Everything that was bad about the Eighties...and hair gel.
Try as I might, I can’t figure out why Michael Douglas is famous. I mean, I know that he’s a big-name actor, and that he’s often appeared in movies as a result. But what these movies are, and why it is that they made his name, is beyond me.
Actually, I take that back; I have seen several movies with Michael Douglas in them. Sometimes he’s the good guy, sometimes he’s the bad guy, but he is always Michael Douglas. You can’t suspend disbelief enough to believe him when he’s playing a cheating husband or a hot-shot Secret Service agent on the run. He’s Michael Douglas, through and through.
I don’t think that Michael Douglas has been Michael Douglas ever since I came out of the womb in ’79, but I can’t remember a time when he “wasn’t” Michael Douglas. What I mean is, for as long as I can remember he’s been one of the big names in Hollywood. But how he got to be that way, and why it is that he’s so well known and yet I can’t name more than five of his movies, is an enduring mystery.
I think I first became aware of him thanks to “Romancing the Stone”, an Indiana Jones rip-off. But I know he’s been in other movies. There was “Fatal Attraction,” “Basic Instinct,” “Wonder Boys”and that one where Demi Moore harassed him. In all of those, he’s playing the same guy: Michael Douglas, sleazy ladies’ man.
The exception to that rule, I would argue, is “Wall Street.” From the minute you see him as slick-haired Wall Street tyrant Gordon Gekko, you know this isn’t your usual Michael Douglas role. It’s Michael Douglas times 10, and he chews the scenery in Oliver Stone’s least-paranoid flick like a kid in a candy store. He represents everything that was bad about the ’80s: tacky taste, expensive needs, an absence of modesty or common decency, and hair gel. The guy reeks of corporate greed and Culture Club tapes jammed into the tape deck of his limousine as he snorts a line of coke off some hooker’s leg.
It doesn’t hurt that his old man Kirk was a Hollywood legend, but Michael Douglas does deserve some of the fame that has mysteriously been bestowed on him. He was almost convincing as Bill Clinton Lite in “The American President”, and he won an Oscar for producing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Plus, the man is married to Catherine Zeta-Jones. Something tells me that he’s not sweating the small stuff in terms of roles. But I do hope Wes Anderson has something in mind for him to work with, a reverse Gordon Gekko if you will. Michael Douglas as anything other than Michael Douglas? It could happen…
