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Every great movie star eventually abandons acting and begins to rely on schtick. Humphrey Bogart, for example, was never a great actor -- certainly not in the man-of-a-thousand-faces, lose-yourself-in-every-part, Alec-Guinness sense of the word -- but he was a great movie star, because he had a great Bogey schtick. Jimmy Stewart, who's often been fingered as the greatest movie actor of all time, similarly relied on schtick -- the Jimmy Stewart schtick, consistent from film to film, always entertaining, even moving, but never very different or surprising.
Even actors who start out as great capital-A actors tend to fall back, in their dotage, on a kind of distilled, Coles Notes version of what was great about their acting in the first place. Take Al Pacino. It's hard to fathom that the man who gave one of the most brilliantly understated performances of all time, as Michael Corleone in the first two Godfather films, is the same man who now shrieks, gyrates, and gesticulates more fiercely than anyone this side of Seinfeld's Kramer. This doesn't, of course, mean he isn't a great movie star, or that he can't deliver a great performance; his schtick -- a kind of commedia dell'arte translation of his earlier acting technique -- was perfectly suited, and was applied perfectly, to his character in The Insider. But no one walked out of that movie saying, "That was Al Pacino? No way!"
Robert De Niro crossed over from acting to schtick sometime after The Untouchables and before Backdraft; Al Pacino made the transition sometime between Dog Day Afternoon and Sea of Love. (It was likely the pyrotechnics of Scarface that put him over the edge.) Jack Nicholson's been doing schtick pretty much from the start, and Kevin Spacey, one of the few modern actors who you can plausibly mention in the same breath with the fellows above, is only now, post American Beauty, becoming a full-fledged schtick-ophile.
In fact, most great movie star actors go through three phases of their careers: the acting phase, the schtick phase, and then the parody of the schtick phase. Sometimes, the parody is self-aware, a kind of inside joke with the audience. (Think of Al Pacino sending himself up in The Devil's Advocate, or of Jack Nicholson playing Satan, a.k.a. "Jack Nicholson-in-quotation-marks," in The Witches of Eastwick.) Other times, it's not quite as deliberate, and feels more like the mailed-in work of a consummate pro who knows that even a half-hearted simulacrum of his usual antics is more than enough to shine in a run-of-the-mill movie. (This is Gene Hackman territory, and pretty much the entire latter half of Christopher Walken's career. In fact, Walken looks like the only thing that gets his blood up these days is hosting Saturday Night Live.)
The brilliance of Denzel Washington is that he manages to somehow be both a great actor and a great schtick man. In A Soldier's Story, Cry Freedom, and Glory, Washington firmly established his ample acting chops, and in Malcolm X he proved that he can inhabit a character like a comfortable suit. Then, in a movie like Crimson Tide, he simply shows up and does his Denzel Washington routine -- all fiery dignity and righteous but reined-in fury -- yet still manages a performance that's more compelling, more watchable, and more entertaining than anything most of his peers could hope to cook up.
Of course, the great knock on Denzel Washington -- one that's been building for years, and is resurfacing again in the response to Remember the Titans -- is that he's in danger of becoming a black Tom Hanks, or, even worse -- much, much, much worse -- a black Robin Williams. Which is to say, someone who starts to view his career as some sort of holy crusade, meant to edify rather than simply entertain, and as such refuses to play any part that doesn't involve moral lessons and/or heartwarming redemption. And, it's true -- it would be nice to see him sink that porcelain-esque slight overbite of his into a meaty villain role, like John Malkovich did in In the Line of Fire. But, frankly, we don't much care if Washington spends the rest of his career playing fiery, righteous do-gooders, because, frankly, he's so damned good at it. (Unlike, say, Robin Williams, and, increasingly, Tom Hanks.) Who else could imbue the football-coach clichés of Titans with something approaching honesty?
After an ill-advised attempt to transform himself, Wesley Snipes-style, from an actor to an action hero (resulting in two of the more unwatchable flops on his résumé, Ricochet and Virtuosity), Washington is now back on the rails and doing what he does best, which is be a big, fat movie star. We likely won't get another Glory out of him, or even another Malcolm X, but in a world of movie "stars" like Tim Allen and Freddie Prinze Jr., we'll take all the Crimson Tide we can get, and we won't begrudge Washington one iota of his renown.
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