SCHOLAR, POET, ACTOR, COWBOY The complexity of Tommy Lee Jones brings to his roles comes from his life
THE EYES of Tommy Lee Jones - dark, piercing, slightly wounded-looking - stare at a reporter across a tape recorder and a hotel breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. Outside the Mansion Del Rio hotel, the San Antonio River glides by in its channel with a picturesque placidity.
Inside, Tommy Lee Jones stretches restlessly in his chair, gobbles some eggs, gives some instructions to his 10-year-old son, Austin (or "Bubba"), who's along for the visit, and says cheerfully, "Ask any question you want to. If it's a violation of privacy, Bubba won't let me answer it."
A top-flight actor, polo player, Texas cattle-rancher and
natural-born poet, Jones may be one of the most intriguing and unsettling American film stars around right now. He mixes you up, scrambles your reactions, crosses over and over again the borderline between sympathy and intimidation.
That's the case with his latest movie, "The Fugitive," which opens Friday. It's a thriller based on the paradigmatic '60s TV chase show, the old serial saga of a determined cop pursuing a condemned but innocent prison escapee across America; in it, Jones confirms the reputation for masterly, scene-stealing antagonists he won in Oliver Stone's 1991 "JFK" and last year's "Under Siege."
It's nothing new. Since 1970, when Jones made his film debut - improbably enough as Ryan O'Neal's Harvard roommate in "Love Story" - he's regularly scratched audience nerves, scarred their souls. Drilling into you, over a pock-marked face and ferociously prominent cheeks and
jaw, his fierce gaze sometimes suggests a thunderstorm rising over a bleak desert. It can radiate danger or calm, savagery or torment, bemusement or sympathy.
Andy Davis, his "Fugitive" director - who's also worked with him in "The Package" and "Under Siege" - says of Jones: "He's got incredible presence and great power. And it comes off the screen; it jumps at you. If you have him do a scene nine times, it'll be different each time, every take usable.
"He's always exploring, always investigating. He's very
chameleon-like. He looks sort of raw and rugged and tough, but, at the same time, he's very comedic. And he can be very subtle and sensitive."
That's what the reporter is seeking right now: the subtler,
sensitive stuff. Jones is asked about his happiest times in the theater.
He ponders. "I'd say it's summer repertory in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in the latter part of the Sixties," he finally replies, recalling a student talent pool that included John Lithgow ("an inspiration to me: two years older and a foot taller"), Stockard Channing and MIT fireball James Woods. "That was the best experience had in the theater. The audiences were very bright, very interested.
And, when it counts, they were very demanding and discriminating.
The themes that we concerned ourselves with (were) the world, its condition and its future. We did everything, anything. Shakespeare, Brecht, the Greeks.
Suddenly he waxes eloquent, as Tommy Lee Jones is wont to do.
"And there was music in the cafes at night! There was revolution in the air! It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Theater really . . . It meant a lot. And I was young. And it was a huge adventure. I had only up until that time dreamed of engaging my imagination in something that seemed so important. So . . . I'd say that was my happiest time
in the theater."
There's a pause as we listen to the river flow. "And in the
movies?" he is asked.
He thinks longer; they are more years to remember. "That's difficult to categorize . . . I was delighted when I was hired by Roger Corman to do one of his road films. [In 1976, Jones played the charismatic escaped con in Michael Miller's critical hit, "Jackson County Jail."] I'd always . . . I lusted after that situation. It was like doing classical repertory in some way. There's a classicism to it. There have been other, similar situations. Not landmarks so much as telegraph poles."
Like "JFK?"
"Yeah. I enjoyed that - because you eat so well in New Orleans. And I love that river . . ."
* * *
With "The Fugitive" out this week, Oliver Stone's "Heaven and Earth" due in December, and another Stone film, "Natural Born Killers, " currently being shot in Chicago, Jones seems perched at the peak of his profession. But you can never quite pin him down. Sheer unpredictability may be a prime reason this sometimes contradictory fellow - who
grew up around the West Texas oil fields, before taking a cum laude Harvard degree in literature and winning all-Ivy League and all-East honors as the football team's offensive guard - has become, since 1989, one of the American cinema's premier heavies.
But offbeat villainy is not the only string in his bow. He's
also a master of ambiguous or tormented "heroism" ("Lonesome Dove"), complex reality ("Coal Miner's Daughter," "The Executioner's Song," the current "House of Cards"), and something that lies fascinatingly separate from
them all, like his current role of Lt. Sam Gerard in the movie update of "The Fugitive."
