After his two decades as a major movie star, Sly Stallone is somebody we may think we know well:
Rambo. Rocky. Cobra. Bulging muscles and that great, sad, drooping eye. A resonant bass voice growling out terse threats and backing them up as $50 million worth of mayhem explodes around him. The Reagan-era outsider as action hero.
But there are other sides to the onetime Italian Stallion. He paints and writes poetry. He is as glib and polysyllabic a talker as Rocky and Rambo are terse and taciturn. And though Stallone has been one of the world’s most popular and financially successful movie stars for two decades, it’s obvious that at age 50 he’s begun to consider a fork in the road.
Offscreen, Stallone has changed this year, experiencing a new marriage (to Jennifer Flavin) and the birth of their first baby. But he also freely admits that some of his more recent movies “were not very gratifying” and “not redeeming in many ways, socially or artistically or on any level.”
If he’s merciless about his own output, he’s just as candid about the superaction genre that made his fortune: “I think we’ve become so self-conscious (about the movie audience). . . . We can’t afford to let them blink or yawn or go the restroom. But I think there’s only so much synaptic input before you overload.
“It’s like the (Roman) coliseum. OK, you fight one lion. I’ll throw ’em to five lions. Naw, I’m getting bored: I’ll throw ’em to five lions and seven bears! And 50 Christians! You know: Just keep upping the ante, until nothing impresses any more.
“It’s gotten so big that we’ve become intolerant. We’ve lost the human touch.”
That lost human touch is exactly what Stallone was seeking in his latest film, “Cop Land,” opening Friday.
In the opinion of many, he’s found it. The cast of this excellent dramatic police thriller includes some of the best currently active American movie actors: two-time Oscar winner Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta, plus brilliant, edgy newcomers like Michael Rapaport, Janeane Garofalo, Peter Berg and Annabella Sciorra. Yet Stallone’s gentle, thoughtful, introverted performance dominates the whole movie by sheer contrast.
Co-workers like Robert Patrick — who plays one of “Cop Land’s” cops, Jack Rucker — admit to being “blown away” by Stallone’s acting. Liotta smiles at memories of Rapaport, a hard-core “Rocky” fan, reprising “Rocky” scenes with its original star offstage. (Rapaport took the Burgess Meredith role of trainer Mickey.)
And writer-director James Mangold insists that “casting Sly dictated . . . that we had to get amazingly powerful people. . . . You need a tremendous force around him. Because he’s got a tremendous life force (himself), and he could literally run over people.”
You can forgive critics and part of the public for being amazed at these developments. “Cop Land,” a Miramax film directed by a darling of the recent Sundance Film Festival, is the kind of picture Stallone hasn’t tried to make for nearly 20 years: inexpensive, realistic, not dependent on pyrotechnics and special effects. Stallone plays unassuming, slow-talking Freddy Heflin: overweight, deaf in one ear, seemingly incapable of guile or rancor. He is the sheriff of a small New Jersey town that is a haven for cops who work across the bridge in Manhattan.
It was a role for which Stallone was paid not his usual fee of $15 million to $20 million but actor’s scale (with profit participation). It was a role for which he gained 38 pounds on a special pancake and peanut-butter diet. And it was a role, the star admits, that he initially had to be coaxed into doing.
“It was so alien to anything I had ever done, or anything I would ever dream of doing,” he says. “I had to be pushed (by William Morris agent Arnold Rifkin and Miramax president Harvey Weinstein) to do something quite as extreme as Freddy Heflin.”
Freddy was not even the part in “Cop Land” that Stallone wanted. He would have preferred, he says, Liotta’s role: tormented and volatile ex-cop and cocaine addict Gary Figgis. (Liotta, in turn, initially coveted Stallone’s part.) But, once wooed, Stallone embraced “Cop Land” — partly, he says, because the 20th anniversary of his breakthrough movie, the first “Rocky,” had got him thinking.
“I think this year was some sort of epiphany. Perhaps it was instigated by the anniversary of “Rocky.” But I felt I had had a very varied life, but not nearly as productive as I wanted it to be.”
Varied his life has certainly been, but Stallone has always incarnated the image of the improbable American hero. The onetime Hell’s Kitchen rebel built himself up with weights after being impressed by Steve Reeves’ Italian “Hercules” movies of the early ’60s. Later he turned to acting while teaching physical education to girls at the American College of Switzerland in Leysin.
Seduced by fantasy existence
When he burst upon the movie scene in 1976, with his original script and lead performance for that year’s Oscar-winning best picture, “Rocky,” he became something more: the great American movie success story of the decade, the ultimate example of the little guy breaking through with spirit and heart.
Then things changed.
Within a decade, with the huge 1985 success of “Rambo: First Blood, Part 2” and “Rocky IV,” he had evolved into a box-office monolith, endlessly repeating the commercial formulas that made him big. For years, Stallone — along with brother-in-arms Arnold Schwarzenegger — has seemed the most egregious example of the superdominant modern superstar in the techno-crazy blockbuster era.
Stallone admits to being “seduced by the kind of fantasy existence that comes with the (superstar) territory. . . . I guess I just wanted to be not accountable to anything. I didn’t realize it at the time. I wasn’t aware of it. But now I am.”
More than other superstars, Stallone and Schwarzenegger came to symbolize the rise of a new kind of movie — empty, for the most part, of character or psychological insight, and equally empty of social insights. The budget almost always approaches or even exceeds $100 million for these movies (which are expected to recoup more than twice as much back). They are geared toward adolescent male audiences and built out of incredible displays of firepower and brutality, massive explosions, car chases and wrecks, blazing gunfights. Most important are repeated scenes in which the hero faces multiple opponents — sometimes whole armies (as in the Rambo sequels) — and manages somehow to defeat, kill or escape them all.
