By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The ambiguity in the characters allows for a personized experience.

Keanu Reeves could be anything onscreen, really, around which the camera creates and recreates a story, a scene and even at times, a character.

The image of a Hollywood icon may be for this reason often more powerful than the message and the acting performance.

In the fourth installment of the franchise, The Matrix Resurrections (2021), after everyone has long retired because of deteriorating conditions of the medium, Reeves plays Thomas Anderson, a video game designer struggling with a psychotic break in which he has difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy.

Twenty plus years after the Google search engine and the first installment of the Matrix, everyone involved has a bit of conflict with the way the flesh and blood reality and the digital fantasy has merged and brought humanity along.

The pharmacology Anderson swallows each evening has a bit to do with the tint of the reality into which he awakens.

Reeves used this same ambiguity in the character Point Break (1991). Director Kathryn Bigelow casts Reeves as an undercover police officer infiltrating a California surfing community as part of an investigation into a series of bank robberies.

The film is a groundbreaking production for Bigelow, as a female filmmaker who shows a distinct voice, who also develops Reeves as a supporting character actor who distinguished his screen performance from that of the usual cast of characters available inside Hollywood.

Then, director Francis Ford Coppola cast Reeves in a supporting role in Dracula (1992), starring Gary Oldman in the title character as Dracula, and Winona Ryder as the love interest.

Reeves bends the ambiguity in his character image to the point of slavish naïve whose entire world gets consumed by the Transylvanian Count.

Reeves eventually finds box office gold in a lead role, costarring with Sandra Bulloch and Dennis Hopper in Speed (1994). Speed won Oscars, in an era before digital production technology taking hold of film production, for sound and also for sound effects.

LAPD Detective Jack Tavern must stop a mad bomber seeking to extort a cash ransom from the city. Dennis Hopper plays Howard Payne, a former police officer, having moved to the city to collect his pension bonus.

The bombing plot accelerates through a sequence of trial and error bombing attempts until an entire public bus full of civilian passengers is put in jeopardy. Director Jan de Bont creates suspense with a bomb stuck to the underside of the chassis of the bus that may or may not explode by remote control, but may just as well also explode automatically, if the bus goes below a 50 mile per hour speed on a congested Los Angeles freeway system.

Reeves and Bulloch have undeniable screen chemistry together, particularly playing characters in polar opposite to the brooding angry homicidal maniac, created by Hopper. 

This proven bankability as a lead marquee name lands Reeves roles with Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate (1997) in which Reeves plays a young naïve lawyer drawn into the nasty backroom game of lawyering.

Reeves ultimately lands the lead role in the Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003) a blockbuster performance that would define his image as well as his film career.

The trilogy with a continuous story has an ensemble cast of interesting character actors that include Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, Carie-Anne Moss as Trinity, and Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith.

Neo, played by Reeves, is recruited into the rebellion fleet of free thinking individuals fighting authoritarian conservatives in the dark web.

The police and the deep cover agent operatives personify the machines spreading hegemony across the planet, while spending a lot of resources fighting off the rebellion.

Morpheus commands the rebel fighter ship Nebuchadnezzar, directing the insurgence into the digital universe while maintaining defiant anti-authoritarian stances even within his own rebellious hierarchy. Fishburne creates the best form of leadership with Morpheus mentoring Neo until Neo can fulfil the prophecy and destroy the machines.

Reeves’ character is interesting and complicated enough to inspire many personal meanings, while also defining the truth as seen by any particular individual.

A few years later, Reeves finds himself cast as a United States military soldier returning from the war only to finds his wife not so loyal, but then, when he decides to move on, he helps out a woman pregnant out of wedlock in A Walk in the Clouds (1995).

Paul agrees to pose as Victoria’s husband when she returns to the family home, after serendipity brings the two characters together. Reeves shows the gentle compassionate side of his screen character whom no one can really dislike – a veteran still with enough compassion for humanity to help out a not so innocent woman.

This bending of the actor’s image culminates in the Matrix role where the character becomes three dimensional in a complicated plot with three parallel narratives.

The gentle side of the ambiguity allows the audience to stay attached to the character even when watching the cool decisive action of a killer.

The Matrix Trilogy is filled with violent, mixed martial art fight scenes that take up a lot of the runtime. The attachment to the screen character is maintained by an endearing layer focused on the gentle humanity everyone desires, despite the authoritarian-defiant nature of the action.

