Movieline Magazine September 2002 thanks to Angeleno.

Man Power

CLIVE OWEN

Clive Owen is the minimalist's sex symbol -- his ability to invite erotic attention by doing almost nothing is uncanny. Even now he may be best known as the thoroughly anonymous "driver" in that cool series of Internet films/commercials directed by stylishly selected auteurs for BMW, and that is appropriate. It deals in and depends on edgy mystique, which its unknown star -- the oxymoron is the message -- exudes (Owen plays a similar character, an unfeeling assassin, in The Bourne Identity). David Fincher, whose company produced BMW's little coup, knew an actor who could conjure whole worlds of postmodern noir when he saw one, and he saw one in Croupier, the film that quietly introduced Owen to American audiences. It was a movie that banked 100 percent on its leading man and gave him, in his role as a self-involved writer turned card dealer, no fireworks to set off, just minute-by-minute of close-up screen time and voiceover to inform us of such things as, "I'm not an enigma, I'm a contradiction." Enigma, contradiction, sure; we'll ponder the distinction as long as it calls for us to keep looking at him. Owen is so interestingly cold you can't help getting yourself tangled up in ideas about what might warm him.

Owen's masculine underplay works like a charm because his subtle register of expression and gesture withholds any apparent wish to charm -- this in a profession that is ever so desperate to charm. Little wonder he was the ultimate saving grace in the almost too-charming British comedy dedicated to the notion of the redemptive power of gardening, Greenfingers. Playing an emotionally battened-down prisoner given new inner life by unexpected horticultural success with a packet of flower seeds, Owen was required to play a man transformed from a state of defeated hostility to one of romantic vulnerability in less than two hours. There are many formulaic ways to do this without being very convincing on either end of the spectrum, but Owen refrained from all of them, finding fresh means of sidestepping the sentimentality that the material all but begged for.

Owen's dramatic thrift must owe quite a lot to his particular nature, but it must reflect an acquired wisdom about his own face as well. Quite an involving face this is, reconciling, as it does, slight hints of Mel Gibson's stunning looks with the cruder handsomeness of Dylan McDermott. Like McDermott, he works well on TV -- in the British series "Second Sight," which played on PBS in America -- where the blunt clarity of his features seals the viewer off from distractions that usually plague TV watching.

The much-admired Gosford Park owes its entire erotic tick to Owen. He is, of course, with Helen Mirren, the big dramatic secret of the piece, but long before we've been clued into that, he's taken over the proceedings from the sidelines by saying little and provoking our curiosity. In Gosford Park, though, Owen shows an intensified, cameo version of what he's suggested elsewhere -- the presence of a secret agenda that it's our pleasure to uncover. As Robert Parks, he is a man of self-defining purpose in the guise of a servant following orders. The hidden decisiveness is silently attractive, and we can't help being gratified when it expresses itself briefly in a stolen kiss. That is precisely what one hopes from an actor who keeps a lid on the obvious while letting mystery roil under the surface -- that the ultimate objective of the thief we fear he is will be stealing kisses.