The New York Times - March 4, 2001
Russell Crowe's Special Brand Of Masculinity By MANOHLA DARGIS

RUSSELL CROWE has a talent for misery. Is there anyone else this famous, outside of jail or politics, who looks this glum, this consistently? A centripetal force in muscular entertainments like "Romper Stomper," "L.A. Confidential," "The Insider" and this year's leading Academy Award contender, "Gladiator," he has made a reputation playing characters who are as likely to suffer bruising unhappiness as to dole it out. And he's done so without a hint of irony. Even when wearing a wolf skin and a skirt, and voicing a Hollywood call to-battle not heard since Samson and Victor Mature, Mr. Crowe, nominated two years running for best actor, keeps a straight face. "Unleash hell" may be the war cry of Maximus, the extravagantly martyred Roman general he plays in "Gladiator," but it isn't a stretch to think Russell Crowe, a best actor nominee. it's that of Mr. Crowe as well.

Mr. Crowe, 36, has assumed a range of roles throughout his 11- year film career, from horse wrangler to sensitive plumber, but he's become famous for a procession of tough, at times brutal men, all securely out of touch with their feminine side. With a face as coiled as his fists, he has resurrected a soulful, often tragic masculinity not seen on American screens since the he-man martyr years of the 1970's, when the likes of Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and even Sylvester Stallone made a last stand for heroic masculinity, however pathological. With an equal measure of ennui and testosterone, these 70's icons gave life to wounded sons (some, predictably, Vietnam veterans) whose alienation from father and fatherland provided for gripping narratives, not to mention some unspeakable male behavior.

The second wave of feminism helped wash away these damaged men, and in their place emerged new paradigms embodied by Mr. Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas and Harrison Ford. Age and evolving audience taste would in time make relies of Mr. Stallone and Mr. Schwarzenegger's cartoon macho, while Mr. Douglas and Mr. Ford mellowed, their edge blunted. The stars who have stayed the course - Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Keanu Rseves, Will Smith and that apotheosis of eternal boy-man, Tom Hanks -- remain freshly young in look and attitude, their masculinity carefully sublimated. Even the men who actually do look and sometimes even act their age -- Bruce Willis, John Trivolta and Samuel L. Jackson at their best, Clint Eastwood almost always -- are cany enough to deliver their masculine perogative with a knowing wink, evidence that the smartest old dogs can learn new tricks..

In this male company, Mr. Crowe isn't just an anomaly, he's an avatar -- a guy who's deadly serious about being a man, whether he's reducing men to meat in "Gladiator" or taking on the tobacco industry in "The Insider" (a role for which he received his best actor Oscar nomination last year). In these and others of Mr. Crowe's films, we are far from the casual male self-parody that inflames, wittingly or not; Jerry Bruckheimer blowouts like "Arrmageddon," the late "Lethal Weapon" films and every feature made or inspired by Quentin Tarantino. There is nothing equivocal about the way Mr. Crowe, as Bud White in "L.A. Confidential," pounds a wife beater and later, his own lover into the ground.

Neither is there a single instance of self-reflexive jocularity in last year's rescue fantasy, "Proof of Life," in which Mr. Crowe portrayed a "kidnap and ransom" expert who falls for the woman whose husband he's ~ to save (and had an affair with his co-star, Meg Ryan). Think of it as the return of the repressed: the resurrection (yes, again) of the angry white man, this time without the Iron John drums and crocodile tears. Born in New Zealand but moved to Australia when he was 4, Mr. Crowe, the son of movie caterers, began working in television at age 6. He acted throughout his teenage years, forming a rock band along the way, and under the stage name Russ Le Roq, recorded a song called "I Want to Be Like Marlon Brando." He appeared onstage in "Grease" in New Zealand and "The Rocky Horror Show" in Australia, where as Dr. Frank N. Furter he donned fishnets and hose for more than 400 performances. In 1980, he was cast in his first movie, "Blood Oath," went on to a few other Australian screen roles, then a year later starred in the film that put the film industry on notice, Joclyn Moorhouse's "Proof." The toxic love story won Mr. Crowe the first of what would become many career awards (an Australian Film Institute best supporting actor prize), but, looking back, one of the more unexpected things about the film is that his is its least exciting lead performance. As a genial dishwasher named Andy, Mr. Crowe seems cast from a different mold than his co-stars, Hugo Weaving and Genevieve Picot, who spend the film circling each other like sharks.

Although "Proof" remains one of his more admired films, revealing the actor's gift for turning reserve into something that looks like feeling, it also hints at his limitations as a performer. In the film, Mr. Crowe's character befriends Mr. Weaving's, a blind photographer, effectively loosening the emotional hold of the blind man's housekeeper and secret admirer, an unsympathetic type played within an inch of cliché by Ms. Picot. Australian films often flaunt particularly atavistic sexual politics, but "Proof" isn't much different from any number of films that value friendships between men over those between men and women. What makes it noteworthy in Mr. Crowe's career, however, is that it's the last film in which the actor successfully played a character close to average. The last film, in other words, before he became Russell Crowe, angry man.

Given his more familiar screen presence, it's worth noting ~hat it's Mr. Crowe who saves "Proof" from wholesale cynicism. His character's charm, his effortless smile and young man's exuberant physicality, spark against the photographer's flinty defenses, and the friendship that grows between them has a loose, sexy vibe. it isn't that the film is a covert gay love story, rather that Mr. Crowe is often most persuasively intimate when performing opposite other men. It's then that he reveals what Curtis Hanson, who directed him in one of his greatest performances, in the film "L.A. Confidential," has called his "emotional purity."