Before discovering Shakespeare, Reeves’ preoccupation with the Bruce Lee double feature, instead of doing homework as a young teenager, provides a useful backdrop to the jujitsu like moves required of Neo in the Matrix.

An added layer of complexity occurs as the film merges the science fiction genre, with romance, horror and high tech at a time when the e-universe and the Internet had just begun to aggressively compete for an audience – including a dark web filled with privacy violations and morality crimes.

The franchise though is not didactic with a message for Internet users as much as a transcendental attempt to make a statement about the new struggle humanity faces.

Reeves pulls in viewers endeared to him to question outcomes without telling them how to think and what to decide.

This screen character welcomes the escapism of movies and digital entertainment by inviting all of humanity to simultaneously attach itself, recreate and progress.

The Matrix has all the intrigue and complicated plot twists of a Shakespearian-esc drama, presenting as a digital opera with an updated version of the internal personal struggles, military battles and the complicated clashes of humanity of the 21^st Century e-universe.

An early infatuation with Shakespeare gets the better of Reeves as he simultaneously presents as a compassionate love interest and as an efficient, prolific assassin.

This double entendre of the screen character continually shifts back and forth, throughout Reeves’ film career, as an ambiguity that morphs from the blockbuster action hero to the romantic love interest of mainstream media to the tidy professional.

This definition finds meaning on the outskirts of society in the authentic portrayal of fragmented marginalized individuals, such as in the role of the gay street hustler in My Own Private Idaho (1991). Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meet Mike and Scott.

River Phoenix costars in a gritty portrayal of gay prostitutes learning to survive on the streets of Portland, Oregon. Director Gus Van Sant produces this independent film production that becomes a bit of a cult favorite in that the film projects a sympathetic portrait of the marginalized.

Mike and Scott find themselves hustling in Rome, Italy. But everything comes to an end, when Scott, played by Reeves, finds true love and marries his love interest, leaving Mike without emotional support in a dangerous lifestyle.

All the more impressive is the ability to cash in on the double entendre within the same production cycle. Reeves us cast as Scott in My Own Private Idaho, at the same time appearing as Johnny in Point Break, and then as Jonathan in Dracula.

Keanu Reeves: An Excellent Adventure, by Brian J. Robb, London, Plexus, 2003.

Matrix Warrior: Being the One, by Jake Horsley, New York, Thomas Dunne Books, 2003.

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The tough side on either the good side or the bad side gets melded with an idea for screen performances.

Benicio del Toro has the film craft fine tuned to an art form, with this character being good, but having all his mental energies, if necessary, focused on a motivating singularity.

The screen character can also be bad, with all the moral turpitude of a homicidal sociopath fighting something more evil than himself.

When the James Bond franchise cast Benicio, he was perfect in the brief role given him at the age of 21 in Licence to Kill (1989).

Much later, at the height of his career, Benicio creates a sublime performance as Marxist Revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, in Che (2008). The quiet resolve of the Argentinian doctor to lead the people of Latin America out of an era of state exploitation was for the betterment of humanity.

Director Steven Soderbergh gets a complete performance out of Benicio in a slow grinding telling of the guerilla leader who joined Fidel Castro in overthrowing the corrupt Cuban regime.

The narrative follows Che through the South American jungles as he branches off from Castro after the Cuban Revolution to spread the guerrilla war against other corrupt South American governments.

This complex leading character appears in juxtaposition to the supporting roles when the singularity of an idea creates a complete personality.

Soderbergh directs a dramatization of events that teeters toward the documentary genre. Benicio provides a stirring portrait of the guerilla leader while Soderbergh inserts into the linear narrative black and white psychotropic flashes of Che appearing at public events and speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of the Cuban Revolution.

The end film product is a lot of gritty realism through the telling of what was required to be a revolutionary incrementally advancing through the jungle until reaching the cities.

Benicio provides quite a different performance as a recovering drug addict that cannot quite stay clean and sober in Things We Lost in the Fire (2007).

Halle Berry and David Duchovny co-star as a happily married couple with two children who eventually suffer tragic loss. Brian Burke befriends Jerry, a former lawyer who cannot seem to clean up and straighten out.

Benicio maintains his internally transformed screen character but he also adopts a very singular focus on an idea or an object that accents many of his film roles. Jerry has been modified by the drugs to the point of being controlled by them.

