Looking for Mr. Wright

There’s a moment in Ang Lee’s underrated but poorly-titled civil war movie “Ride with the Devil” in which a trio of pro-confederacy bushwhackers are hiding in a hovel near a farm in Missouri. One of the bushwhackers, Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), is romancing a civil war widow (Jewel), but when the romance continues indoors, his friend Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) objects, and attempts to enlist the aid of the third bushwhacker, the former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), who is incongruously fighting with the confederates. “Leave Holt out of this,” Daniel Holt responds, not unmindful of the dangerous racial/sexual territory being entered. “Holt ain’t even here. Holt ain’t nowhere near here.”

You could say the same for the actor saying these lines. He disappears so completely into his characters that as you watch him perform you think: “Jeffrey Wright ain’t even here. Jeffrey Wright ain’t nowhere near here.”

Not a minor character in anything
If you’re a Jeffrey Wright fan, as I am, your movie pickings are pretty slim. Nearly a decade after his star turn as Jean Michel Basquiat in “Basquiat,” most of the movies he’s appeared in have been little-noted nor long-remembered. He played Chris, the bartender who romances Ellen Barkin in “Crime and Punishment in Suburbia” (2000). Its box office take was $26,000. He played Jaworski, a crazy ex-cop with a disfigured face, in Sylvester Stallone’s “Eye See You” (2002): $79,000. In “Cement” (1999), he played the corrupt, drugged-out partner to Chris Penn’s histrionic bullying cop. Straight to video. In each of these films (all of which are awful, by the way), he’s just a bit or supporting player.

Of course most bit and supporting players act like bit and supporting players. Wright’s characters don’t. They suggest a full life, even if their life is not full. In John Barth's 1958 novel “The End of the Road,” one character lectures another about how we're all the lead characters in our own lives; about how movies and plays exacerbate this egocentricity by narrowing the focus to a single point of view. “‘Hamlet’,” he says, “could be told from Polonius' point of view and called ‘The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlein of Denmark.’ He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay.”

So with Wright’s characters. In “Suburbia” Chris is amazingly present as he romances Ellen Barkin. When he accidentally shoots someone and walks away from the crime scene repeating “I didn’t do that,” it’s not the reaction of a character who does their necessary bit for the story; it’s the reaction of a person who can’t process how his life has irrevocably changed.

Even characters whose job it is to be more or less subservient to other (usually lead) characters suggest a full life. Wright won both Tony and Emmy awards for playing Belize, the drag-queen nurse in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” and from the moment you first see him, tossing glitter-confetti to cheer up a bed-ridden, AIDS-ravaged Prior Walter, you love him. He cheers, but he doesn’t lie. He cares, in a world that doesn’t. “Why’d they have to pick on you?” he says, resigned but not, holding Prior’s hand. Near the end he berates the solipsistic Louis who has suggested Belize is in love with Prior. “I have a man, uptown,” Belize says, and when Louis says he didn’t know, Belize snaps, “Because you never bothered to ask!” It’s Belize dressing down Louis but he could be dressing down the playwright as well.

I would love to ignore the racial component in all this — this is an article about one man’s talent, after all — but most of the stories that get made in Hollywood are white stories. By suggesting the full life of his characters, Wright suggests the stories that aren’t being told. What about Holt? Why don’t we follow him down to Texas to find his mother? What about Winston, Bill Murray’s Ethiopian neighbor in “Broken Flowers”? He’s so much more interesting than Murray’s character, because he’s so much more interested. Let’s follow him instead.

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