"The Great Debaters," which Denzel Washington both stars in and directed, opens Tuesday. But isn't there another great debate involving Washington that should be going on?
In certain relationships there comes that crucial point of reevaluation. You step back and try to assess where you are and where you're going. You look back on the old days and say: Boy, we really had some good times. Can we have that kind of fun again? Or should we just move on? Denzel Washington and I are at that point.
I don't know when he knew - I don't even know that he does know. But it dawned on me two months ago watching him play the real-life Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas in "American Gangster." It took one scene to realize we'd have to have The Talk. Lucas walks up to Idris Elba, shoots him in the head, then takes some cash out of his pocket and walks back to the Harlem diner where he had been having a meal with his brothers. Washington does all this while wearing one relaxed facial expression. He may as well have gone to fetch the paper.
The scene reminded me of that moment in "The Silence of the Lambs" where Dr. Chilton explains to Clarice how Hannibal Lecter remained remarkably placid while dining on a victim: "His pulse never rose above 85, even when he ate her tongue." You could say the same about Washington in "American Gangster," where he's playing a different kind of cannibal. That murder moment - and several more in the movie like it - was textbook Denzel: dapper, prepossessing, seductive, prone to lightning strikes of anger, but seemingly decent and desirable till the end. Honestly, I wish he'd throw the book out.
Washington did that once. He won his second Oscar for playing a monster cop in "Training Day" and it was like watching an arsonist start a forest fire. He burned down the whole movie. For him, it was a rare instance of shamelessness. He didn't care whether the audience liked this psycho. He just wanted to act the bejesus out of the part. I didn't love the performance (the entire movie caters to it), but I could feel Washington's excitement. And I loved that.
That kind of excitement is missing from a lot of his movies, especially "American Gangster." Washington is the model of class, even when he's bashing somebody's head in. Why does this nut-job crook get the movie-star treatment? Frank Lucas calls for crazy. It calls for abandon. It calls, I'm afraid, for Al Pacino. You could argue, as I did with myself for a few days after seeing the movie the first time, that Washington smartly chose to go in the opposite direction from the volcanic eruptions of Pacino's legendary Tony Montoya. This Frank Lucas embodies tranquility and a sort of goodness. His business may be killing people by the thousands, but he takes his mother to church every Sunday.
Both Washington and the movie seem needy for us to see Lucas's upside. He lets himself go nuts when someone gets blood on his chinchilla rug, but my mother would have done the same thing. Washington doesn't lower the mask on Lucas enough for him to seem both necessarily disturbed and necessarily distinguishable from, say, the many (many) lawmen he's played - in "Ricochet," "Virtuosity," "Fallen," "The Bone Collector," "Out of Time," "Déjà Vu." These men are a little renegade but heroes all the same. In the eyes of the filmmakers, Frank Lucas is a hero, too.
Washington plays this drug lord the way he plays his cops. Never mind that that's actually Russell Crowe's job. In "American Gangster" Washington is the smartest, sanest, most seductive man in the room - he's Denzel Washington. Crowe operates with a dulled self-pity that puts a tarnish on the movie's righteousness. Washington can't put a tarnish on anything. He polishes every emotion until it shines or until it bleeds.
He seems infallible even when guilty. There's no psychology to what he does here, no private vulnerability. I don't think he could have played the unhappy second half of Lucas's life - the penniless civilian years - since it's full of tarnish. He wants to play Superman, but without even being Clark Kent - all strength all the time.
But Washington knows his audience, too: People want to feel he's unbeaten even when he's lost. The last shot of "American Gangster" isn't sad, although it should be. It's an unequivocal triumph. The superhuman steeliness of his performance changes the meaning of the film's politics. Just listen to the whoops in the movie theater. It's pure cognitive dissonance: implausible nonsense in one way, a staggering testament to a man's star power in another. Denzel Washington is the only actor in Hollywood who can stand in a ditch and make us think he's reached the mountaintop.
Washington sometimes seems stuck as an entertainer. Sidney Poitier's upstanding social consciousness seems to loom in Washington's personal airspace, but you can't imagine Poitier taking many of Washington's parts. Washington is a more adventurous actor. But what's funny about "American Gangster" is that he plays the part the way Poitier might have: with a distracting premium on dignity. Interestingly, in the two affecting films Washington has directed - "Antwone Fisher" in 2002 and "The Great Debaters" - he shrewdly casts himself as a sort of Poitier life coach, but to America's black youth. His "To Denzel, With Love" bit more or less works there. But it still doesn't alleviate the fatigue I have watching lately.
A few weeks ago I realized what was wrong. The balance between his persona and his characters is off. He's not playing characters. I knew this because I caught him on TV as Tom Hanks's lawyer in Jonathan Demme's "Philadelphia." That was a character. The movie still feels like it was written on a chalkboard. But Washington is very good as a man surprised by his own bigotry. He gets to give a few impassioned courtroom speeches. But a lot of the performance is in his body language, in his face.
While you might think of Washington as a man of gesture (well, one gesture, really: that clenched-fist, arm-pump thing he does when he's angry), he's not a facial actor. Like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and William Holden before him, Washington's masculinity doesn't give much away. But that lawyer in "Philadelphia" is the most observant, thoughtfully human work he's done. It's also the rare part Washington has taken where his righteousness is upended. Hanks won an Oscar for playing a gay man with AIDS, but Washington is better in a way since, speech-making aside, a lot of his changing is from within.
He's been as good in the four movies he's made with Spike Lee - "Mo Better Blues," "Malcolm X," "He Got Game," and "Inside Man." In "Inside Man," he seemed reborn after carrying a bunch of generic thrillers. For Lee, he was just playing a New York City detective. But all Washington's street intelligence, his movie-star smoothness, his natural cool made sense again. He didn't have to act up a monsoon, and he seemed happy not to be cutting off people's fingers. He relaxed, and so did we. You leave the movie high on everybody in it, Washington especially. Unlike most of his other cops, he wasn't just playing a job this time. He put sex and wit into the movie, the kind that could make a guy fall in love with a star again.
If an actor's going to play a part that calls for him to bash somebody's head in or sell tons of heroin to the good people of Harlem, he shouldn't apologize for it. Seduce us, hurt us, leave us strung out. Don't get me wrong. I want Washington to respect us - just not too much.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
