Monday 19 May 2008

The Rockwell Landing

Sam Rockwell has managed to illicit critical acclaim in pained independent efforts but soon he will be everywhere.


Actors, broadly speaking, can be split into two groups. Pearly-white-toothed perma tans intent on shining as bright as possible while their name carries a box office appeal and then those that, ya know, love acting, love the craft and would act in the dim light of their basement should the occasion call.


However, there are increasingly actors who can flirt between the independent periphery and still get people chucking out ticket money to see them don costumes in the height of summer. One big money blockbuster, then one labour of love and then back to the big studios. While this group may soon get a new member in the snarl-toothed shape of Sam Rockwell.


Not a new name by any stretch of the imagination but Rockwell is gradually gaining an untold credibility that could see him shot to the upper echelons of independent-honed talent. The announcement that Sony has just picked up the distribution rights of Moon, a story of one man and his replica on the loneliest planet, shows that Rockwell is no longer a fringe player. And it’s about damn time!


Having made his start as the erratic ‘Wild Bill’ Wharton in that Tom Hanks film that went on for three hours centring on one man’s moral struggle and journey...sorry is that too broad? (It was The Green Mile, by the by). Things looked to be taking a turn for the worse when Rockwell popped up in the less than auspicious Galaxy Quest, which, to be fair, wasn’t horrible and Rockwell certainly helped in that department.


Rockwell looked to have picked a more commercial path with the role as prime villain Eric Knox in the reborn Charlie’s Angels series and nobody would lament an actor who had been actively working since 1988 finally ‘making it’.


“I thought it did turn out okay,” Sam admitted about the less than critically appreciated Charlie’s Angels. “In fact, for the genre we were in, I thought we succeeded.” It was the next choice that would define Rockwell, when George Clooney – a founder member of those able to flitter between studio films and their own, smaller efforts – cast him as the irreverant and troubled spy Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.


Leading certainly suited Sam’s charm and it was instrumental in his stock rising as a bankable star. “Ridley Scott saw the trailer and I got to do his next movie, Matchstick Men,” he told About.com at the time. Turns came and Sam was able to show his class in the modern imagining of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but has now retreated into somewhat more offbeat choices, where he has been able to really exhibit his ability and skill.


For those that are still scratching their skull thinking ‘who?’, you are going to struggle to miss Rockwell over the next year or so. Playing an alcoholic turned born-again Christian in missing-girl-drama Snow Angels, a self-involved sex-addict in the much anticipated adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke, an aid to Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon and Moon. Phew!


It’s hard to begrudge such an easy-going guy and an obviously talented actor, as much as I am trying to avoid it I can’t...it would seem that all’s well that’s Rockwell.



Chris Sloley - in a somewhat sycophantic mood

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