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By Steve Ramos
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Ralph Fiennes
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Nicolas Cage plays a noble car thief in Gone in 60 Seconds. Mission: Impossible 2 spy boy Tom Cruise once again saves the world from chaos. Mel Gibson waves the Stars and Stripes as a South Carolina farmer who joins the Revolutionary War in The Patriot. Finally, George Clooney is the captain of a storm-battered swordfish boat in The Perfect Storm. Striding into this blockbuster arena of machismo is Ralph (he uses the British pronunciation "Rafe") Fiennes, courtesy of his three-role performance in director Istvan Szabo's Sunshine. But the cerebral stage actor has politely declined to play the action star. Fiennes is content to remain Hollywood's Hamlet. For audiences in search of movie alternatives, he is a welcome break from action heroes.
In Sunshine's tale, spread over 100 years and four generations of the Hungarian Sonnenschein family, Fiennes portrays three generations of men with surprising success. Subtle changes slowly cross his expressive face. Fiennes' intense gaze is the catalyst behind his characters' aging. Basically, he is the best thing in a lumbering movie.
Quiz Show (1994) was supposed to be the movie that propelled Fiennes to stardom. In director Robert Redford's film, Fiennes played Charles Van Doren, the dashing blue-blood intellectual, a Columbia University English instructor, who reluctantly agrees to cooperate with the crooked producers of Twenty-One, the most popular quiz show of the 1950s.
Van Doren was a drastic switch from Fiennes' Schindler's List role as World War II concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth. In a brutal performance, Goeth rolls out of bed, pats his ample belly, then steps onto the balcony with a high-powered rifle and takes aim at the unsuspecting camp internees.
Fiennes is gentle and charming as Van Doren. He is vile and repugnant as Goeth. For a leading man who has sidestepped the early predictions of megastardom with challenging roles, suddenly, playing the action hero looks dull by comparison.
"I just go on an instinct," Fiennes says, speaking at last year's Toronto Film Festival. "I go by who the director is ... I don't think actors want to play themselves. They might want to play aspects of themselves, but it's a fantasy. I know the industry has all these labels. A film is mainstream, or not mainstream or could be mainstream, but my decisions aren't so simple."
Recently, director Martha Fiennes collaborated with her famous brother in Onegin, a lush adaptation of Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. He plays the arrogant Russian aristocrat who struggles over his love for a beautiful country girl, Tatyana (Liv Tyler). Joining his sister at last fall's Toronto Film Festival, Fiennes describes his knack for portraying confused, secretive men whose passion often leads to wrongdoing.
"I've chosen parts that have conflicted characters because those parts interest me," Fiennes says. "They have more dimensions to them, more human characteristics. Human characters interest me more than idealized characters who are identified as the hero. It's a personal taste.
"I loved the character of Onegin when I read it. I like the journey he went on and that he was this cynical, jaded man who wasn't connected with his emotions until he was too late."
Fiennes is the most improbable of movie hunks. He receives an idolatry usually reserved for screen heroes who save the planet from runaway asteroids. In Sunshine, Fiennes isn't heroic at all. In fact, he's anti-heroic. In person, he is slim, with dirty blonde hair that's casually swept back. He answers questions slowly and quietly. As the emotions move across his thin mouth, ample nose and icy blue eyes, it's clear that Fiennes is too somber to play a blockbuster hero. He's an actor who's all brain and little brawn.
Early in his career, producers approached Fiennes about becoming the next James Bond. Instead, he stayed committed to more challenging roles. He played a post-apocalyptic hustler in Strange Days (1995), a 19th-century priest with a gambling addiction in Oscar and Lucinda (1997), a love-ruined Hungarian explorer in The English Patient (1996) and an undistinguished novelist in love with a married woman in The End of the Affair (1999). As portrayed by Fiennes, these are men whose sense of bravado lies in serious doubt.
Action heroes are about dirty T-shirts, but Fiennes is about clean handkerchiefs and pressed shirts. So it makes perfect sense that his brief flirtation as a blockbuster hero was playing dapper Brit spy John Steed in the disastrous remake of The Avengers (1998).
Fiennes' physical strengths are showcased in stage performances like his Broadway performance of Hamlet. Then again, not that many action stars perform Shakespeare. But, as I said, Fiennes is a true anti-hero. ©
