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In 2002, a middling number of us saw The Sum of All Fears, in which Ben Affleck played a young Jack Ryan (the Tom Clancy character most famously portrayed on screen by Harrison Ford, not the pervy failed Republican Congressional candidate from Illinois). Even back then, -- before Gigli and Jersey Girl and the all-'round Jennifer Lopeziness that was shortly to follow -- The Sum of All Fears was supposed to be the comeback film that would shore up Affleck's rapidly ebbing fortunes, and maybe help audiences to forget his reputation as The Chum of All Beers. And, you know, as such things go, it was okay. To camouflage the fact that Affleck isn't very convincing playing someone very smart -- in this case, a History PhD cum CIA agent -- the producers cannily surrounded him with actors who are, like Philip Baker Hall, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell, and (our favourite member of the excellent supporting cast) Liev Schreiber. Affleck's Ryan gets tapped, suddenly, to become a field agent, in which capacity he encounters Schreiber's John Clark, who's been doing all the leg work on the case of the missing Russian nuke and also, unlike Ryan, isn't as skittish as an epileptic lamb in the field; Clark speaks a bunch of different languages, knows how to handle guns, and is, generally speaking, the character whom we wish the movie were about. We probably weren't supposed to spend every scene Clark and Ryan share wishing that Ryan would do something to piss Clark off or compromise the mission, forcing Clark to dispatch him dispassionately and take over the protagonist's role, but we were. (Shut up, Ben Affleck -- both retroactively and, you know, also right now, wherever you are.)
The Sum of All Fears is, in that respect, classic Liev Schreiber: no matter how much of him there is in a movie, it's just never enough for us. Usually that's because he's only been afforded a secondary role, as in the many big-budget movies whose backgrounds he's filled out, playing the sort of smart guys who are -- like John Clark -- always more interesting but less central than the more conventionally pretty leads. Schreiber made his screen debut a mere ten years ago, and while he's nearly always better than his material, he never, never seems to phone it in. Even when no one would blame him if he did -- and we don't say that to be elitist, but...Ransom, Phantoms, Sphere, Kate & Leopold, and we rest our case. Would anyone really blame him if he didn't bring his A game to Jakob the Liar? Robin Williams probably didn't even know Schreiber was there, so busy was he devouring every prop and backdrop within a four-mile radius.
Schreiber gets more to do in the indies, which we're always pleased to see. (Because it is, actually, all about us, and if someone could just pass that message along to him before he signs on for another Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton craptacular, we'd be every so grateful.) He's cute (and tall!) but underused as Nigel, the club bouncer Parker Posey accuses of "lowering [her] worth," in Party Girl. He's amusingly dopey as an inept kidnapper/extortionist in the overlooked suspense drama Twilight -- a role which required him to cozy up to an exceptionally unpleasant Reese Witherspoon, which makes his performance that much greater a triumph. We have no reason to think he was anything but perfect as Laertes in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet, but we'll never be able to test that supposition, since the idea of sitting through any Hamlet in which the title role is undertaken by Ethan Hawke is enough to make us want to take poison orally, aurally, stabbed into us on the tip of a sword, and also rubbed into our eyes and scalp, just to make absolutely sure there would be no chance of our surviving to experience the smuggest, greasiest "to be or not to be" in Shakespearean history.
But there are two roles for which we will always treasure Schreiber especially dearly. First: Andrew in Walking & Talking. If you've never seen this delightful, understated mid-'90s gem because you're put off by the Anne Heche factor...well, we can certainly understand that, but we beg you to set aside your prejudices and trust us this once. The fact that she's quite good in it is beside the point; she's not actually in it that much. She plays Laura, who very early on gets engaged to her longtime live-in boyfriend Frank (Todd Field). But the movie is mostly about her best friend Amelia (Catherine Keener), and the ways she struggles to deal with Laura's big life change. (And actually, if you haven't seen it and are planning to -- and, for real, you should -- just go out and rent it and watch it and then resume reading this paragraph once you've finished.) One way is by leaning even more heavily on Schreiber's Andrew, whom Amelia dated long before the events of the movie take place. Andrew is poorly socialized, marginally employed, addicted to pornography, carrying on a long-distance phone-sex relationship with a girl on the opposite side of the country, and constantly relying on Amelia to loan him money to pay his phone bills, and to come with him when he grudgingly spends time with his aging, increasingly senile parents. In return, Amelia relies on Andrew to pose as her boyfriend when she tries to make a past date who blew her off -- a video-store clerk she calls "The Ugly Guy" behind his back -- jealous; Amelia also makes free to summon Andrew from the city to her mother's lake house after a mysterious obscene call freaks her out. (The jury composed of this commentator and Sars is still out as to whether Andrew himself placed the call in order to scare Amelia into summoning him to the cottage.) In many respects, Andrew is kind of a fuck-up, but a really charming fuck-up who comes through in the clutch: not only is he totally agreeable acting in loco boyfriendis -- there's a nice moment on the drive back from the cottage where he takes the wheel while Amelia, who's driving, takes off her sweatshirt, and then balls it up to use as his pillow -- but it is he who finally takes the risk of trying to get back together with Amelia. When it comes to exes who continue hanging around and occasionally pissing us off, we could all do a lot worse than Andrew. It's a well-written part -- three-dimensional and real -- and Schreiber does a great job just sinking his teeth right in and inhabiting it ("Hello, cookies!"). Walking & Talking comes fairly early in his career and proves that Schreiber has the power to make both bad and good movies even better.
