Daily Archives: January 27, 2010

Randy Winn is headed to the Bronx, according to Joel Sherman.

Has there been a more complete American actor in the past forty years than Gene Hackman? He may not be the most sexy or daring movie star but I think he’s got more range than DeNiro, Pacino, Beatty, Hoffman or even Duvall. Which is not to put those guys down. I’m not knocking Nicholson either. And you know how much I adore Bridges, who is almost twenty years younger than Hackman.

But to me, Gene Hackman is the Spency Tracy of his generation. He’s Everyman, and I’m hard-pressed to recall too many performances where he wasn’t believable. (I was talking recently with a friend about actors who are only as good as their directors or their material and this doesn’t apply to Hackman, who made a career of being better than his material.)

Did you know that Hackman turns 80 in three days? And that he’s effectively retired as an actor? I didn’t until I read this nice appreciation of Hackman by Jeremy McCarter in the current issue of Newsweek:

One reason why we haven’t valued Hackman properly is a slur that’s been flung at him since the ’60s: character actor. But Gene Hackman is not a “character actor.” He’s a great actor, full stop. (He’s only a “character actor” in the way that Jackson Pollock is a “painting painter.”) Hollywood’s habitual bias toward pretty leading men slights the actors who have the range to play all sorts of roles. This, surely, is Hackman’s greatest distinction. Good ol’ boy Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde. Comically diabolical Lex Luthor in Superman. The blind hermit in Young Frankenstein. The coach in Hoosiers. Saintly cowboys, panicky astronauts, philandering steelworkers, several kinds of president … Like every actor, he had some misfires, and there’s no denying that he signed on for some seriously regrettable films. But this side of Meryl Streep—which is to say, here among the mortals—it’s hard to think of a contemporary American actor who could convince you he was born to play so many far-flung roles.

Every year, the Oscars teach us to rate performances like these by how deftly an actor incorporates funny voices and prostheses. Hackman, to his credit, rarely went there. If you put his many characters side by side, their real marvel is how limited a set of tools he used to play them: save for a couple of Southern accents and the occasional porkpie hat, he relied on only the raw material of his voice and body. As Popeye Doyle, the volcanic, superextroverted cop in The French Connection, he pulled out all the stops, ranting and shouting and raising hell. Three years later, he did the opposite, pulling himself inward to play Harry Caul, the meticulous, introspective eavesdropper in The Conversation. When you’ve seen one transformation, the other looks doubly impressive.

Hackman played the romantic lead in All Night Long, an odd movie that is like a goofier, and less-self-aware version of American Beauty, and he was winning in Twice in a Lifetime too. His light comic touch was wonderful in The Birdcage. And one of my favorite Hackman leading roles was in Arthur Penn’s ’70s drama Night Moves.

He may be overlooked in some quarters. But not here.

[Photo Credit: Joran van der Sloot]

The new production of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” was enthusiastically reviewed by Ben Brantley in the New York Times earlier this week:

Even more than with “Death of a Salesman,” Miller used “Bridge” to sell his theory that true tragic heroes may well emerge from the common run of contemporary lives. So eager was he to make the point that he even included a one-man Greek chorus, an Italian-born lawyer named Alfieri (here played by Michael Cristofer), who speaks loftily about the grandeur of the story’s “bloody course” of incestuous longings and fatal consequences.

Perhaps Miller felt that plays, like classical heroes, required tragic flaws, and thus provided one for “Bridge” in the form of the long-winded Alfieri. This drama needs no annotator or apologist if it’s acted with the naturalistic refinement — and accumulation of revelatory detail — found in this interpretation.

