Is Mastroianni the most important actor in the history of cinema? He has certainly left the most attractive legacy. More believable than Bogart; more attractive than Brando, he has bequeathed to us the truest cinematic icon of the 20th century’s closing half: the ineffective male in all his many varieties.
No other star has been so attractive exhibiting doe-eyed inadequacy, although Cary Grant was occasionally allowed to came close. Mastroianni’s stock in trade is being overpowered and overmatched, whether as the intellectual labour organizer out of his depth in The Organizer; as Sophia Loren’s hopelessly outclassed ex-lover in Marriage, Italian Style, or in Dark Eyes, as a wastrel at the end of his life who has abandoned romance for simple inertia. What emerges from his work as a whole is Mastroianni’s closely-observed three ages of Man: as perplexed by the world, by women, and ultimately by himself.
Mastroianni is most famous in North America for two collaborations with Federico Fellini from the beginning of the 60’s: La Dolce Vita, and 8 1/2. 40 years later, both movies provide a startlingly up-to-date portrait of the man of today—or at least the way the man-of-today feels about himself. Mastroianni gives us men to whom things happen, who have lost the power to meaningfully initiate action. In 8 1/2 he is Fellini’s self-portrait: a burned-out filmmaker no longer in charge of his life or his creativity, who desires nothing more than to stay upright in hope that somehow, clarity will reassert itself.
It does not—although Fellini is more optimistic about the consequences at the close of 8 1/2 than by the denouement of La Dolce Vita, where the battle against disorientation is deemed hopeless. There, one character sums up the struggle: “We need to live in a state of suspended animation, like a work of art; in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly that we live outside time, detached.” Unfortunately, they succeed. All that’s left to do is give up on life altogether.
As intractable (if ultimately more bemusing) a struggle is the Mastroianni Man’s tortured association with women—call him the reluctant ladykiller. If he seems bewildered by women, women are certainly not bewildered by him: Matinee-idol good looks, a voice so beautiful as to make the dubbing of foreign-language films seem a crime, a sense of worldliness held in check as if by memories of pain.... What’s to resist? The Mastroianni Man can have any woman he wants—except, as it turns out, the one he loves.
Take Visconti’s White Nights—a superior weepie from the director of such light classics as The Damned and Death in Venice. This is soap-opera for guys, with Mastroianni suffering in the Jane Wyman role: Boy, out wandering the evening streets, rescues girl being harassed by bikers. He’s interested in her, but she’s preoccupied. We learn that she’s carrying a torch for Mr. Wrong—a tall, tough and handsome guy who had to go on the lam from the law but who promised to meet her on a bridge over the local canal at ten o’clock some night in the indefinite future. Every evening, she goes there. So does our boy, who gradually sways her towards himself. Then, the very night she finally falls for Mastroianni, who should show up and whisk her away? No, it’s too terrible to even contemplate....
What is surprising is how easily the second-billed Mastroianni dominates the movie, even though he’s in the passive, secondary role. Showing a kidnapper’s ability to get his captives emotionally on side, he effortlessly co-opts us into his suffering.
It is a skill he relies on, nowhere more effectively than in Il Bell’Antonio, another good, healthy measure of industrial-strength suds. (Confounded by the Catholic guilt attending every good Italian boyhood, Antonio can perform sexually only with women he doesn’t like. With the woman he loves, he is impotent. In a society that demands children, he must therefore renounce love.) Yet, with an alchemist’s expertise, Mastroianni turns this purplest of melodramas into the purest white satin.
There is technique to his alchemy as well as truth. The technique is simply the actor’s knowing exactly how to make himself look cinematically good. When he’s on, he doesn’t simply look good, he looks perfect. He is the only possible subject in the frame, and he draws your eye, no matter who’s around him. (This is an extremely useful ability in a movie like Fellini’s Ginger and Fred, where an actor could any time be upstaged by a group of singing and dancing midgets.) Your sympathy is his, and he will make you care even when you shouldn’t.
It’s an ability he found even more useful in his later career. Actors, unlike directors, must grow old, and with age it seems the Mastroianni Man gives up the fight against bewilderment. The wolf, having worn sheep’s clothing for so long, decides he likes the life, and settles in to the role of the philanderer aging gracefully. “Let me tell you a story” he says to a stranger in a restaurant in Dark Eyes. And he tells us of the time where he almost experienced the great love of his life but that somehow it slipped from his grasp.
He has a great storytelling face, and the director returns to it again and again, the face now providing the counterpoint to the matinee-idol’s skill. Suddenly we notice the truth in that face, especially at the climax of his story, when it displays a sudden self-awareness that, for reasons he still can’t fully grasp, our narrator has just lost everything of real value to him. It is the semi-perplexed look of a man realizing that he has had the best moment of his life, but he has mostly missed it. It is a look of amusement and regret, of mastery lost and not to be regained, a look of farewell.
It is the truth in that look, more than anything else, that connects him to us. It sums up a character’s life, and it sums up Marcello Mastroianni’s career. His screen life documented for us the passing of credible cinematic manliness. His face on the screen is a snapshot of ourselves.
-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1999
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