MOVIES : What’s Wrong With...

Lena Olin must have already got wind of the sour word of mouth drifting ahead of “Mr. Jones” when she slipped behind a corner table of the Four Seasons Hotel restaurant for lunch.

The Stockholm-based actress has occasionally been critical of Hollywood and the gaudy ostentation in which most of its more successful practitioners live, but this time she was in junket mode, which means one is impeccably polite, impeccably well groomed, and obeys the Western dictum where never is heard a discouraging word--except to say, “I don’t do this circus when I’m not working. I turn away from it all. I go to Sweden, or I look to myself. I have a completely different life that suits me.”

She could not have known for sure that in a few days “Mr. Jones” would keel over on launch. But she did know that it had been difficult to make. After all, the TriStar Pictures film’s original release date had been in April, and director Mike Figgis was said to have been uninvited to the post-production process. (Speaking as executive co-producer, Richard Gere, who stars, says that Figgis had to honor another film commitment. Figgis is out of the country and unavailable for comment.) And, of course, as co-star, she was there.

“With ‘Mr. Jones’ we had to go back and do re-shoots. We really worked,” Olin said, looking down at the tablecloth pensively. “This film has been going on for a long time. The problem in the script was that it was so hard to find a way to deal with their relationship. She’s a doctor. We didn’t want to make him out (to be) a lunatic. But at the end he is a lunatic, a sick man. There were a lot of different endings.” She looked up with a brief, imploring glance in which, in a nanosecond, you saw an actor’s helplessness.

Olin hasn’t been seen in a movie since her 1990 role as a female revolutionary in Sydney Pollack’s critically blistered $40-million “Havana.” In “Mr. Jones,” she plays a recently divorced hospital psychiatrist, lonely and aging and attracted in spite of herself to a contrasting life force represented by Gere--who uses the device of manic-depression to indulge an actor’s blowout run of behavioral eccentricities.

It isn’t until late in the movie, when her skin takes on luster and she seems charged by a more youthful urgency, that you realize how much the earlier look--the dead hair, the panic at the edges of her eyes, the wan aura of self-neglect--is a setup for what’s to follow. In a quiet and skillful way, Olin has taken her limited character as far as it can go.

In February, she’ll be out in a new Peter Medak film called “Romeo Is Bleeding,” in which she plays a free-lance Russian racketeer named Mona DeMarco, who is murderously scheming to get out of New York before the feds and local police catch up with her, and latches onto a crooked cop played by Gary Oldman. With her dark eyes--charged with early storm warnings--and broad Slavic cheekbones, Olin’s Mona is a plausible arrival from a portentous subcontinent of vast extremes. She’s a beautiful Nietzschean predator, flush with the confident power of sexual ruthlessness, beyond morality and conscience, what the French would call “a beautiful monster” (Mona even slices off her own arm to elude capture).

Word from advance screenings both here and in Europe is that “Romeo Is Bleeding” is problematic--but Olin is magnificent.

What does she think of her two most recent films in tandem?

“I haven’t seen either one,” she replied. “I always sort of create practical problems so that I don’t have to see a film I’ve just done. I’m too vulnerable, too fragile. People see your work, and there’s nothing you can do. You’re completely exposed.”

Indeed she is. Which leads to the question: After the critical and commercial failures of “Havana” and “Mr. Jones” (we’ll leave “Romeo” aside until it gets a fair viewing in February), is Olin’s American film career in danger of being prematurely eclipsed?

Or, to put it another way, what’s implicit in Variety critic Todd McCarthy’s lament in his “Mr. Jones” review when he recalls Olin’s countrywoman Ingrid Bergman, who by comparison “prompts one to imagine what a great star Olin might have been, and what roles she might have played had she been around in the 1930s and 1940s.”?

Might have been ?

At 36, Olin has made only four films released so far in the United States, and as far as critical success is concerned, she’s a creditable two-for-four. She was so impressive in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” that director Philip Kaufman reportedly felt possessive about her and only reluctantly passed information about her to director Paul Mazursky, who was casting “Enemies, A Love Story.” As Masha in “Enemies,” she earned an Oscar nomination and a New York Film Critics Award for best supporting actress.

There are at least a dozen top-flight Hollywood actresses who have survived mediocre movies in careers longer than Olin’s (like Susan Sarandon, Anjelica Huston and Jessica Lange), but the misuse of their powers, though unfortunate, hasn’t created the same sense of misgiving. What is it about this case that strikes an odd note?

Part of it has to do with Olin herself. She combines the visceral power of Anna Magnani with the wisdom of the flesh embodied by continental actresses like Jeanne Moreau and Simone Signoret. And she has had the benefit of a lengthy acting education--first in drama school and then with Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theater--that most Americans, preoccupied with Method emotional states, don’t get: that is, a strong emphasis on the minutiae of physical expression.