I had wondered if “Bridge” really needed another revival. New York saw a first-rate production only a dozen years ago, directed by Michael Mayer, with Anthony LaPaglia, Allison Janney and the young Brittany Murphy (who died at 32 last year). But this latest incarnation makes the case that certain plays, like certain operas, are rich enough to be revisited as often and as long as there are performers with strong, original voices and fresh insights.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Nathan Ward, whose book, “Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront,” will be published later this year, has an interesting column about the play’s orgins:

About a year after Miller’s death in February 2005, and a few months before Longhi passed away, I happened to interview the lawyer about the old waterfront. Unlike his “portly” stage likeness Alfieri, Longhi was, at 90, a tall, trim and elegant man. Sitting in his Manhattan law office on lower Broadway, he recalled how his friend Miller, who lived in picturesque Brooklyn Heights in the late ’40s, “often thought about that mysterious world of the Brooklyn Italian waterfront. . . . But he being an intellectual, who’s gonna talk to him? Nobody.” In his autobiography, “Timebends,” Miller remembered wondering, on his daily walks, about “the sinister waterfront world of gangster-ridden unions, assassinations, beatings, bodies thrown into the lovely bay at night.” But, he was forced to admit, “I could never penetrate the permanent reign of quiet terror on the waterfront hardly three blocks from my peaceful apartment.”

…Miller first heard the story that became “A View From the Bridge” while on a trip with Longhi to Sicily in 1948. “Longhi mentioned a story . . . of a longshoreman who had ratted to the Immigration Bureau on two brothers,” Miller wrote, “his own relatives, illegal immigrants who were living in his very home, in order to break an engagement between one of them and his niece.” Longhi told me, “it happened to my client . . . who turned to me and said, ‘I’m going to kill so-and-so,’ and then it turned out that I figured he must be in love with the kid. And I told this story to Miller and he said, ‘What an opera!'”

No one would mistake Red Hook or Columbia Street today for the place whose tough waterfront culture so shocked Miller in the late ’40s. But the last time I was down there, I saw a throwback to Eddie’s world, an aspect of New York dock life that never completely dies: Up on the Waterfront Commission building there was a new banner advertising a special crime-tips number that read: “HAD ENOUGH? Theft, corruption, and organized crime cost the port millions of dollars and thousands of jobs.” One side of the street may sell New Zealand meat pies and feature a French backyard bistro, but the ragged side of his old neighborhood Eddie Carbone would know at a glance.

Blues week continues…

So, the Yankees won the World Series last year, the first time they’ve done so in the seven postseasons since I started blogging about them, and I didn’t write a single word in acknowledgment of that fact. In fact, I haven’t made any attempt to look back a the 2009 Yankees at all thus far. Blame the World Baseball Classic. The WBC delayed the start of the 2009 regular season, pushing the World Series into November, and when the Yankees finally wrapped up number 27, I had to attend to commitments to Sports Illustrated and Baseball Prospectus that ran right into the holidays (baby’s first Christmas!). Before I knew it, it was 2010. I figured I had missed the boat by that point, but with the NFL playoffs on hold for two weeks in anticipation of the Colts-Saints Super Bowl, and Pitchers and Catchers still more than three weeks away, now seems like as good a time as any to look back at 2009 before we move forward with 2010. I’ll start with the obvious: letter grades for the 2009 team, which will serve as both the follow-up to my mid-season grades, and something of a preface to my annual “campers” post, which typically skips over the players who are assured roster spots. Hitters today, pitchers and the manager tomorrow.

Mark Teixeira, 1B

54.7 VORP, -3.7 UZR
.292/.383/.565,  39 HR, 122 RBI, 103 R, 43 2B, 344 TB

Misguided calls for Teixeira to earn the American League Most Valuable Player award put me in the odd position of arguing against a player I actively campaigned for last fall, despite the fact that he was having exactly the sort of season I hoped and expected he would. Removed from the absurd suggestion that he was more valuable than Joe Mauer last year, I don’t have a single bad thing to say about Teixeira. He finished in the top ten in the league in VORP, tied his career-best OPS+, and his counting stats across the board were near perfect matches for his career averages per 162 games. He led the AL in home runs (tied with Carlos Peña), RBIs, and total bases, and won what I thought was a deserved Gold Glove (UZR’s shortcomings in evaluating first-base defense lead me to trust my eyes rather than that stat in this case).

Teixeira’s postseason batting line was unimpressive, but he nonetheless made his impact with a few big hits (most notably his game-winning home run in the 11th inning of Game 2 of the ALDS) and his glove, the latter of which played a major roll in bases-loaded, no-out escape acts by David Robertson and Mariano Rivera in the ALDS and ALCS, respectively.