Our other favourite Schreiber role is Marty in A Walk on the Moon. The film is remembered primarily for showcasing a pre-Unfaithful Diane Lane getting it on with Viggo Mortensen all over the Catskills (and him getting very familiar with her Catskills, if you know what we're saying, and you probably do). The setting is a holiday camp in 1969; Lane's Pearl got pregnant in high school and married Marty, and now their daughter is sixteen (and obnoxious, and played by Anna Paquin) and Pearl is apparently restless, even though she's married to, like, the greatest man in the world. (And, again, here's where you should quit reading if you don't want to be spoiled.) Marty can't afford to take the time off work to stay at the camp through the week, so he drives through insane traffic on Fridays and Sundays to spend the weekends with his family -- not having the slightest inkling that his wife is totally cuckolding him. His mother (Tovah Feldshuh), who is spending the summer with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, does figure it out and warns Pearl not to ruin her life and break Marty's heart, but Pearl is too selfish and trampy to pay any heed and Marty finds out and has his heart duly broken and it's terrible to see him hurt because Schreiber has made him such a kindly, gentle, considerate man who is clearly doing everything for Pearl and couldn't be more devoted to her. Once he discovers Pearl's infidelity and has some time alone to sit with it, he even makes an effort to change himself to become more appealing to her, turning on the radio and grimly attempting to dance to a Bob Dylan song. The movie doesn't make Pearl out to be the devil or anything -- she doesn't set out deliberately with the malicious intent of destroying her husband, using Viggo as her instrument -- but Schreiber's Marty is so fully realized that we can't help feeling his injury. Damn you, Diane Lane, why can't you keep it in your pants?!
Last weekend, we discovered that when Schreiber's got a big old face-on-the-poster lead in a huge summer blockbuster, we would have still liked even more; while Jonathan Demme's current remake of The Manchurian Candidate belongs to Schreiber and Meryl Streep (who plays his character's mother), and while it moves along at a brisk pace and never gets boring, the scenes that don't contain Schreiber's Raymond Shaw are a little less unboring than the ones that do. (Spoiler, spoiler, blah blah blah.) We're no thespians (unless you count our high-school work in the chorus of Grease, and you shouldn't), but we have to think that Raymond Shaw is, technically, an incredibly difficult role for an actor to take on: because he's been brainwashed, he's got to appear amiably blank on the surface, with an overlay of faint menace, but also as though he's still experiencing emotions that he's safely compartmentalized. There has to be a lot going on without there really seeming to be anything going on at all. And Schreiber's such a fucking good actor, he pulls it off. We don't really know anything about any of the characters -- not even Denzel Washington's crusading paranoid -- so we don't care about them much; but of Raymond, we know that he lost his father relatively young, and thus was left to the care of his Gorgon of a mother; he once loved a girl, but his mother busted them up; his response to the loss of his only love was an indirect suicide attempt: enlisting in the army, and insisting upon staying in the infantry, eschewing an officer's commission; and then, he was taken by forces beyond his control and placed at the centre of this sick experiment in mind control. Raymond is the movie's ultimate pawn, but Schreiber embodies the humanity in a movie that is, overall, pretty cold and antiseptic. Poor Raymond! At least he finally gets to make a choice that turns him from a pathetic figure to a somewhat tragic one. (We also have no complaints about a movie that requires all 6'3" of him to spend most of it in suits. Yeah, we also appreciate all the political points the movie was making, but it's still summer, and we still get to be shallow if we so choose.)
In a scant ten years, Liev Schreiber has become one of the best and most reliable journeyman actors of our time, excellent in roles ranging from a Shakespearean creation to an average twentysomething Manhattan bonehead to Orson Welles. He's always magnetic, and is often the most interesting person onscreen. And yet because he evinces more power than prettiness, he may have already achieved as much fame as he ever will. But other eras have made stars of men who were not what the majority would consider to be standard dreamboats. Couldn't Liev Schreiber be our Dustin Hoffman, our George C. Scott, our Ned Beatty? Come on, you guys: let's prove that we care more about brilliant acting than we do about oddly large pores. Let's crowd out Jack Ryan and make John Clark our new hero.
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