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| Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams in Fosse/Verdon. |
Sam Rockwell’s portrait of Bob Fosse – the legendary director-choreographer
whose body finally succumbed to drugs, alcohol, nicotine and workaholism at
the age of sixty, in 1987 – in the eight-part F/X miniseries
Fosse/Verdon is one of those rare dramatic reincarnations
of a celebrity that you feel, as you watch, you will retain forever in your
mind alongside the work of the real one. (Some other examples: Judy Davis
as Judy Garland and Geoffrey Rush as Peter Sellers, both also in TV
dramatizations, and Annette Bening as Gloria Grahame in the 2017 movie
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.)
I saw Rockwell was at the
Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2000 in the
supporting role of the desk clerk in a production of Lanford Wilson’s
The Hot L Baltimore, which is set in the lobby of a
low-rent residential New York hotel. The director, Joe Mantello, staged a
pre-show during which some of the members of the ensemble wandered on and
improvised behavior that sketched in their characters before we heard any
of the dialogue Wilson had scripted for them. I can’t remember what any of
the other actors did because Rockwell made his simple tasks so interesting
– so detailed and so quirky – that my companion and I kept our eyes on him
the whole time. And nearly twenty years later, his performance, in the
margins of the show, is the only one I still recall. I had already started
spotting him in movies like
Galaxy Quest and Michael
Hoffman’s version of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where he exhibited the same distinctive combination of focus, precision and humor,
all guided by an unpredictable perspective, as if his character occupied
some space in the world that no one else had ever noticed before. Both
those movies came out in 1999; Rockwell has played dozens of roles since,
many of them in bad or forgettable movies, and I haven’t always liked him.
(I hated his Oscar-winning performance in
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but it would be
unfair to pin the blame on Rockwell, since nothing in that repellent movie
made an iota of sense.) But I think his gifts are both outsize and
off-kilter, and when he’s good he can be sensational. He was the best thing
about
Vice, for instance, drawing on impressive resources
for satirical impersonation to play George Bush Jr. But what he does as Bob
Fosse goes way beyond impersonation, though he gets down the man’s
slouching grace and his sexy slightness and the way the cigarette tucked
insouciantly in the corner of his mouth completed him as definitively as it
completed Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart. Rockwell gets
inside
Fosse – his compulsions about work and sex, his ambition and unsatisfiable
perfectionism, his cynicism about show business and about his own talents,
the erotic charm that was generated as much by his world-weariness as by
his persistence and the appeal of being around his genius.
