(Thornton’s own dad was a baseball coach.) Lucky, then, that a handful of chunky leading roles were lined up for Thornton, and he hardly put a foot wrong in any of these, from Monster’s Ball (2001) to Bandits (2001) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), to a very contrasting pair of sports coaches, in Friday Night Lights (2004) and Richard Linklater’s Bad News Bears (2005). His fifth marriage, by his own admission, made him feel like the supporting player, not the star, but only because the wife in question was Angelina Jolie, experiencing her own meteoric ascent. As a thinly disguised version of Clinton’s campaign-runner James Carville in Primary Colors (1998), he was bang on the money, and he became the first port of call as the guy you might stick in a control room – the Ed Harris, if you like – in a Michael Bay joint such as Armageddon (also 1998). The re-pairing of Paxton and Thornton on Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan (1998) was just one of the highlights of Thornton’s post-Sling-Blade jamboree, netting him another nomination.
#New york brilliance full#
Thornton’s scripts were full of grit and pain: they connected in glancing ways with his brutal-sounding backwoods upbringing, which saw him beaten repeatedly by his father from the age, as he remembers it, “of three or four” – a legacy of pain which has stamped him with acute OCD ever since. He’d had bitty roles since the mid-1980s, and deserved more acclaim for co-writing and co-starring in the phenomenal One False Move (1992), Carl Franklin’s still-underrated neo-noir, which gave Bill Paxton his best ever role as a hicksville cop with everything to prove. At 41, and already at the tail end of his fourth marriage, his star was finally rising. Thornton was Oscar-nominated for Best Actor that year and won Best Adapted Screenplay. The role he’d written for himself, Karl Childers, would be a tough sell in the current climate: Karl was an abused, intellectually disabled loner in Arkansas, who developed paternal feelings for a 12-year-old boy played by Lucas Black, and intervened in a fateful, ultimately heroic way in another family’s crisis.
What happened? Thornton was the toast of Hollywood in 1996, thanks to the promotional push his writing-directing debut Sling Blade (1996) got from Miramax, the same year as The English Patient. He’s become a kind of twilight actor in interchangeable parts. Secret service men, politicians, spin-doctors and soldiers have become Thornton’s bread and butter, but these besuited stiffs, who pop up every year or two in generally underperforming pictures, might just as well be all called Donald Fitzroy. He appears in this week’s Netflix action romp The Gray Man – ill-fatedly – as one Donald Fitzroy, the handler of Ryan Gosling’s character. Billy Bob Thornton, a staple of good-to-great American films 20-odd years ago, has not exactly gone into hiding, but the 66-year-old’s film career is in a curious state.
0 kommentar(er)
