The New Hollywood icon, who died yesterday at the age of 95, was the most dynamic actor of his generation – big or small.
He played everything: preachers to astronauts, network bosses to country singers, Jesse James to Josef Stalin, social outsiders to military men. A lot of military people. (His father was a rear admiral in the US Navy and was expected to follow in his footsteps; the son naturally rebelled by enlisting in the Army after graduating from college.)
Stoic figures were his specialty, but he also had an organ that could reach the decibels of a jet plane in seconds. Like Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, with whom he was close friends in his days as a struggling actor in New York – and with whom, in Hoffman’s case, he even shared an apartment – he came of age in off-Broadway theater in the late ’50s and in television productions in the early ’60s before rising from character actor to movie star in the New Hollywood of the ’70s.
If you name the greatest American screen actors of the past 60 years, Robert Duvall is one of the top five. If you try to pinpoint the one definitive Robert Duvall performance, half a dozen titles immediately come to mind.
The calm core in the storm
Most immediately think of “The Godfather” and its sequel, in which Duvall – who died on February 15 at the age of 95 – played Tom Hagen, the only Irishman in a family of Sicilians, an adopted Corleone child who played a key role in Cosa Nostra’s attempt to become a legitimate corporate power. Hagen is the Corleones’ lawyer, a clan member who can never quite be considered “family” due to his origins.
He’s the one who calmly leaves movie mogul Jack Woltz’s house after his “client” insists on hearing bad news straight away – just before a horse’s head appears in the studio boss’s bed. Hagen is the one who tells the hot-headed Sonny Corleone, “This is business, nothing personal,” who casually tricks an informant into accepting his own death sentence, and who suddenly screams during a Senate hearing on organized crime, “This committee owes us an apology! An apology!!!”
In Francis Ford Coppola’s two mafia masterpieces there are countless great cinematic moments that thrive on noise and frenzy. Duvall could rival Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and everyone else in this regard. But he knew exactly how to hold attention by doing little more than shifting his gaze and showing what Hagen was thinking without a single word. This is great acting.
Between irony and horror
It may be the consummate Duvall performance – the one that shows how he could be the calm center of a raging storm or suddenly transform himself into the storm. Yet throughout his long and distinguished career, Duvall demonstrated not only a seemingly endless range but also an instinctive understanding of how film acting works as a dynamic art form.
Everyone remembers “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like…victory” from the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now” – Duvall’s fourth film with Coppola (fifth if you count his uncredited cameo in “The Conversation”) – and his Lt. Colonel Kilgore, who loved both weapons of mass destruction and surfing (not in that order).
This quote is one of the most succinct character studies of the warrior mentality in just two lines. But even more impressive than his emphasis is what happens immediately afterwards: the dreamy glow on Kilgore’s face gives way to a slight frown, a brief nod of resigned insight – everything passes, even the rush of conflict – and he walks away. Comedy, irony and horror without words.
He achieves a similar effect in “Network” (1976), where fictional television station boss Frank Hackett is best remembered for shouting, with almost biblical fury, that they had made a newscaster’s nervous breakdown a hit: “It’s a big, fat, big-breasted hit!” Need someone to turn it up to eleven? Duvall is your man. But here too, the magnitude of this extraordinary achievement can be seen in the details.
In an earlier scene, Faye Dunaway’s unscrupulous producer tries to sell him on the idea of giving her mentally unstable news anchor with a messiah complex full star status. “For God’s sake, Diane, we’re talking about putting a clearly irresponsible man on national television,” he says. Then Duvall pauses and you see how he doesn’t think morally but in terms of quotas. A slight smile. A glow behind the eyes. The look says it all: get the obviously irresponsible man in front of the cameras immediately.
Size in detail
Duvall was never an actor for effect, even when his characters were out of control, and he understood that people – especially patriarchs and authority figures – are never just one thing. He was able to show the audience a seemingly tyrannical father like in “The Great Santini” (1981) and at the same time make it understand how this man became someone who throws basketball balls at his son’s head.
Duvall could start at the bottom, as in the film that won him the Oscar, “Tender Mercies” (1983), and highlight every misstep and bar brawl that got him there – and then let the audience watch as he fought his way back, step by step, to a quiet life of dignity and inner peace. He showed how a man who wants to bring salvation to others rages against his creator (“I love you, Lord, but I’m angry at you!”) and loses himself in a dark night of the soul in “The Apostle” (1997), which he also wrote and directed.
Even as he took on roles starting in the 2000s that simply cast him as a wrinkled face of well-deserved gravitas, what happened was always more than a glorified cameo. Duvall turned peripheral characters into main characters simply through his presence. Yet he still had one incredible performance left in him after the turn of the millennium, one that should have won him an Oscar or three.
In Get Low (2009), Duvall plays Felix Bush, a hermit in the Tennessee backcountry. One day he comes to town and invites the community to his funeral, just because he isn’t dead yet doesn’t mean they shouldn’t come. A meeting appears on the appointed date. Bush gives his own eulogy. “I had to drive all the way to Illinois to find someone who had something good to say about me,” he begins. Soon after, he confesses to an act from long ago that made him believe he no longer deserved a place in society.
The last great confession
On paper, this description might seem like pure exposition. In Duvall’s hands, however, viewers follow Bush every step of the way, from fond memories of an old love’s nickname to bone-deep shame and remorse over his role in a tragedy. It’s not a monologue, although it takes up a good six and a half minutes of screen time. It’s a liberation. After finally confessing to the world what he did, he exhales. “I don’t mind actually dying next time. But please forgive me.”
You don’t even have to have seen the previous film to be moved to tears by this scene. She is steeped in loss. And for many of us who revered Duvall’s work and considered him among the best to ever appear in front of the camera, that’s a feeling all too familiar right now.
