he following comes from my friend Julie in Los Angeles, who is hanging out with a mutual good friend of ours named Bryan, the significance of which is that she talks about him in this question oh well, you'll see:
"I liked Ethan Hawke in 'Training Day'. So did Bryan. In fact, we talked about this last night and how we thought his 'soul patch* dating Uma being a cool Austin boy' phase gave him a bad rap as an actor when really we both thought he was sort of astonishing in 'Dead Poets Society.'"
I too thought the young Ethan Hawke was astonishing in "Dead Poets' Society." Throwing all pretense of hipness aside I can tell you that "Dead Poets Society" holds a dear place in my heart and that every time I watch that movie, I cry. I cry especially in the Ethan-Hawke-as-adolescent-tortured-by-shyness scenes. And "Reality Bites"? Well, he's good in that movie too, although I remember kind of flinching through that film, probably more because of my proximity in age and standing (at the time) to the characters than anything else. But it's a good film. Ethan Hawke has been in some bad films, I think, but I've never seen them. Dammit, I've never seen Ethan Hawke actually give a bad performance. So why did I lose faith in Ethan? When he gets an Oscar nomination (for a movie I haven't even seen, by the way), why do I roll my eyes and chortle and nudge the person next to me and pretend as though I'm Christ on the Cross and say, "Ethan Hawke? I mean, ETHAN HAWKE??" Am I so fickle as to change my opinion of his acting abilities based on his media personality, as Julie suggests?
For me, it started with that book he wrote (The Hottest State). It was a book about my generation, probably smoking and drinking too much and wearing cowboy boots and searching for itself, and I didn't read that book either, except I heard excerpts I didn't like, that seemed straight-up embarrassing. Or maybe I didn't even hear excerpts. Maybe other people told me about the excerpts in compelling and highly opinionated ways. It's hard to remember now. Apparently he wrote more books. I didn't even keep up. And then there was the Uma thing, and the mostly unseen films and a media personality that smelled suspiciously like pretention. (As if none of my friends have ever been pretentious. As if I have never been pretentious.) But so instead of respecting him for being an actor who at least tried, who at least had some sort of a brain, I just fostered this anti-Ethan Hawke thing, out of smugness or professional jealousy or what? I don't know.
I won't go on about Ethan Hawke. I've spent many years not going on about Ethan Hawke, and I'd like to keep it that way. Except I think Julie might have a point. Maybe he IS good in "Training Day." (I wouldn't know.) And I think it's interesting, the way a bunch of nothing can accumulate to make you surly and dismissive about somebody. Whether it's a celebrity or a person in the office or your next-door neighbor or whatever. It's just a good thing to realize, isn't it?
(But also, I thought it was Hackman's Year, man. I thought he had that thing in the can.)
*I think this is some term for a goatee, although I had to actually look it up on Google, as I originally assumed it was the name of Ethan Hawke's book.