“In school, what was important was not the emotional or the psychological,” she told Premiere magazine in 1991. “It was not how you felt inside, it was how you showed your feelings with your body and the sound of your voice. It was all very practical work.”

She has mentioned a number of other times how boring and tedious that work often was, but it has given her an unusually broad and precise physical vocabulary and the capacity (indispensable in first-rate acting) for displaying several contradictory feelings at once.

Olin has also had the rare good fortune of entering the inner circle of one of the 20th Century’s great artists, Ingmar Bergman. In bearing a similar relationship to Bergman that Yvonne Bryce bears to Athol Fugard, or Billie Whitelaw to Samuel Beckett, she has joined a select international group.

But where a movie star is obliged to transcend a role (or even an entire vehicle), an actor like Olin is obliged to work within the limits of its credibility. Which is another way of saying that one’s choice of script is crucial--never more so than in Hollywood.

“Choosing a role is very difficult,” she says. “There’s no way to have a strategy. Every time I get a script it’s a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It’s like falling in love. You can’t give a reason why. The few times I haven’t gone with my instinct is when the work hasn’t been good.”

While she spoke, Olin made short work of a sandwich lathered in mozzarella cheese, a diet soda and yogurt. She wore a military blue double-breasted pantsuit over a delicately patterned white blouse, scooped out at the neck. In person, she doesn’t convey the dark, almost tropical sensuality that characterizes her screen presence. The absence of any jewelry highlighted the ivory pallor of her Nordic skin; her conversational pitch is lighter than her dusky, morning-after screen voice and tinged with a Swedish lilt. Her beauty would be daunting were it not for her alertness toward anything that enters the field of conversation and her agreeable capacity for bemusement.

An hour or so in her company reveals little beyond biographical particulars. She did allude to a troubled past: “I was somehow a tomboy in Stockholm. I was so full of joy, the happiest kid. Things changed. I don’t want to talk about it. I needed attention. I was pathologically shy. I’d climb the highest tree or try to ski off the highest mountain. I’d get into fights. I wanted contact. I’d hit somebody, just for that. I was short. I didn’t start to grow until I was 13. The shyness took over. I’d never want to be a teen-ager again.”

An ominous expression had crossed her face when she said that “things changed.” What those changes were is anybody’s guess--she has a chilly way of sealing herself off from unpalatable topics.

Olin was born into a theatrical family in Stockholm. Her father, Stij Olin, was a well-known radio personality who appeared in some of Ingmar Bergman’s earlier films. Her mother, Britte, was an actress who quit the stage at age 30 to raise her family of three children, one of whom subsequently died (a surviving brother works at Stockholm’s Strindberg Museum). Her parents split up when Lena was 16, having endured a home life that was, as one knowledgeable observer described it, “very unhappy, filled with betrayal and lost trust.”

At 17, Olin auditioned for Bergman and the Royal Dramatic Theater. She didn’t get in, but Bergman hired her as an extra in a film called “Face to Face.” Later, she did join the theater’s acting corps--and came as exuberantly close as one can to realizing a personal destiny.

“Acting solved a lot for me,” she said. “I can almost recall the moment when I felt you’re in control of all your senses, but because you’re acting, you’re protected. You’re free inside. The fear goes away. I could tell something about myself, and I could see that people would get the message. To know that someone is going to receive this, the thing you’re communicating, is beautiful. It’s still true. I know it’s important to follow the story, but whenever I’m in front of a camera I feel in touch with it. I feel free.”

For his part, Bergman, though a stern taskmaster, saw a similar potential in Olin that he had seen in others like Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Anderssen and Liv Ullman. A year later they made a characteristically probing, somewhat biographical teleplay together called “After the Rehearsal,” in which Bergman, in the character of Erland Josephson, says to her, “When I saw you . . . your eyes, your impatience and vulnerability, I felt happy knowing I would turn the wheel with you.”

“After the Rehearsal,” which deals with an actress who gets pregnant during rehearsals for Strindberg’s “The Dream Play,” turned out to be prophetic: Nine years later Olin was in rehearsal for the same play and in fact did became pregnant by actor Orjan Ramberg--which infuriated Bergman and led to a bitter estrangement that has since been patched up. (Bergman, who believes in fate and the spirit world, must have eventually appreciated the irony.) An added rift with Ramberg remained permanent, however. She has full custody of their son, August, who is now 7.

Olin’s stage career was well established (Erland Josephson once identified her to an inquisitive stranger as Sweden’s greatest actress) when a man named Bertil Ohlsson was so taken with her role as Cordelia in a Bergman production of “King Lear” that he telephoned his Paris associate, producer Saul Zaentz. After Zaentz made several visits to Stockholm (with Kaufman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist) she was cast as Sabina opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” No actress since Marlene Dietrich had done as much with, or under, a bowler hat. It was a memorable arrival to the international film scene and served early notice of Olin’s intelligence, sensuality--and fearlessness.

