Even though we should know better, sometimes it’s fairly easy to mistake the characters an actor plays with what he or she must be like in real life. For example, if you tried an experiment and asked a group of strangers about A-list stars, a majority would probably tell you that Tom Hanks seems like the nicest guy on the planet given his work in Forrest Gump and Big (which is why they avoided his brilliant turn as a hit-man in Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition). And in the same turn, that probably Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, and Basic Instinct star Michael Douglas seems like he’d be a tad intimidating. Sure enough, it’s this kind of thinking that spans the entire realm of all celebrities whether they’re actors, athletes or musicians whose lives are thrust in front of us in a multitude of ways, all inviting us to label them by their creative output.
Case in point: the highly verbal independent film star, Chris Eigeman a.k.a. an actor upon whom I developed quite an irrationally intellectual crush in the early '90s. Ever since I saw Chris Eigeman in Whit Stillman’s Barcelona -- dissecting the process of physical therapy and analyzing what’s really going on at the end of The Graduate — I became a fan of the actor’s uniquely neurotic delivery of dialogue. Simply put, Eigeman can make the most complicated paragraphs of scripted words sound naturally effortless.
Thus, over the years, since his scene stealing performance in Stillman’s Metropolitan, it’s no wonder that Eigeman has attracted some truly innovative writers such as Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming) and television scribes including Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls) and Peter Mehlman (It’s Like You Know). Indeed if there were ever a verbal Olympics, I’m going on record as stating that the American team should consist of Eigeman as its captain, quickly followed by Lauren Graham, Campbell Scott, Parker Posey, Matthew Perry, and Topher Grace.
And it’s precisely this type of thinking, based on the characters Eigeman has portrayed again and again, that made his much darker, far less verbal, noir-tinged feature filmmaking debut, Turn the River, remind me once again that — similar to the way you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (as then no one would read Catcher in the Rye) — you shouldn’t judge a man by how many WASPs he’s played. In a truly memorable and impressively subtle character-driven work — Eigeman’s first as a writer/director — he cast his vastly underrated Treatment co-star Famke Janssen (Goldeneye, X-Men, Made) as Kailey, a desperate New York pool hustler, eager to get together enough money to take her child away from her ex and head across the border to start a new life.
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