What persuaded Mr. Hanson that Mr. Crowe could play period Angeleno was "Romper Stomper, " the film that made him a star in his home country. Directed by Geoffrey Wright, the film, about a violent gang of neo-Nazis, was released in 1992 to praise and condemnation. Some critics saw it as an attack on white supremacist culture; others argued that the filmmakers relished skinhead culture too enthusiastically. Considering the close regard with which the director filmed his young star, here all muscle and freaky tattoos, the latter view seems understandable. What everyone did agree on was Mr. Crowe, whose performance had reviewers reaching for that most dangerous of comparisons for new talent: Marlon Brando. Now often regulated to the cult shelves in video stores, "Romper Stomper" earned the actor stilt more awards, but perhaps more important, it also earned him the attention of one of Hollywood's then biggest stars, Sharon Stone. Ms. Stone had been looking for someone to hold his own opposite her in the western "The Quick and the Dead" and lobbied on behalf of Mr. Crowe, reportedly sealing her approval with the claim that he was "the sexiest guy working in movies." More dead than quick, the genre pastiche didn't do much for Mr. Crowe except bring him to the United States. He subsequently appeared in three more duds: "Virtuosity," "Rough Magic" and "No Way Back."

Then in 1996, Mr. Hanson cast him in "L.A. Confidential," thrusting Mr. Crowe into the American imagination. Neatly distilled from the James Ellroy novel, the film tracks the violent adventures of three Los Angeles police officers, all of whom are either on the take or the hustle. Mr. Crowe's Bud White is at once the most brutal and vulnerable of the three, a raging bull with a weakness for women in peril. Dressed in boxy suits that hang forlornly off his newly thickened body, his hair cropped close, Mr. Crowe looks the image of the cop Mr. Ellroy put on the page: a violent man who, like some latter-day Atlas, shoulders a world of hurt, his own and everyone else's.

Mr. Hanson has said that when searching for an actor to play Bud White, he was thinking of the Hollywood actor Aldo Ray. An ex-Navy frogman with a heavyweight's build and a rasp of a voice that fluttered and cracked between alto and tenor, Ray took on various macho roles in the 1950's and 60's, the best of which, like Anthony Mann's masterpiece brut, "Men in War, were edged with vulnerability. A similar admixture of tough and tender defines

Mr. Crowe's most memorable performances; even Hando, the skinhead antihero of "Romper Stomper," is steeped in anguish. Part of this, certainly, has to do with the roles Mr. Crowe has taken on, as well as the directors with whom he has worked, including Michael Mann on "The Insider" and Ridley Scott on "Gladiator," both partial to visions of heroic masculinity. But there is something else, too.

Mr. Crowe seems nothing if not angry, the part, the better his performance. Not since the prime of Robert De Niro, the De Niro of "Mean Streets," and "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull," has another male actor made fury look the equal of emotional truth. As with Mr. De Niro, the characters that Mr. Crowe plays best come equipped with trigger tempers, a taste for primitive vengeance and impatience with most social niceties. Theirs is an extreme masculinity, a sort of maximum maleness that appears to have carried over to Mr. Crowe's personal exploits, which, from his brawls to his romantic entanglements, have provided tabloid fodder for years.

In contrast to many movie stars, he doesn't shy from bad publicity and indeed sometimes seems to seek it out, whether he's shouting at the press or just baiting them. When a British journalist, who interviewed Mr. Crowe around the time of the release of "Romper Stomper" in Great Britain, asked the actor about the film's homoerotic subtext, the Australian replied, "Well, you'd know more about that, mate, being English." The British, in turn, have had theirs. One of the more oft-repeated stories about Mr. Crowe, which surfaced several years ago and involves the actor's reported habit of shouting out his own name during sex, has transcended industry gossip to become one of those legends that cling to the famous as part of the smog of fame. Last year, the story was the subject of a column in the British newspaper The Guardian, and even the British Film Institute's monthly magazine, Sight and Sound, has referred to the actor as "Russell 'Go Russ' Crowe."

The gossip and the performances, the off-screen noise and on-screen ferocity are of a piece. The unbearable heaviness of being Russell Crowe is a gestalt, after all, a way of being and making meaning as a man. In film after better film, Mr. Crowe takes on the burdens of modern masculinity, and with each role seems to sink deeper into the ground. It's no surprise that his characters increasingly skew totemic, like those ticked off in the children's rhyme: rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, skinhead, whistle blower, gladiator chief. The most memorable of these, the ones who burn up the screen with their intensity, their passion and rage, are ordinary men gutting. their way through times ordinary and not, embodiments of the everyday heroes eulogized by Susan Faludi in "Stiffed," her lament for sweat and beard growth. All of which has, rather understandably, made it more and more difficult for the actor to play average.

It is a peculiar problem most recently born out by "Mystery, Alaska," the unfunny hockey comedy Mr. Crowe made between "L.A. Confidential" and "The Insider." Given little to do but skate and flog limp jokes, the actor slips into neutral as, in a terrific Russell Crowe as an amiable dishwasher in the 1991 film "Proof." instance of movie miscalculation, his character, a married sheriff bereft of corpses and Grand Guignol, is forced off the ice. To bench Russell Crowe is colossal idiocy, but there's also something perversely fascinating about watching the actor look so rootless, so lost, at land and at sea at once. All he can do is wait out "Mystery, Alaska," a sidelined hero, primed for the next hot word and punch, the next chance to stand up or take the fall like a man.

Is it any wonder that Mr. Crowe's subsequent films were "The Insider," "Gladiator" and "Proof of Life"? Is it any wonder that in his next, "A Beautiful Mind," he's to play John Forbes Nash Jr., madman and Nobel Prize winner both?