“Enemies, A Love Story” followed a year later, in 1989. Then “Havana,” whose failure still mystifies her: “It was such a shock,” she says about the blast of negative reviews. “It was like being hit in the face with a basketball. We never felt we made a movie that wouldn’t work. We had Sydney. I did see it later on, but it’s hard to be objective.” And now, the evaporating “Mr. Jones” (whose box-office figures plummeted 40% in its second week).

Producer Scott Rudin is one member of the Hollywood community who doesn’t think that Olin in Hollywood could turn out to be a tale of trouble in paradise.

“The bravest performance I’ve seen in years” is how Rudin describes her role in “Romeo Is Bleeding,” adding: “I don’t agree that she’s in danger. There are too many examples of actors coming back strong in one film after a series of failures. She’s played consistently good parts that are worth playing.

“The reality is that she’s a Swedish actress, not easy to cast. If there’s a movie that’s right for her, she’s capable of greatness. Given who she is, she transcends the standard commercial considerations you use when hiring somebody. It’s only a potential problem if you were to hire her to sell a picture.”

A top Hollywood filmmaker, familiar with Olin’s work, declined to speak on the record but was nonetheless indignant when he said: “I think your story is a terrible idea. Why would you want to put even the shadow of a doubt in people’s minds before she gets a full chance? She’s very talented, and I don’t think (these flops) will hurt her career.”

However, he continued with this disclaimer: “It depends. It’s too early to say. If she’s really good in these pictures, she’ll be OK for as long as she doesn’t have to carry them, like Barbra Streisand in ‘Prince of Tides,’ or Michelle Pfeiffer or Demi Moore.

“People are looking at Lena as more of an actress than a movie star,” he added. “She’d do better if ‘Havana’ and ‘Mr. Jones’ and ‘Romeo’ are big hits. If she’s made bad choices, we don’t know. She doesn’t live here. She has to rely on agents and managers. If people can say, ‘That’s a terrible picture, but she’s something,’ that’ll only confirm her specialness and talent. I can’t believe a Peter Weir or Stephen Frears won’t come along at some point and say, ‘God damn , that’s a performer!’ ”

Another veteran Hollywood observer takes a less sanguine view when he says: “There’s nobody like her in America. She’s a life force. But she’s sexually threatening. She has the legitimacy of her Swedish background and training, but she doesn’t have a George Cukor or Billy Wilder or Ernst Lubitsch to take care of her.”

Two dud films do not of course determine a career; any speculation about what’s to become of Olin is indeed premature--who would want to foul the air of an artist’s freedom to roam?

But considering that she is on the actor-as-artist end of the spectrum, as opposed to actor-as-celebrity, it’s also her misfortune to have come along at a time in Hollywood when the politics of career supersedes choice of roles; when cost accountants and market research pulse-takers have virtually as much to say about making movies as filmmakers. And when, as Sean Connery said last year as co-producer of “Rising Sun,” “You have a lot of people in positions of control who have absolutely no idea of what filmmaking is about.”

“I’ve learned that you do have to think about other things than acting here,” Olin says of life in Hollywood. “But I have to be very stern with myself so that I don’t make choices as a coward. You realize here how important it is to be a star, but that can be dangerous if it’s stardom you’re trying to protect, because your acting is en garde . You can’t be that way; you have to be willing to give everything you’ve got.

“In Sweden, stardom is looked upon as phony. You walk to the theater every day like everybody else. Here, you deal all day long with phone calls. It’s very hard not to be protective of what you’ve got.

“But I’m getting used to it. I’ve got the best of both worlds. I’ve never seen anybody here do something they didn’t want to do. Here you can make a life. One thing that happens to me when I go to Sweden: There’s a boredom and resistance, longueurs , that give me a sense of the value of life, a kind of neurosis that to me is healthy. I’m more interested in my dreams than where I place my shoes.”

The disturbing question about Olin in Hollywood is not Lena Olin. It’s what Hollywood will do with a name that draws a blank on the computer when it comes to ratings and revenues. Nothing terrible, artistically speaking, can happen to someone who says, “What I feel and live with is the thrive, the urge. Why it’s so strong is a mystery to me. It isn’t money. It’s beyond myself and brings me beyond trivialities, like fear.”

Olin can always go back to Bergman and help him in his stealthy examination of, as he puts it, “that little dot, the human being” (and in fact will, after she completes “Night and the Moment” with Willem Dafoe, which is filming in Paris).

In the meantime, her risk of being shunted aside in our current rush-to-judgment atmosphere is one the rest of us share. Anything that inhibits a talent like that cheats us out of piercing glimpses into the psyche, of compelling stories told in the flesh.