Jim Caviezel vs. Billy Crudup
Battle of the Moody Brooders

Recently, we at Fametracker watched Thelma & Louise again, and we were reminded of something. Obviously, we're all intimately familiar with the whole female-bonding-through-firearms thing, leaving the female characters front and centre. The secondary effect of making the women the focus of the story is that it pushes the movie's menfolk to the margins, in the two-dimensional eye-candy role traditionally held by "the girlfriend." And what eye candy they are! Remember Michael Madsen, all greasy-haired and gruff and squinty? Remember seeing Brad Pitt for the first time, all southern charm and golden hair and washboard abs? Sure you do.

Even when male actors are attractive -- very attractive, as most actors are -- they're seldom paraded in front of a female (and gay male) audience simply as objects of lust. More often, male eye candy has to be more than just a very pretty face; in addition to that, there has to be some intangible quality married with the pretty -- sensitivity, or pathos, or A Dark Secret. It helps if the pretty is dark and mysterious -- you know, like Johnny Depp. Or Goran Visnjic. Or...well, you probably see where we're going with this. Beefcake + Heartache = Eye Candy.

Both Billy Crudup and Jim Caviezel had breakout roles in 2000 in which their pretty-boy looks were amplified by their characters' pathos and sensitivity. As John Sullivan -- a soulful police officer reunited with his deceased father via some kind of freaky otherworldly ham radio -- in Frequency, Caviezel got to live out the secret fantasies of repressed men everywhere by enjoying a loving (if somewhat far-fetched) adult relationship with his father. Presumably it wouldn't be a sufficiently meaningful movie if all we saw was blue-eyed, buff Caviezel busting perps and counselling wayward youths; no, we also have to see him bent over his mystical ham radio, his eyes brimming with tears as he connects with his dead parent in a way he never could when Sullivan Sr. was alive. In the current Angel Eyes, Caviezel is a mournful, mysterious, taciturn drifter who's survived the deaths of all his family members and who manages to find love with J.Lo after saving her life. Is he simply a laconic fellow, or does he dodge each and every question about his past because he's literally an angel? And does it really matter what his story is after he takes his shirt off? (We're sure Caviezel is a really nice guy in addition to being a hottie and a good actor, which is why we're not saying anything about his role in Pay It Forward.)

While Caviezel has made a decent start eking out his niche as an intense looker, but he has a long way to go before he can catch up with Billy Crudup, who's played just about every kind of tortured soul ever to light up the screen with his rare and breathtaking smile. Sexy suitor thwarted because he's from the wrong side of town? Check. Famously focused real-life long-distance runner who died young? Check. Range-riding philosopher cowboy? Check. Craven political type haunted by the long-ago death of the idealistic love of his life? Check. In Almost Famous, Crudup's biggest and showiest role to date, his Russell Hammond is explicitly described as a "guitarist with mystique," making him the inscrutable, shape-shifting enigma around which the story revolves. Of course he is "a golden god," a rock star sex machine who uses a devoted female fan like less attractive men use toilet paper. But Russell's magnetism is matched by his intransigence in the face of a young reporter's persistence. When will Russell learn that in order for an audience to love him, he has to reveal some part of himself? Or is what we really love about Russell -- and Jim, and Billy -- the sense that beneath those flawless faces are fathoms-deep pools of unknowable pain that can only be healed by the love of a good woman (or gay man)?

Advantage: Crrrrrrrrudup.