The eccentricity of the character explains the decline from a life as a lawyer grazing from cocaine to rock to something harder. The uniqueness of the performance remains evident even through more normalized scenes when Jerry has episodes of sobriety.

The complexity of this screen character is shown as a lawyer who has become lost viewing reality through the veil created by psychedelic drug use.

Johnny Depp co-stars as Raoul Duke, a gonzo journalist following story leads during an extended hippy era that is accented by drug and alcohol experimentation in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Duke and Dr Gonzo go on a road trip to Vegas and encounter various drug induced issues between them and the hotel, and between each other.

Johnny and Benicio show how the characters struggle with the need that arises, from time to time, to reconcile with who they really are in between psychotropic experiences. Duke must eventually write the story he is meant to as a gonzo journalist. And Dr. Gonzo must spontaneously provide sober legal advice to his associate with whom he is sharing a hotel room and a big cache of illicit drugs.

The film, directed by Terry Gilliam, dramatizes the generational novel, of the same name, written by Hunter S Thompson, that defined the era of “Gonzo” journalism in 1972.

In the Fan (1996), Juan Primo is a franchise player with the San Francisco Giants. Benicio again shows a singular focus, this time as an iconic baseball player with the fan support and a multi-million dollar paycheck.

That internalized screen character is suddenly one of the greatest young hitters in Major League Baseball.

This singularity of purpose shapes a character shattered into a fragment by the cross border drug wars.  In Sicario (2015), Benicio plays a member of a deep cover drug enforcement unit that breaks a lot of rules to get the law and order agenda completed.

Alejandro’s hatred for the chaos and corruption created by the drug cartels drives his character so much that the first film advances to a second film. In the sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018), the assassin becomes all the more determined.

The character stream often has a more complex conventional background whose journey has taken the personality into the darker sides of life. The doctor becomes a revolutionary. The lawyer becomes enveloped inside psychedelic experiences.  The professional baseball player finally loses out to the petty jealousies of teammates.

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), Benicio gets cast for the reversal scenes as a shady code breaker when the official ‘greatest codebreaker’ cannot be retained for an important mission to disengage a device used to track the rebel fleet.

DJ has unmatched skill in opening locked jail cells and locked electronic doors to a secret instrument panel. This personality with a valuable steely focus also has a hidden background personality that ultimately reverses the course of the film’s interstellar journey.

A perfect internal character provides the foundation for unique screen performances. This complete person becomes fragmented into eccentric personalities that are shaped by the environment and also by exposure to the various moral vices and virtues within that environment.

The focus might be on an object as simple as a baseball or on an idea as complex as a Marxist guerrilla revolution. Benicio nevertheless provides the unique performances for each script that compels the narrative forward from scene to scene.

DETROIT AIN’T KENTUCKY AND PARIS FRANCE AIN’T HOLLYWOOD BEL AIR 

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Henry Fonda personified the good American after working all four corners of the stage and screen.

Fonda played American like no actor before and no actor after him from the young President Abraham Lincoln in the Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) to the aging retiree of America’s Greatest Generation in On Golden Pond (1981).

After a long, brilliant career, Fonda received the Honorary Oscar Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1981, and then his first Best Actor Award in 1982 before disappearing from the world stage, except in DVD and streaming replays, on August 12, 1982.

When Henry’s daughter, Jane, began to appear on the stage there was not much space her father had not already occupied. The challenge for the young actress to overcome her father’s iconic stature in global cinema was substantial.

Jane Fonda did find an unoccupied space in Paris, France, and after a few films settled in with the French cinematic world for an active decade of performances and celebrity appearances.

Still though, besides the desperate need to escape from the long shadow cast by her talented father, if Jane’s career wasn’t compared to the acting career of her father, Henry, in America, she was referred to Bridgette Bardot in France.

Jane was from the era of sexual liberation, and ever more gender emancipation, but she shied away from being compared to the international sex symbol from the French film industry.

Henry was from the Golden Age of Hollywood, appearing in such films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Mister Roberts (1955) and The Longest Day (1962).

Jane was moving on by the end of the first decade in cinema, emerging from the cultural revolution as an icon for a generation that had broken free of their parents’ conservative cookie cutter nuclear family social structure and conservative minded expectations.

In The Chase (1966) Jane is cast in a supporting role as part of a back story that gradually merges with the main narrative that is compelled forward by the leading character, played by Marlon Brando. Brando had been considered by many in the film industry and the actors guild as the greatest American actor, although he received many unfavourable critical reviews.

