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We have to admit, Tim Roth baffles us.
Not long ago, he was overflowing with accumulated indie-film goodwill: he was like a British Steve Buscemi with -- ironically -- better teeth. Every so often an actor will achieve a kind of critical mass of hipster credibility and suddenly seem to be in every cool movie around. Buscemi has enjoyed this moment, as have, more recently, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly. Donal Logue has almost been this guy for several years now, off and on. But back between 1992 and 1994 -- basically, between Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction -- no one's hipster gloss was shinier Tim Roth's.
Usually, when an indie actor reaches this point in his career, he can go in one of several directions: line up a steady stream of parts in interesting films (Hoffman); sign on to the traveling troupe of some blockbuster specialist like Jerry Bruckheimer (Buscemi); cash in by taking every single role that comes his way, no matter how inane (Gary Oldman); or repackage his appeal for mainstream audiences, and reap the critical and financial rewards (Benicio Del Toro). Roth seemed headed on this last path when, in 1995, he turned a co-starring role as the bad guy in Rob Roy into a virtuoso tutorial in the art of sneering, sniveling, and general villainy, and bagged an Oscar nomination. By the time he starred as a bellhop in Four Rooms, also in 1995, he almost seemed like the mascot of the indie-film community, an impression not diminished by the organ-grinder's monkey outfit he was forced to wear in the film.
But then, at about the same time ex-video-store-clerk chic was being trampled by the ascendance of computer-generated blockbusters and Lou Pearlman-generated boy bands, Tim Roth faded from view. No doubt he spent the latter years of the nineties doing many rewarding and worthwhile things, but none of them included acting in films anyone remembers. Is it possible that his caricaturish turn in the terminally twee Woody Allen musical, Everyone Says I Love You, managed to vacuum out all his hard-earned hipster mojo in one swift and merciless suck? We certainly never soured on Tim Roth -- we just wondered what ever became of him. Then, during a flight from San Francisco to Toronto, we saw him in Lucky Numbers, a film so lifeless, so incompetent, so precisely the opposite of the very films that had made Tim Roth so cool a few years back, that we had to assume his appearance in it was payback for some undisclosed, and presumably debilitating, debt to John Travolta.
Now he's returned to rave reviews for his role as General Thade in Planet of the Apes, which critics are heralding as a virtuoso tutorial in the art of sneering, sniveling, and general villainy -- which means he's pretty much back where he was in 1995. This may not be a bad thing, assuming that this time he sticks around, and learns to pretend that Lucky Numbers never existed, much as we have.
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