Some of those spectaculars (“First Blood,” “Cliffhanger”) are very good, unique in their way. And nobody needs to make constant mea culpas for entertaining hundreds of millions of people.
But now, Stallone says, things have gone too far. “There seems to be a tremendous frustration this year, this summer. We have finally taken the idea of action films to the point where it’s a complete 4th of July explosion. And, just like the fireworks, when the smoke clears, there’s nothing left.”
Success not enough
Are these the sentiments of a fading super-action star, someone who — like Burt Reynolds, Charles Bronson or even John Wayne and Clint Eastwood before him — finds himself superseded by younger actors and forced to turn in new directions?
Not completely. Despite the ebbing domestic box office and sometimes horrendous reviews of his last five pictures (“Demolition Man,” “The Specialist,” “Judge Dredd,” “Assassins” and “Daylight”), Stallone remains one of the most popular of all movie actors worldwide, capable of rallying vast audiences in many different countries. It is Stallone’s continuing foreign appeal that drives his immense box-office clout from Germany to Hong Kong to France (where, in 1992, he was awarded an honorary Cesar, or French Oscar, for career achievement).
Obviously, though, he’s discontented. This is, after all, a man who almost won two Oscars (for writing and starring in “Rocky”) at age 29 and who, since then, has become the star ignored by the Academy, the movie hero many critics love to hate.
It is the boyishness and vulnerability of Stallone’s screen image, combined with narcissism, uncertainty, sweetness, inner pain and a bit of sadism, that is a large part of what draws those massive audiences to his pictures. But that volatile mix is also what alienates the critics. These characteristics and contradictions come out especially in the movies built around his two most famous characters: Rocky Balboa, the lovable long-shot boxer from Philly, and John Rambo, the glowering, psychically scarred Vietnam War vet and killing machine.
In both these roles — created for “Rocky” and 1982’s “First Blood” — the actor, however crudely or vaingloriously in the sequels, manages to incarnate for millions the dreams and idealism, as well as the paranoia and single-mindedness, of young manhood. He also embodies the tremors and convulsions that result when those dreams collide with the absurd and terrifying world outside.
But both these characters, Stallone insists, are very far from his own personality. Or speech patterns. Or inclinations. Or temperament.
Closer to him, he insists, is another character he wrote and played in 1978, two years after “Rocky”: Cosmo Carboni in “Paradise Alley,” his directorial debut. Cosmo, one of three working-class Hell’s Kitchen brothers in the ’40s who get involved in local wrestling bouts, is everything Rocky and Rambo aren’t: fast-talking, flamboyant, pseudo-sophisticated, an aggressive street hustler with overbearing charm and a streak of recklessness.
And he was a character that audiences — and, more importantly, critics — decisively rejected.
“It had a big effect on me,” Stallone admits of the movie’s poor reception. With his cocky chutzpah and caustic sense of humor, Cosmo was, Stallone thinks, “closer to me than Rocky. When that was rejected, that sent the message: We don’t like who you are. We like who you pretend to be.”
Stallone has never returned to the exuberant mixed comic-dramatic mode and heightened realism of “Paradise Alley,” which remains, in many ways, the most interesting and promising film of his career. Now, though, he says, “I am so driven to backtrack to that kind of feeling I had in `Paradise Alley.’ I was constantly focused on the written word back then.
“I guess I became very nostalgic and really wanted to retrace what I hadn’t done in 20 years. Because those were the most interesting steps for me. . . . I guess I just wanted to take a gamble. I wanted to see if it was possible to recapture or instigate the kind of feelings that I had at one time: to see if there’s still that ability or that necessity to try to do `people’ films, the kind that I cut my teeth on.”
Looking for content
Interestingly, despite already widespread praise for Stallone in “Cop Land” (including a lengthy rave by Richard Corliss in last week’s Time), Stallone is still unsure of his acting in the picture. “I felt as though I was treading water the whole time. . . . I knew that if there was going to be any weak link in the film, it would be me.”
When he saw the movie screened the first time, “I felt I let everybody down. I was very upset. I felt that when I came on, there was a sag in the energy. It was like the tortoise and the hare.” (Of course, it was the tortoise, not the hare, who won the race.)
It’s obvious that, for all his qualms and uncertainties, “Cop Land’ is a movie that hasn’t — unlike “Judge Dredd” — left a sour taste in Sly’s mouth. He’s happy with it, stimulated enough to want to do more serious dramas in the future and even to take up screenwriting again. Stallone is working on a script based on the Turkish-Armenian holocaust of 1916, the incident described in Franz Werfel’s “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.”
“That’s the kind of subject that, two years ago, I’d never have even thought of,” he says. “I’d be thinking about: Is it commercial? Now I’m saying: Is it integral?”
And when Stallone returns to the action-movie genre, he wants something with more content, psychology and “bones” — something closer to the original “First Blood” or 1993’s “The Fugitive” — than the movies he’s been making in recent years.
“For me,” Stallone says, “the greatest action films are things like `Lawrence of Arabia,’ `The Bridge on the River Kwai’ and `The Sand Pebbles.’ I love those kinds of films.”
“Cop Land,” and his performance in it, are good enough to give Stallone that new direction — if he wants it. And we should want it for him, if only because many of us still remember how he raised our spirits 21 years ago with his crashout in “Rocky.”
It was 12 years ago, with the 1985 releases of “Rambo 2” and “Rocky IV,” that Stallone suddenly found himself on top of the world box-office heap. But he says that this last year was better.
“This has been the best year of my life so far,” he insists. “I’m really happy to get a second chance.”
Just like Rocky Balboa.
