FILM COMMENT : MOVIES : For Years, Nick Nolte Has Been the Prince of Players

As Tom Wingo in “The Prince of Tides,” Nick Nolte is playing a character who is trying to close himself off from his own pain. “I was a champion at keeping secrets,” he says, but he isn’t really. Tom may have the thickened look of a superannuated golden-boy jock, and he may sport his Southernness like a medallion. But his hulky jauntiness can’t disguise the stricken look behind his eyes, or the way his face slackens into an aghast mask when the sorrows cut too deep. The truth is that Tom is very bad at keeping secrets, and it’s a measure of how extraordinary Nolte’s performance is that we pick up on this the first moment we see him.

Nolte has often been extraordinary, but his work in “The Prince of Tides” may finally give him the full recognition he deserves. He’s currently also on view in “Cape Fear” playing a terrorized lawyer, but it’s a far less free-wheeling and resonant performance. “Cape Fear” is emblematic of all the times he has been used by directors as a cog in the machinery. “The Prince of Tides” is a culmination of the best work Nolte has done in the movies.

One of the reasons his work has tended to be overlooked until now is that, unlike so many actors who specialize in playing misfits, Nolte doesn’t go in for a lot of beetle-browed flibbertigibbet scratch-and-grunt Methodology. When he plays an over-the-hill football player in “North Dallas Forty” or a besieged Vietnam vet in “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” or a scraggly bum in “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” he’s so far inside these characters that we never spot the technique in back of the performance. Everything he does seems completely in character, almost pre-consciously so. You don’t register the outriggings of mannerism, the rehearsed pauses and studied glances. His acting seems to derive from an intense physicality; he provides a link between acting and athleticism--he has a superb athlete’s awe for the eloquence of body language. No other actor is as good with the sheer utensils of his trade. Take two of his best performances: the shaggy Expressionist artist in Martin Scorsese’s “Life Lessons” mixes his paints as if they were lifeblood; the photojournalist in “Under Fire” works his cameras as an extension of his torso.

This physical expressiveness, especially in someone as beefy as Nolte, can provide moments of revelation that the punier actors can’t approach. When his characters are in conflict, their agonies take on a larger-than-life proportion; it’s as if his body were contorted against itself. In American movies, actors of Nolte’s bulk are generally not employed for their subtleties; they’re cast as loamy salt-of-the-earth types, lunkhead rampagers, heavies. Actors like Stallone or Schwarzenegger may sometimes play heroic characters but they don’t really have a heroic presence; they can’t incarnate heroism and they don’t have the performing equipment to show its contradictions. That’s why they can so easily lampoon their own image: It was never that rich to begin with.

The heroic presence conveyed by Nolte is much more in line with actors like Sean Connery or Richard Harris who, in their performances, appear to have a purchase on something larger than themselves. Their agonies and triumphs move us kinesthetically, their emotions are a majestic and heightened version of our own.

There are other actors out there, like Ed Harris and Fred Ward, who are capable of rooting out the sensitivities in common-man misfits. But no one is quite like Nolte in the way he manages to be both larger-than-life and down-to-earth. He’s that rarity--a believable Everyman. And the reason he’s believable is because he works from the inside out, from the gut; physical honesty is equated with emotional honesty. There’s no gaseous we-the-people agenda inflating his persona--he can’t even be said to have a persona. When someone like Kevin Costner goes into his Everyman routine, the flat, toneless diction and dampened energies and impassive handsomeness are meant to summon up a Gary Cooper-like mystique. It’s the mystique of the Westerner, and it can be fearfully boring. Why do so many actors think it’s all-American to be muted? Is the theory perhaps that the strong-and-silent types have the best propulsion to sweep stealth-like into the byways of the small-town psyche?

Nolte doesn’t play these laconic games. He brings his characters--his convicts, vets, hobos, shutterbugs, football players --to rip-roaring life. You would never think of them as all-American archetypes, even though, in a sense, that’s what they are. They’re too juiced by life. His characters contain a crazy-quilt of possibilities, which is why, when they mutate from one guise to another, like Jerry in “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” going from his tramp rags to his Rodeo Drive duds, the transformation seems magically right. We can see how it all fits together.

