Crazy fame opens door to activism

Clooney. Pitt. Jolie. Penn. Foster.

All are now in their mid-40s. Call them, if you want, the Red Carpet Generation of movie stars, the generation that came after People magazine started naming the Sexiest Man Alive, Rupert Murdoch freed the tabloid paparazzi and the world's internet star stalkers started tracking down their movements, even if they were just taking their Yorkshire terriers to the vet for de-worming.

I like them -- more than ever after four days of watching their films Replica Cartier Watch at this year's Toronto Film Festival. I can't honestly say that I like all their movies, but I respect them all.

What I respect, especially, is the way they have come to use the utterly idiotic kind of fame they "enjoy" every time they walk out the door.

Theirs is an era in which their most absent-minded thump of a Casaba melon at the Farmers Market is liable to wind up on someone's cell phone camera and lord knows where after that (especially if a few pounds overweight.)

Paul Newman was the template for the American movie star of the previous post-Brando generation -- New York-trained, politically liberal and activist to boot, always on the lookout for the best directors to work with, at once gracefully distant from the everyday world and approachable at the same time.

Newman's stardom never stopped him from making Robert Altman films like "Buffalo Bill and the Indians" and "Quintet."

Newman is 82 now. Think of those in his generation who hit 70 this year or soon will -- Redford, Beatty, Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda. They're all, more or less, in the Newman mold, subtracting Newman's conspicuously fancy shmancy education (Kenyon, Yale, The Actor's Studio.)

Clooney, Pitt, Jolie , et. al., are in that template too. But they've actually taken it a step further.

If their fame in the world of tabloids and Red Carpets is going to be idiotic and excessive, they're going to use it to do actual good in the world -- unashamedly. And, if they can't do that, they're going to use their movies to combat the falsehood that envelops them 24/7.

And they're going to put their ideals into their movies -- again, unashamedly.

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Take a look at some of their upcoming films in the next few months -- Clooney's legal thriller "Michael Clayton," Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" (which some consider an American masterpiece and which, frankly, I can't get out of my head, despite it being a kind of spiritual autobiography for Penn), and Brad Pitt's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (which, whatever else it is, the epic Western is a meditation on truth and fame that only a man of successive front page couplings could have gotten made.)

I don't admire the films equally but I saw them all in Toronto and I admire the way they're made -- with integrity, no matter how much junk fame had to be cashed in to do it.

"Michael Clayton" is good at a lot of things, not least of which is its little plot sideswipe at an agro--giant conglomerate in the Archer Daniels Midland mode. Penn's "Into the Wild" is a deep, passionate and utterly extraordinary look at the way America's children of privilege sometimes reject the world. "The Assassination of Jesse James," starring Pitt as Jesse, is about how little the stories we like to tell resemble any truth we might actually need to know.

Don't believe anyone who tells you that everything done in American movies of the past is superior to what's being done now. "Into the Wild" is the movie "Easy Rider" -- for all its historic importance -- might have hoped it was good enough to be.

These are the kinds of movies you hope major American movie stars have the clout and the chutzpah to make.

Let the paparazzi and the stupid press questions rain down on them daily -- as long as these people can convert it all into movies like these, I think they're as exceptional as any modern generation of Hollywood actors has ever been.

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