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Smoke and mirrors
By Gary Arnold
Justin
Theroux, born at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington in 1971 and
raised in Chevy Chase D.C. until he departed for boarding school at the
age of 14, lives in Lower Manhattan, roughly below 14th Street and above
Canal Street. He was at the Toronto Film Festival to help promote his
new movie, "Mulholland Drive," David Lynch's alternately
baffling and bemusing fable about amnesia in Hollywood, when New York
City was victimized by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
The festival wound down very quickly in
the aftermath. Mr. Theroux, who returned to Washington recently for a
day of press conversations at the Four Seasons Hotel, joined a group of
friends in heading home as soon as possible in a rental car.
"We got back that night," he
recalls. "We came in over the George Washington Bridge and got as
far as 14th Street. I got out and walked with my luggage the rest of the
way to my apartment. We were in sort of a marginal area for a week and a
half. If you had your ID, you could go in. Fortunately, my place was a
little above the severe damage. At first you were mostly aware of tons
of smoke damage. Even now the air is sometimes saturated with that acrid,
smoky smell. It was surreal, with neighborhoods cordoned off and no
traffic at all on Broadway."
Mr. Theroux reflects on the possible
repercussions for movie content in the future.
"I'm very pessimistic," he says.
"I think it's going to go back to business as usual. I think the
studios will find a way to slip back into the old habits, even if they
seem totally obsolete right now I hope all these events will help to
weed out all the [stuff] I want to see weeded out, but I wouldn't bet on
it."
* * *
Mr. Theroux, whose mother, Phyllis
Theroux, was a writer with The Washington Post's Style section in the
early 1970s, attended Lafayette Elementary School in Chevy Chase D.C.
and Annunciation School on Massachusetts Avenue NW before his prep
school years. He graduated from Bennington College in Vermont with a
double major in visual art and drama. Although he had been active in
school dramatics since his teens, he found it easier to make a living
with illustrative talent when first pursuing a career in New York.
"I do figurative stuff," he
says. "I specialized in murals for a while and painted walls in
several restaurants. Some kind of cartoony. Others more abstract and
graffiti-influenced. I did billboards, ads, T-shirts, whatever came
along.
"I had done a lot of acting at school,
but it was painting and other illustrative work that kept me going for a
couple of years. I got my first acting job by a fluke, in a play called
'Hide Your Love Away,' about the Beatles' ill-fated manager Brian
Epstein, and it did quite well. From then on, acting started taking over.
But I still keep a sketchbook handy and paint when I get the chance."
Movie roles for Mr. Theroux began with
another biographical project, Mary Harron's "I Shot Andy
Warhol." He was cast in her subsequent feature, the movie version
of Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho," playing a
professional colleague and rival of the psychopath impersonated by
Christian Bale. Miss Harron evidently is completing a new script that
includes a role for Mr. Theroux.
While performing in a revival of Anton
Chekhov's "Three Sisters," the actor was introduced to
director Ben Stiller by fellow cast member Jeanne Tripplehorn, Mr.
Stiller's consort at the time. Mr. Theroux and Mr. Stiller became
cronies and collaborators. They're working on a pair of comedy
screenplays, and Mr. Theroux has a cameo role as a disco club disc
jockey in Mr. Stiller's farce "Zoolander."
* * *
Working for the habitually engimatic
David Lynch proved a satisfying experience for Mr. Theroux, the closest
thing to a leading man in "Mulholland Drive." The movie
revolves around a couple of aspiring and endangered actresses — a
breathless and ingenuous blonde portrayed by Naomi Watts and a sultry,
amnesiac brunette portrayed by Laura Harring. Cast as a film director
named Adam, Mr. Theroux seems to be confined to a separate subplot until
the threads get weirdly entangled during climactic episodes.
Unlike Woody Allen, Mr. Lynch does not
conceal script pages from his actors to protect the secrets of the plot.
The joke is that knowing them may not be revealing anyway.
"You get the whole script," Mr.
Theroux explains, "but he might as well withhold the scenes you're
not in, because the whole turns out to be more mystifying than the parts.
David welcomes questions, but he won't answer any of them. You work kind
of half-blindfolded. If he were a first-time director and hadn't
demonstrated any command of this method, I'd probably have reservations.
But it obviously works for him."
What did he ask that Mr. Lynch declined
to answer?
"Things that seemed very elementary
at the time," Mr. Theroux replies. "Who's this strange
character I meet called the Cowboy? Is this a fantasy? A dream? Is my
character an extension of you? Actually, he did answer that one. He said
no, it was definitely not an extension of him. I don't think he wants
anything he does to be mistaken for autobiography."
Was Adam perhaps a portrait of someone
else in the movie business?
"I asked that as well," Mr.
Theroux says, "but David is so wonderfully unplugged from the whole
Hollywood scene that he might find it difficult to name one or two
directors, let alone borrow any aspects of their lives or personalities.
"Here's an example. Ben Stiller came
to visit me on the set one day. David thought he was an extra. He even
offered him a job as an extra when we explained that Ben was just a
friend and wasn't really looking for movie work. It shows you how
completely in his own world David is."
* * *
Mr. Theroux summarizes the Lynch
directing technique on the set as "very simple, nuts and bolts."
Mr. Theroux felt confident enough to try out his own "bare-bones
theory" of the movie's curious plot reversal on the writer-director.
At about the two-hour mark, "Mulholland Drive" takes a very
drastic turn for the sinister that leaves the leading ladies in a
topsy-turvy state, playing acutely diffferent characters from the ones
to whom we have grown accustomed. Mr. Theroux is a little luckier. His
identity doesn't change when the plot suddenly turns decisively morbid
and inexplicable.
The Theroux interpretation can be
summarized as follows: "It begins in fantasy and ends in reality."
Relatively speaking.
"There's a person who lives on the
fringe of Hollywood," Mr. Theroux explains, "and you sort of
enter the movie midfantasy as she gets to L.A. She gushes over being
able to use this beautiful apartment owned by her aunt and encounters
only sunny days. She gives brilliant auditions. She meets and charms
powerful directors. She takes in this lost soul and gets involved in a
kind of Nancy Drew mystery that allows her to fashion the other girl in
her own image. Then, when the film turns dark, gets turned on its head,
we see things as they really are: The sunshine girl is a desperate,
weak-minded hanger-on who lives on the fringes of power and celebrity
and everything.
"If you're familiar with L.A., it's
not that far from the truth. You see it all the time. There's an
incredible desperation that is mirrored in this film. People who are
close to celebrity in superficial ways but nowhere near to achieving it
for themselves. They're the people you see in clubs or at parties who
may be standing near famous people but are really thousands of miles
away."
How did Mr. Lynch react to this ingenious
and poignant analysis?
"He said that it was fine if that's
what I wanted to believe," Mr. Theroux says. "I think he's
genuinely happy for it to mean anything you want. He loves it when
people come up with really bizarre interpretations. David works from his
subconscious. It can be fun to give yourself over to that."
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