The unity that he brings to his roles is often enough to unify his movies. He gives them a core of meaning. As Lee Umstetter, the paroled lifer in “Weeds” who tours with his own theatrical troupe of ex-cons, Nolte shows us how performance has sustained him behind bars and again on the outside. When he’s performing his self-written part, wearing bright white makeup and strung out hair, like some sort of gonzo Kabuki, he’s an amazing actor playing a not-very-good one. But Lee’s avidity for acting overrides his meagre abilities. His acting is his salvation. Onstage, he clicks off his wary con’s radar and exults in his own uncensored self.

One of the reasons Nolte made such a bang-up impression when he debuted on television in 1975 in “Rich Man, Poor Man” is because he was almost too strong, too unruly for the small screen. But that show’s miniseries format at least suited his power; his Tom Jordache had the kind of novelistic complexities that deserved an extended run. Watching that show, it was clear that Nolte was a born movie actor (though it had taken him more than a dozen years of knocking around regional theater to make it to the screen). His first feature film of consequence, “The Deep,” came a little more than a year later, and it remains his worst--not necessarily because the film was dreadful but because his character was unadulterated beefcake and Nolte seemed content to play him that way. It’s the performance of an actor bound for a routine career as a moving target in a shooting gallery.

Nolte has never made that mistake again, although he’s been indifferent in films like “Another 48 HRS.,” where he looked miserable lugging his carcass through the tumult while Eddie Murphy dithered in his own zone of self-adoration. When Nolte doesn’t put himself into his work, his staunch reserves of feeling turn to marble; he’s block-like, transfixed. And we can feel betrayed, because Nolte is one of the few modern actors who have demonstrated a depth of emotion playing the kinds of characters who are usually given short, disdainful shrift in the movies--the jocks and good ‘ol boys, the kind of guys who look at home sullenly nursing a beer in a low-lit topless go-go joint. He can make us ashamed of taking these guys for granted, of thinking we already knew everything about them. There’s an egalitarianism about Nolte’s best acting: He doesn’t condescend to his characters (or to us). He can discover the emotional possibilities in them because he hasn’t closed himself off; he’s not after the quick fix, the caricature, the snobberies confirmed.

Nolte is less effective when he tries for a ferocious, bad-guy malevolence, as with his corrupt, walrus-mustached cop in “Q & A.” At a time when some of the most acclaimed actors, like Robert De Niro and Anthony Hopkins, are connecting with audiences by turning themselves into specialists of the grotesque--the human equivalent of moray eels--Nolte brings a companionable and hearty presence to the “normal” range. And he brings to his characters a note of regret too, of missed chances.

It’s conceivable that if Nolte had scored in movies a decade earlier than he did, when he was still in his mid-20s, he might have gone on to a routine career in action films and clobber comedies. But what makes his performances in films like “North Dallas Forty” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain” so moving is the undercurrent of loss, of being irrevocably past one’s prime. (It’s this sense of loss that connects Nolte to some of Brando’s work: the sense of time and corruption robbing you of the chance to be a contender.) Desperation has made these men ardent. The over-the-hill wide receiver recognizes the corruption of his sport, the Vietnam vet accepts the brutalities of his drug smuggling. And yet these are hard-core romantics; both characters radiate a core of decency and sacrifice themselves for a friend, for an ideal.

Nolte takes the romanticism of his role in “The Prince of Tides” all the way; that’s why it’s the culmination of his work to date. Without him, the film might have devolved into high-flown camp (some of it is anyway, particularly the shampoo commercial-style love scenes he shares with Barbra Streisand in the last half hour). The “sensitive man” stuff in “The Prince of Tides” could perhaps work only with an actor of Nolte’s bearing; his Tom Wingo may not realize it but he’s already attained the manhood he aches for. His marriage is a shambles, his twin sister has attempted suicide. Everything about the performance reveals Tom’s desperation.

There’s a forced theatricality about him; in his sessions with his sister’s New York psychiatrist, played by Streisand, he cultivates his Southern charm with an over-deliberate swagger--it’s as if he were constructing the armature of his own sanity. When he’s playing with his two young daughters, the frolicking is a bit too carefree--Tom is idealizing the childhood he wished he had. And when he’s emotionally challenged, he often retreats into his own child-like cocoon, which makes his hurt only more transparent. Tom is so physically emotive that when he moves into his own hushed space his stillness can seem a little creepy and self-mesmerized, as if he were trying to block out all bad memory and will his own amnesia.

He can’t do it, of course, but we respond to the pain behind the attempt. For Nolte, Tom’s heroism is in his final breakthrough to feeling, and that’s the heroism of the performance too.