The film featured what would prove to be a slate of the next generation of A-Listed Hollywood actors.

Fonda becomes incrementally more prominent in the film as does Robert Redford, while Brando’s character literally takes a beating as if director Arthur Penn is ushering in a new generation. Robert Duvall has a supporting role in the backstory.

Penn would go on to cast Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the culturally successful film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The anti-authoritarian tone of the biopic gangsters resonated around the world with the very same global audience that was rebelling against their parents like no other generation before them.

Redford would find feature film success again opposite Fonda in Barefoot in the Park (1967) before emerging at the front of the casting line on the marque with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

Duvalle played a supporting role as Boo in the Gregory Peck film, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). And then Duvalle went on to have significant supporting roles as uniquely composed characters, including in the Godfather (1972) as Tom Hagen and in Apocalypse Now (1979) as Col. Kilgore.

In They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1969) Jane plays opposite her brother, Peter, and earns an Oscar nomination for her performance as one of many Americans so struggling financially that her character tries to get ahead by winning the cash prize of a dance marathon.

Jane still could not find her own footing. So, as the decade came to a close with America’s identity faltering around the world, the actor who has been looking inside herself to find her characters, decided to look outside herself in the real world to find personal inner definition.

That her father, Henry, took a role as a sinister gunslinger in the Sergio Leone’s film, Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), kind of fit as Jane gained greater perspective of the image of a nation that was becoming less flattering on the international stage and even less so at home.

This ruthless wild west killer, Frank, is binary opposite to the thoughtful juror in 12 Angry Men (1957). America never had so much integrity than when Henry Fonda played Juror No 8 and turned the minds of an angry jury to save the life of the falsely accused.

The Fondas and America would again move together on the world stage, but this time, with the next generation, in binary opposite to the nation’s traditionally accepted modus operandi.

A defiant waive of resentment within America had captured the nation’s attention, with protest just shy of rebellion in the streets rising up in opposition to the American military involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia in Southeast Asia.

And civil rights was on the agenda with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and the rising black power movement in the Inner Cities.

The first few steps onto the real world political platforms of activists were about as surreal as Jane’s character in the futuristic film Barbarella (1968). Director Roger Vadim animates with comic book caricature the street fight spreading around the world that was simultaneously challenging sexual barriers, gender inequality, racial bigotry and military involvement in foreign wars.

The wrestles tomboy, who grew up with a world famous actor who often worked away from home on film shoots, stepped away from dramatizations and into a special real world zone of political activism.

America’s illegal exploitation of native American land grants was a parallel narrative to the plight of Vietnam War veterans involved in the GI movement and the fight for civil rights by Black Americans.

In Klute (1971) a missing person investigation by private detective John Klute, played by Donald Sutherland, leads to Jane’s first Oscar win. Jane Fonda plays a New York call girl, after having embarked on the method acting process of interviewing and spending time with real life call girls.

Jane explores on film the emotional and intellectual composition of the character in detail, as John Klute and Bree Daniels become entangled in a personal relationship during the investigation. Fonda received her first of two Oscars for the film role.

But it would be Jane’s investigation of America’s image, which transcended her film career for the next two decades, that would forever brand her unique legacy as a great American icon.

Fonda joined sit-ins with Native American protests, such as at the Paiute Reservation in Nevada, where the government had begun a water diversion project that took water out of the reservation for use elsewhere by non-natives.

Jane was eventually arrested for trespassing on an army base in support of the GI Movement that was protesting the American Military involvement in the Vietnam War.

Fundraising among her network for the Black Panthers didn’t help her profile that was being compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Jane at times became her father’s screen characters in real life vignettes.

After a few years of political activism, in Julia (1977) Jane shows how she incrementally became a political activist. Julia is approached by an acquaintance to move money from Paris to Berlin for the Jewish underground in Nazi Germany. Initially, Julia has not put any thought into participation in the underground, but by the time she delivers her package, she has become entirely immersed in the cause.

And then in Coming Home (1978) Jane Fonda costars with Jon Voight, as a volunteer at a Veterans Affairs Hospital rehabilitating severely disabled veterans who had returned from the Vietnam War, all broken up inside and out.

Sally volunteers after her husband, Captain Bob Hyde, played by Bruce Dern, ships off for a tour of duty in Vietnam. Luke is transitioning, while inside the VA hospital, back to the world he left behind to become a soldier.

