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LOS ANGELES TIMES

MOVIES

A Picture of Intensity

Anthony LaPaglia likes playing angst-ridden souls, so Lantana seems a perfect fit.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

December 15, 2001

 “Here’s the good news and the bad news. I’m 42,” says Anthony LaPaglia. The Australian-born actor, flipping an omelet slice onto a piece of toast at a Brentwood coffee shop, is trying to explain the basis for his startling performance in “Lantana,” which opens in Los Angeles on Friday. “The bad news is, it’s not good to get old in this business. But the good part is that, by the age of 42 you’ve experienced enough life, enough failure, enough loss and frustration to understand that guy.”

 

That “guy” is Leon Zat, a Sydney detective seething with rage who cheats on his wife, yells at his children, bullies witnesses, beats suspects and isn’t even all that nice to his mistress. When a famed psychologist (Barbara Hershey) vanishes into a tangle of lantana weeds, Leon’s missing person investigation draws him into the overlapping private lives of three other couples whose marriages are every bit as dysfunctional as his own.

 

Says LaPaglia, “At one point Leon says ‘I’m numb. I can’t feel anything.’ So he tries to jump start his life, he has an affair, he has these bouts of anger because he doesn’t know where to put any of this stuff. There’s a complexity in the writing that makes Leon a really great character.”

 

The Australian film industry clearly agrees. LaPaglia earned that country’s Oscar equivalent last month when the Australian Film Institute named him the year’s Best Film Actor. In an unprecedented sweep, AFI also singled out “Lantana” as best film and awarded trophies to LaPaglia’s castmates Vincent Colosimo (supporting actor), Kerry Armstrong (actress) and Rachel Blake (supporting actress). In America, LaPaglia is emerging as a darkhorse Oscar contender.

 

Commercially, “Lantana” remains a top ten box office draw nine weeks after its theatrical release in Australia. Word-of-mouth buzz there has turned the psychological thriller into something of a pop culture phenomenon akin to the stateside indie success story “Memento.”

 

“I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t walk down the street,” says LaPaglia. “Now, I get approached by people who are just so moved by the film,” says LaPaglia. The reason is simple, he believes. “‘Lantana’ caters to an audience that has been completely neglected. There’s this huge population of people over 30 who want to go to the movies if you give them something to see. ‘Lantana’ somehow reflects their lives, it gives them characters they understand.” Referring to the film’s deliberately ambiguous final scene leaving the future Leon’s marriage unresolved, LaPaglia says, “The movie respects the audience and lets you figure things out for yourself.”

 

Among the issues to puzzle over: what exactly is Leon’s problem? His wife Sonja (Armstrong) is beautiful, intelligent and sensitive, his dope-smoking teenage son only moderately bratty. He has a job, his colleagues respect him. Yet Leon is miserable. “You know what this guy‘s problem is?” offers LaPaglia: “Most people live lives of unfulfilled ambitions. When you’re 15, you’re gonna be a fireman or whatever your dream is. Suddenly you’re 30 and not doing when you thought you’d be doing at 15, suddenly you’re 35 and you’ve got a bunch of obligations and commitments you hadn’t conceived of before. Leon is all about waking up one day at the age of 40 and going ‘How the hell did this become my life?’”

 

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“Lantana” offered LaPaglia a welcome break from conventional moviemaking. For starters, the cast performed a table reading in front of the entire crew so everyone involved in the production would understand what the film was about. Two weeks of intensive rehearsal followed.  Said LaPaglia, “Usually when you do a movie, you shake the other actor’s hand and say ‘hi,’ and then somebody shouts ‘action.’ That’s rehearsal. It’s ridiculous.”

 

Once shooting began in Sydney last fall, the usually garrulous LaPaglia turned taciturn. Director Ray Lawrence, speaking by phone from Australia, said, “As much as Anthony loves to chat, when he was on the set he didn’t want to talk unless he was in character. I remember there was a scene in the film where Anthony has to break down. We had a technical problem and I said we might have to do this again. He said, I can cry again, but I can’t do that (ital) again. He’d been dragging this (emotional baggage) around for six weeks for that (moment of performance). That’s the kind of intensity he brought to the role.”

 

In Lawrence, LaPaglia finally found a director who appreciated his understated style. Says LaPaglia, “Movie directors are always telling me ‘I can’t see what you’re doing, can you do more?’ I’m always fighting them: ‘You can’t tell what I’m doing because you’re looking through that stupid little black and white monitor. Believe me, you’ll see it on the dailies.’” On “Lantana,” Lawrence called LaPaglia’s bluff, and then some. “Ray would come up to me very quietly after a scene and say ‘It’s too much, do less.’” recalls LaPaglia. “At home my wife would say ‘How’d it go today?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t know, I just felt like I wandered around in front of a camera all day and didn’t do anything.’ It really felt that way. Ray just stripped me, stripped me bare.”