Jones dominates "The Fugitive," just as he did "Under Siege" - where he played a flaky, long-haired, leather-jacketed, rock-and-roll battleship hijacker. (According to Davis: "The part was written as Elton John; Tommy wanted to do it as Alice Cooper, and we compromised on Paul Butterfield.") "The Fugitive's" Gerard, of course, is the prototypical
indefatigable cop, who, for a generation of mid-'60s TV watchers, became a symbol of relentless police pursuit. For four seasons, ending in what was then the highest-rated single TV program in history, Gerard hounded the hapless "wrong man," Dr. Richard Kimble - played on TV by
David Janssen, in the film by Harrison Ford - for the murder of Kimble's wife, while Kimble chased the mysterious "one-armed man" who'd actually committed the crime.
In the TV show, Gerard was played by the London actor Barry Morse: dour, unsmiling, a thin-haired intellectual who seemed unreachable. Jones' Gerard seems unreachable too, but in a different way. He's the man you absolutely do not want on your case, the cop who won't be fooled
or flummoxed, a techno-athlete and numbers wizard, peeling through the false leads of the chase with terrifying focus, zeroing in on Kimble like a rifle's red laser beam.
"Well, all heroes have to encounter some kind of jeopardy, don't they? And it takes a lot of jeopardy to be convincing around Harrison, because people have so much confidence in him. Anyway, I think it's important to distinguish between antagonists and villains. They're two entirely different things. Our Gerard is an antagonist."
Jones often gets wounding, unforgettable moments in his films: whether he's playing sensual, embittered murderer Gary Gilmore in "The Executioner's Song" or an armored ex-Texas ranger like Woodrow Call in "Lonesome Dove." Yet ask him about what was going on in those scenes or
movies, or what he intended, and he'll simply reply, with prototypical Texas taciturnity, "It's a job of work." And he'll add: "I try to be a good soldier. I'm there to do what you want. I'm there to serve the director, my fellow actors, and the audience."
It's not a pose. Jones was born in San Saba, Texas, where his father was a real-life cowboy turned oil-rigger. But though he excelled early in the classic Texas sport, football - in a position, offensive guard, that's the sports equivalent of trench warfare - he also developed, early on, his interest in literature and theater.
"West Texas was pretty much life, language, habits of dress and transportation, modes of thought, dictated pretty much by the terrain and the weather," Jones recalls. "The way they are in most societies where people live close to the land. The country's flat; it's hot; it's dry. The water's very precious."
In this flatland, Jones' first recorded stage credit was in a
production of Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood" at St. Mark's School. Ask him about his favorite authors and books and he'll rattle off a startling list: Tolstoy (for "War and Peace"), Shakespeare, James Joyce (for "Ulysses"), T. S. Eliot, Bertolt Brecht and the eloquent Victorian art and social critic John Ruskin - the supreme 19th-Century English
prose stylist whose writings inspired both Tolstoy and Gandhi. "I don't read enough, though," he says now morosely. "Nobody does. This guy, " he nods at Bubba (who is now busy writing a sequel to "Jurassic Park"), "reads more than anybody. And he doesn't read enough."
What about the contradictions between being football player and poet? Has he ever reconciled them? Jones smiles. "I noticed when I was an undergraduate . . . that I had a lot of friends in different worlds.
We did `Coriolanus' one time and we needed centurions . . . So all these Italian linebackers from the [football] team showed up. They looked real impressive: two hundred, sixty pounds. Made pretty good centurions.
"Also, my offensive line coach came to see a play I did one time: [John Arden's] `Serjeant Musgrave's Dance.' He didn't understand it one bit. He was retired from the Army, so, he said: `Oh, yeah. Sometimes a guy takes all he can take.' Actually, that's a pretty good critical assessment!"
Jones did have a roommate at Harvard, but it wasn't anyone like Ryan O'Neal's lovelorn Oliver Barrett. It was a Tennessee politician's son named Albert Gore. Jones doesn't want to be asked questions about his old roomie - it's the one subject he's declared out-of-bounds for the interview, probably out of weariness. But Gore himself, in a Washington
Post profile by Cathy Horyn, said of his old friend: "Tommy has an unerring sense for the poetry of life that is not apparent to someone who simply sees [his taciturnity] . . ."
