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Way off in a dusty corner of Fametracker, you will find something called The Baldwin Obscurity Clock. Posted on July 12, 1999 -- the debut date of this site -- the Clock marks the time that's elapsed since any of the Baldwin brothers had a certifiable hit. The clock currently shows that Alec, the best known of the Baldwins, is also the one who's mired in the longest career drought: currently, the time that's passed since his last bona-fide success -- The Hunt for Red October -- is over 4400 days, or about twelve years. (As for the others, Billy's gone roughly 3900 days since Backdraft, Stephen's gone over 2400 days since The Usual Suspects, and Daniel, the anomaly, is still waiting for his hit; alas, his clock remains set at infinity.) When we originally posted the clock, we knew that we might have to go back and reset it for one or other of the brothers, should they strike the box-office jackpot again. But that eventuality has, so far, remained purely theoretical.
While we thank them for saving us this additional labour, we can't say we're entirely pleased with this family-wide career stagnation. Frankly, we couldn't care less if we ever again enjoy the screen talents of Billy or Stevie or Randy or Tito or Moe, but Alec...well, he's a hard guy to dislike. Or, rather, he's a hard guy to like. Or, rather, he's both, often at the same time, and that's where the problem lies.
Not long ago -- okay, it was quite a long while ago by now -- Alec Baldwin wasn't best known as a middling star of forgettable thrillers and the patriarch of Hollywood's most notorious gang of leering, oleaginous siblings. (Yes, he's not really the patriarch, though in the context of the Baldwin Boys, he comes across as some unholy mix of brother, father, ringleader, and frat-house president.) Way back in the '80s, he was reeling off stand-out supporting roles in movies like Beetlejuice, Married to the Mob, Working Girl, and Great Balls of Fire. He was a talented character actor with leading-man good looks, and he was quite often the very best thing his movies, many of which, admittedly, didn't offer much else by way of competition.
Alec Baldwin's future seemed to hold nothing but promise. That's how it seemed. In reality, his future held promise and The Marrying Man, which is something else entirely.
Because since The Hunt for Red October, it's been one long, vertiginous downward spiral, like a biplane in a death spin, the whine of which sounds something like this: TheMarryingManMaliceThe GetawayTheShadowThe JurorTheEdgeSplat.
The reports of his prima-donnaish behaviour on the set of The Marrying Man after he'd hooked up with Kim Basinger -- heck, the reports of his having hooked up with Kim Basinger -- did little to bolster his public reputation. Then, after the success of The Hunt for Red October, he walked away from the Jack Ryan franchise, apparently pinning his hopes instead on the burgeoning Lamont Cranston franchise. And let's face it: actors just don't bounce back from flops like The Shadow -- just ask Billy Zane, whose career bravely went down with The Phantom, and who was last seen holding up a hairpiece on Boston Public.
A string of mediocre movies followed for Baldwin in the '90s. Then, when Baldwin divorced Basinger in 2001, she went public with tales of his violent -- and sometimes physical -- rages. (You can currently find them on the cover of one or other of the tabloids.) Plus, Baldwin's still rocking that slicked-back hairstyle, which even Wall Street money managers long ago abandoned as irredeemably cheesy. And to top if all off, there was the rumoured fling with Jennifer Love Hewitt, which was denied by all involved, but not before it had sent all of America into a collective fetal-position shiver.
So really, there's a very strong temptation to write off Alec Baldwin, like a bad debt or an unfortunate blind date. And yet, just when you're ready to John Hancock the separation papers, he does something eye-catching or noteworthy or just plain impressive. Like his coiled-spring cameo in Glengarry Glen Ross, as the slick, sadistic sales representative with the Rolex and the big brass balls. Or his funny, self-parodying role as a vain and near-pedophilic movie star in State and Main. Or the fact that while, yes, it's annoying when actors go around acting all political and everything, of all of them, Baldwin is the only one who seems to have the brain cells to pull it off, especially when he shows up on Politically Incorrect to rip some conservative radio host a new one. Or the voice-over he did for The Royal Tenenbaums -- a movie that, we're ashamed to admit, we liked so much that any association with it is enough to cleanse the career afflictions caused by even the most boneheaded of personal miscalculations.
To which we can only say: confound you, Alec Baldwin! Confound you! Or, rather, you confound us!
Alec Baldwin, on the other hand, seems perfectly unconfounded. He's now settled into a kind of semi-retirement, marked by an odd brand of late-career fame: you know, the kind of fame that puts you somewhere between the cover of Vanity Fair and the cover of a straight-to-video movie box also starring Craig Sheffer and Robert Davi. He seems happy making pseudo-cameos (like his role in Pearl Harbor) and reaping steady voice-over gigs (recently he's provided voices for everything from The Royal Tenenbaums to Final Fantasy to Cats & Dogs to Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends). As producer Art Linson recounts (in a recent article about the making of The Edge), in 1997, when Linson cast Alec Baldwin, the studio told him that, as far as they were concerned, the movie was still one star short. That, in the end, is a fitting epitaph to Baldwin's strange career: long, enjoyable, even riveting, but ultimately the movie was one star short.
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