A

Robinson Cano, 2B

50.3 VORP, -5.2 UZR
.320/.352/.520, 25 HR, 85 RBI, 103 R, 48 2B, 331 TB

The Yankees’ improvement from an 89-win team that missed the playoffs in 2008 to a 103-win team that won the World Series in 2009 had two sources. One was the big offseason acquisitions of Teixeira, CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, and Nick Swisher, but the other, the rebounds by 2008 disappointments including Cano, Jorge Posada, Hideki Matsui, Melky Cabrera, Phil Hughes, and even Derek Jeter, was far more significant. Mark Teixeira was roughly a three-win improvement over Jason Giambi (+24.5 VORP rounded up for his glove, using 10 runs ~ 1 win), but Robinson Cano was almost a five-win improvement over the 2008 version of himself (+43.8 VORP again rounded up for some improvement in the field). Cano didn’t merely bounce back; at age 26, he had his finest season yet, setting career highs in games, at-bats, runs, hits, doubles, homers, total bases, and VORP and posting his best major league K/BB ratio (2.1). Cano’s UZR above looks problematic, but he was at -8.0 in 2008, and those who watched him all season thought he was solidly above average.

Whatever you make of Cano’s fielding, he did have one major hole in his game in 2009. Cano hit .376/.407/.609 with the bases empty, but just .207/.242/.332 with men in scoring position. He also struggled in the postseason, hitting just .193/.266/.281. Still, he had the third best VORP total among major league second basemen behind future Hall of Famer Chase Utley and ’09 fluke Ben Zobrist, so it’s hard to complain too much about the details.

A

Derek Jeter, SS

72.8 VORP, 6.6 UZR
.334/.406/.465, 18 HR, 107 R, 30 SB (86%)

If the Yankees had a legitimate MVP candidate in 2009 it was Jeter, who finished fourth in the majors in VORP trailing only Mauer in the AL (albeit by 18.2 runs). To put it simply, Jeter’s 2009 season was one of the best seasons in the career of a legitimate first-ballot Hall of Famer. Depending on how much emphasis you place on his defense (or which statistic you use to evaluate it), 2009 might have been Jeter’s second-best season ever behind only his otherworldly 1999 (103.9 VORP), though I’m tempted to rank it behind his 2006 campaign as well. In addition to setting a career high in UZR (a stat which only dates back to 2002), Jeter posted a career best K/BB ratio (1.25) in 2009, both of which suggest that it was hard work rather than good fortune which improved Jeter’s performance in 2009. As we await the annual barrage of reports of players reporting to camp “in the best shape of his life,” it’s worth noting that conditioning can make a difference.

A+

Alex Rodriguez, 3B

52.3 VORP, -8.6 UZR
.286/.402/.532, 30 HR, 100 RBI, 14 SB (88%)

Before he could even get into a spring training game, Alex Rodriguez was outed as a former steroid user and diagnosed with a torn hip labrum that required surgery. Things could only get better, and boy did they. Rodriguez returned in early May and homered on the first pitch he saw, and though his batting average struggled a bit early on and the surgically repaired hip hindered him in the field, Rodriguez was undiminished at the plate. Then came the postseason. Rodriguez hit .363/.414/.648 in the first 100 postseason plate appearances of his career, but his .143/.314/.214 mark in the next 70 gave him an undeserved reputation as a choker. No more. Rodriguez hit .365/.500/.800 as he led the Yankees to the title with one of the great postseason performances of all time. His biggest hits were home runs that tied up Games 2 of the ALDS and ALCS in the bottom of the ninth and 11th innings, respectively, and a key RBI double with two outs in the bottom of the ninth as the Yankees rallied against Brad Lidge in Game Four of the World Series, but there were many more as he connected for six homers and drove in 18 runs in total, the latter falling just one RBI shy of the record for a single postseason. Add those postseason totals to his regular season line in place of his missing April, and his totals swell to .294/.413/.560 with 36 homers, 118 RBIs, and 92 walks.

A

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