Andy Davis says of his frequent colleague, "He's a real American male . . . He's got a real Americana to him: this interesting combination of being Texan, a cowboy, intellectually sophisticated and well-read, and all those weird things going on with him. It makes him very mysterious." And, in the Post profile, Oliver Stone - who seems
to have signed Jones on as a semi-permanent repertory player, says: "He is definitely the kind of man who would have ridden with Sam Houston to the Alamo. He is very strong in his beliefs, fierce and close to the land."
FILMS WRITTEN by an Oliver Stone, a Quentin Tarantino ("Natural Born Killers") or a William Wittliff ("Lonesome Dove") have a certain literary / dramatic depth and shine. What about the others, the ones, like the Steven Seagal "Die Hard-on-a-battleship" thriller "Under Siege,"
that start, seemingly, as journeyman projects?
"Well," Jones says with a frown, "It'd be better - wiser, more polite - to say that the script of "Under Siege" wasn't entirely finished when it became necessary to start shooting; that circumstances developed during the shooting schedule that changed the demands that we made on the script . . .
"And it's not even important, because you're dealing with a formula, a commercial movie. Formulas are more important, actually than the script.
Your job is to make the formula new and different. And how do you do that? By giving it real content. Something that people want to watch, something new and different, something that stimulates people.
"Most people who will suggest that the American motion picture audience is dumb are sadly mistaken. Americans are not dumb. We don't read enough books; we may be watching too much television. But these people are not idiots. So that's why I say that even if you're dealing with a formula situation - formula story, formula plot - you have a responsibility to make it new and different and stimulating."
"Lonesome Dove," the 1989 TV mini-series from Larry McMurtry's novel, may be the most obviously lasting work Jones has done in recent years: a six-hour film novel of humor, gentleness, sweep and sorrow.
It also has an interesting history: Jones' part - the taciturn,
super-tough, family-denying Capt. Woodrow Call - was probably the part intended for John Wayne, when McMurtry first conceived the story back in the '70s. In assuming Wayne's role, Jones gave it a sense of unease and
final tragedy that the Duke - who complained that the part offered him was a "whiner" - might not quite have mustered.
"I was sent a script and read it, " Jones says now. "And of course I'd read the book - and I immediately began to whine for the part. I tried to do a good job; it was important to me. The main thing that attracted me was just the beauty of the book. And the truth of the language. I liked the way the people talked: what they concerned themselves about. And the humor and the proximity to reality. How peoplelive.
"And I knew that if we were faithful to the book - and I knew (producer-writer) Bill Wittliff would be - that people all over the world would get a chance to see a real version of the history and literature of my home - as opposed to a phony version. We love `The Searchers.' But . . . nobody ever wore those clothes. And nobody ever talked like that. So I was looking for an opportunity to work on a story in which my relatives could recognize themselves. And in which my
children could recognize their grandparents and great-grandparents."
The rush of the river has become more palpable. Jones mentions that he's starting a new branch of his career - directing a movie for cable TV from the novel "Good Ol' Boys" - and that his favorite filmmakers include Jean-Luc Godard, John Ford, Orson Welles. What does he think
about our culture now?
"I think our culture has developed very positively." he says,
quietly. "I do. I'm very optimistic, hopeful for the future.
"I don't think forty years is a very long time. Or twenty-five
years. Twenty-five years ago, I graduated from college; this is my twenty-fifth reunion year. I doubt I'll make it; I don't have time. But, when my classmates reunite, those who do, 1969 will be as vital and alive as 1993 or 4 is. The number of the year recedes behind us, but the year itself is not goin' anywhere."
The words begin to roll out, like simple eloquent narration over a movie shot of distant mountains, plains, a sunset. "That which is good and evil in 1960 exists today, and the passage of time is slow, and not relevant. The difference is, in my mind, that good is winning the fight."
"You do feel that?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
There's that little bemused smile again. "I don't know why. I think it's because . . . I think I was born with faith. That's why. Hell, I think that's why I believe in it. The faith was here and I was born into it." The smile grows. "That's the reason. That's why."
I remind him again of all the hurdles around, personal and social. And, as he answers, I get a glimpse of the West Texas cowboy's son, showing up in the Harvard yard all those years ago, the Vietnam period, when something bright, dangerous and out of control seemed to have been loosed on the world. Tommy Lee Jones has just the right answer, and John
Ruskin or Vince Lombardi probably couldn't have bettered it.
"A lot of these hurdles will develop a reputation for being
unjumpable." he says. "But there's not an unjumpable hurdle on this Earth."