Jane Fonda won a second Oscar for her performance that brought attention to the poor conditions of the hospitals and the neglect of the veterans. The film was a direct challenge to the image of America at home and on the global stage by focussing attention on the brutality of the war and the horrible treatment of returning soldiers by the American people.

Jane’s character’s incremental attachment to a veteran in the hospital turns to love serendipitously as Jon Voight’s character takes up political activism, once he was well enough to leave the hospital and after a fellow VA patient commits suicide inside the hospital’s pharmacy.

Sally gets emotionally attached to the idea of defiance, which ultimately affects her demeanor and irrevocably changes her inner character by the time her husband returns from the war.

Dern shows how the soldier has become deconstructed by the war, physically and emotionally, while Luke channels his activism into public service by speaking to young soldiers and potential recruits

Home Coming won three Oscars in total. One more for Voight and one more for Best Writing.

In China Syndrome (1979) the nuclear power industry becomes an environmental sidebar to the tumultuous decade of political activism in America after the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island Nuclear plant in Pennsylvania that same year as the film’s theatrical release.

The theme underscores the plight of the whistle blowers as Americans begin to question the good will of unbridled capitalists. 

Jane plays investigative television reporter, Kimberly Wells, costarring, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon. Jane received another Oscar nomination for the role, as the film, produced by Michael Douglas, received four nominations in total.

Just when Jane had defined herself and created space between her acting art and the acting art of her father, she confronts the inevitability of comparison in On Golden Pond (1981) where she plays a supporting role to her father.

Henry Fonda plays Norman, with Jane Fonda playing his daughter, Chelsea, who comes to the family’s lakeside retreat to visit for Norman’s birthday. Norman is a retired college professor whose mental faculties have begun to faulter, and the once strong character personifying academia becomes a vulnerable member of the country’s retiring generation.

The film won three Oscars, one for Katharine Hepburn for her role as Norman’s supportive spouse, and one for Henry Fonda for his leading role as a faltering personality. On Golden Pond also won an Oscar for Best Writing by Ernest Thompson.

Everything should logically come to a conclusion now, with the iconic lives and screen personalities of Henry, as father, and Jane, as daughter, finally merging on screen with the greatest of success and international acclaim.

The acting art of Henry Fonda helped define Americana as the America everyone else wanted around the world. Juror No 8 had the greatest of integrity in his relentless pursuit of the truth and justice inside the jury room.

In a way, Jane’s activism defends this image of the Fondas being integral to the American way of life by challenging unjust deviations from what America had become respected for.

Not content to live inside her father’s shadow, Jane Fonda moved forward into the gritty gorilla war transpiring inside the homeland to re-revolutionize politics.

In Comes a Horseman (1978), Jane reconciles her past with her present by playing a lonesome ranch owner. James Caan plays a competing neighbour who comes to the realization that him and Ella will not survive another year on their own on their respective ranches.

Director Allan J. Pakula brings the two characters together, as a bigger brand than they would have been as individuals, to fight the ruthless land holder, Ewing, played by Jason Robards. Jane creates the character of a down to earth generational ranch owner who personifies the struggle between the family rancher and the independent farmer against corporate America and the oil companies.

Henry Fonda had become a cinematic institution who had created a screen character with unwavering integrity, especially after growing up in the nation’s heartland, Omaha, Nebraska, where the myth of rural purity drove the day as much as the Ford Motor Company.

For a time, especially as a child, Jane had become a tourist of the American history that her father had helped define, often finding the most joyous moments when her father, the personification of Americana, would come home from a film shoot, after a long absence, and take her swimming at a public swimming pool.

As Henry’s acting legacy grew, so did America. The great life came to an end with an Oscar worthy acting performance.

This cache helped Jane for a while as she developed her own rapport with the public. But when Henry’s final act came to an end, Jane would continue on with her political activism for another decade, and still continues her acting career during her final act, just as her father did.

Jane had come to realize that the real America existed underneath more than a few surface layers.

In all respects, Jane is Jane Fonda, known in her own right, and not simply as her father’s daughter.

Jane had to work hard for this self definition and independence, but she has become more clearly defined as a result of this on-screen and off-screen struggle for individualism.

For Jane, this struggle required immense personal courage and, as a result, simultaneously defined her, while also setting her free.

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