Michael Nouri vs. Chris Sarandon
Battle of the Pompous Professionals

[WARNING: Mild Lovely & Amazing spoiler ahead.]

In real life, we want the professionals who are responsible for our well-being to be...well, responsible. Doctors, lawyers, judges -- hell, even accountants -- should be ethically irreproachable and inspire unerring confidence from their clients. But in movies and on TV, it's a different story. The reason there are so many shows about doctors and lawyers (and...okay, not so much with the accountants, but you get our drift) is that many of us don't understand exactly what it is that they do, except that people's lives are in their hands. Therein lies the TV- or movie-ready drama: what if they fuck it up?

Chris Sarandon and Michael Nouri play professionals who either fuck it up, or make you think it's very possible that they might. Though in their younger days, they played a wide range of non-professional roles (Nouri as the male love interest in Flashdance, a baseball player in Bay City Blues, and Count Dracula; Sarandon as Al Pacino's would-be transsexual boyfriend in Dog Day Afternoon, and Jesus Christ in a 1980 TV movie -- yes, really), they're both, now, at that age at which they look the part of the pompous professional. The salt-and-pepper hair confers authority, and adopting a self-important attitude is a time-honoured way for people in lofty positions to forestall disagreement or doubt.

Lately, Chris Sarandon has made a very credible bid for inclusion in the Pompous Professional hall of fame. Perhaps due to the abiding love fans have for The Princess Bride, Sarandon has locked into the dry, urbane demeanour of Prince Humperdinck and brought it to his role as Dr. McGrath, the doctor/professor/sexual harasser on the first season of Felicity. He then played his roles as Mark Greene's neurosurgeon on ER, Amy Gray's fellow judge and love interest on Judging Amy, and another judge -- this time, one trying to sabotage Sally Field's career -- on the short-lived series The Court, all exactly the same way. Which is fine; the tone and attitude of Humperdinck, a villainous fairy-tale prince, are surprisingly fitting when transplanted into the person of a self-satisfied twenty-first-century New York surgeon.

But lest Sarandon get too smug in his position as John Wells's go-to dick, he should take note of Michael Nouri's hot breath on the back of his neck. Nouri was, one might say, Sarandon-esque in a memorable guest-starring role on Law & Order, in which he played a cardiac surgeon who harvested a woman's organs before she was legally dead. He has since gone on to play a cardiologist on a couple of episodes of the now-defunct medical drama Gideon's Crossing, and currently plays Brenda Blethyn's plastic surgeon in the indie film Lovely & Amazing. Nouri's Dr. Crane exhibits all the attributes of a classic pompous movie professional: he reassures his patient by making it seem as though her questions are somewhat stupid; he appears unconcerned when the routine medical procedure he conducts puts her in a near-coma; he is vague about the details of her treatment; and he makes her fall a little in love with him. When everything turns out for the best, the viewer's sense is that it's good luck, and not the result of anything Dr. Crane may have done.

That there is little apparent variation among the professionals Nouri and Sarandon have recently played is not necessarily the fault of either actor, but is, rather, inevitable given that fictional professionals, on screen, are so seldom given anything original to do. Sarandon and Nouri do what they can to make their roles, if not unique, at least credible: they act kindly, but they smile only with their mouths, not their eyes, and they are ultimately too smooth, and too smarmy, to be entirely trustworthy. As long as there are cookie-cutter medical and legal dramas to staff, they will neither of them go hungry.

Advantage: Sarandon