show up as a tenderhearted man-child in Michael Mayer's "A Home at the End of the World," based on a Michael Cunningham novel. Similarly, in 2006 we get Farrell not just in "Ask the Dust," in the role of disillusioned writer Arturo Bandini (Fante's stand-in, in this tale of early-'30s Los Angeles), but also as Sonny Crockett in Michael Mann's movie updating of his hit '80s TV show "Miami Vice."

Farrell's choices may seem indiscriminate, but when it comes to acting in the contemporary filmmaking business -- maintaining a balance between making money and doing work that means something to you, all the while knowing that your choices may become extremely limited after you reach a certain age -- it's hard to know if being too discriminating is all that wise. The price an actor pays for actually working can be quite high: Just six years ago, after his breakthrough performance as the enigmatically sensitive Pvt. Roland Bozz in Joel Schumacher's otherwise tedious "Tigerland," nearly everyone had high hopes for Farrell as a "serious" actor. Now there's a tendency to judge him more by the projects he takes than by what he does in them.

Next page: Why did he really want to sleep with a 69-year-old?