 

Lawrence says over the top theatrics weren’t called for because he needed LaPaglia to come across as an ordinary person audiences could relate to. “I hate ‘aspirational’ films -- you’re not rich enough, blonde enough, thin enough. I deliberately wanted to confirm people’s flaws. Anthony has this sort of emotional force field, so he doesn’t really need to physically do very much at all. That’s the trick. He doesn’t lay it all out. He’d prepared this performance for the audience and then gave it to them in little bits.”

 

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Growing up in Brisbane, ADELAINE Australia, LaPaglia didn’t give much thought to show business. At age 21, while working as a shoe salesman, he tried to impress a date by taking her to the 17th century Restoration comedy “The Way of the World.” By the time the play ended, LaPaglia had decided to become an actor. “The whole audience was like a collective organism,” he remembers. “It laughed at the same place, became quiet at the same place. I wanted to be somebody on the stage who could control the behavior of 200 people.”

 

Soon afterwards, LaPaglia failed an audition for the Australia’s top acting school, the National Institute of Dramatic Arts. Plan B: he moved to New York, got a tattoo in New Jersey that still decorates his left bicep and studied acting with a succession of teachers. LaPaglia tried to find work in Los Angeles, taking classes with an imperious Russian drama coach, who, he soon realized, was a “complete fraud.” Back in New York, LaPaglia hit his stride with the late Kim Stanley, who taught him the essence of Method acting. “She said it’s this simple: if you believe what you’re doing, everybody watching you will believe you. That’s it.”

LaPaglia adds, “There’s no imaginary cup of coffee, no pretending you’re a lemon, don’t imagine your dead dog. It’s just believing your circumstances. For movies, the trick is blocking out the rest of the world so you can create that magic in a split second of film.”

 

LaPaglia made his first picture, the soon forgotten “Cold Steel,”  in 1987. For the next several years, he played cops, detectives or gangsters, consistently stealing scenes in movies of varying quality and prominence. “When you think about it, what else is there but cops and bad guys,” jokes LaPaglia. On television, LaPaglia impressed critics in 1996 when he portrayed moody defense lawyer in the Steven Bochco-produced ABC series “Murder One” while his younger brother Jonathan starred during the same timeslot on Fox’s “New York Undercover.”

 

In recent years, LaPaglia has appeared in the period romance “House Of Mirth,” Woody Allen’s “Sweet and Lowdown,” and Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam.” Sprinkled among LaPaglia’s four dozen movie characters are priests, slimy CEO’s, Fidel Castro, a demented Santa Claus, and an over-the-hill baseball player. “People say ‘character actor’ like it’s a dirty word,” asserts LaPaglia. “You know what? I’d rather be a character actor any day of the week. You get to do more things and it’s far more interesting. In the American movies I grew up watching, the leading men were always the stiffs.”

 

“Lantana,” filled with twisted story arcs and thorny characters, turned out to be the kind of filmmaking experience LaPaglia had nearly given up on. “Before ‘Lantana,’” he admits, “I was getting all my thrills out of theater because I felt like it was the only place left where you couldn’t fake it.”  LaPaglia won a best actor Tony for portraying Eddie Carbone in the 1998 revival of Arthur Miller’s drama “A View From the Bridge.” “Most of the stuff I’m proudest of has happened on the stage, which in Hollywood means absolutely nothing,” says LaPaglia, who lives most of the year in New York with his wife of three years, Australian actress Gia Carides. “I’d gotten a little bit jaded with film. Usually I get hired for a movie and they expect very little. Doing ‘Lantana’ was a lot more demanding. It reinstated my belief that movies can be a social and political and sexual commentary on the world that we live in, that there are people out there who really understand storytelling and cinema.”

 

LaPaglia has three films in the can, including a role as Al Capone in “The Road to Perdition” opposite Tom Hanks. He’s also producing a movie version of “A View From the Bridge” with “Lantana” author Bovell on hand to adapt Miller’s play.

 

Like “Lantana,” “View” depicts the inchoate cravings of a flawed everyman. LaPaglia recaps: “I’m a Brooklyn dock worker who’s secretly in love with his niece,” “When she falls in love with someone else it drives him insane and sets him on this relentless path of self destruction that he cannot stop.”

 

It might not be everybody’s idea of fun, but for LaPaglia, stories like “View” and “Lantana” offer exactly what he’s looking for: deeply divided souls filled with turmoil, angst, and heartache. “It’s what I live for,” LaPaglia purrs, “It’s what I studied acting for, which to make the most complex journey I can make in the most complicated way I can make it. That’s what makes me happy.”