Michael Keaton is the most mercurial of screen performers – that’s why, 40 years on, he’s so in demand
The actor is back on screen this week, albeit very briefly, as the Vulture in ‘Morbius’, having just played an opioid-addicted doctor in ‘Dopesick’. Geoffrey Macnab looks at what makes him so versatile and compelling to watch
Starring Michael Keaton, Michael Keaton, Michael Keaton and Michael Keaton,” trumpets the marketing for Harold Ramis’s 1996 comedy, Multiplicity. It’s a bravura performance, or series of performances, from the star and one that demonstrates why, more than 40 years after his big screen debut, Keaton remains so heavily in demand.
In Ealing comedy classic Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Alec Guinness famously took on nine different roles. In Multiplicity, Keaton plays the same character in multiple different ways. He is cast as Doug Kinney, an overworked construction administrator and family man whose life is spiralling out of control. Doug has no time for his wife and kids. A geneticist offers to solve his work/life balance problems by cloning him. We therefore get to see several variations on the same personality – the alpha male macho Doug, the shy, sensitive, good in the kitchen version and a drooling, dim-witted second-generation clone that has a far lower IQ than the other models.
As Multiplicity underlines, Keaton is the most mercurial of screen performers. He can turn on a dime, switching moods and personality, playing exuberant and abrasive characters one moment and very downtrodden and introspective ones the next.
In recent weeks, Keaton has again been on shape-shifting manoeuvres. He is back in cinemas in a high-impact cameo as Adrian Toomes/Vulture in new superhero movie Morbius. This is the star in pantomime villain mode reprising his Spider-Man: Homecoming role. He is a snarling, malevolent, criminal lowlife, so self-evidently evil that you half expect little flags to pop up encouraging the audience to boo for the very short period he is actually on screen. (It’s strongly hinted, though, that he will feature more prominently next time Morbius surfaces.)
It’s a very long way from the world of Marvel Comics characters to Keaton’s recent TV series Dopesick, for which he won a Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG) award last month. Keaton plays Samuel Finnix, a doctor in a Virginia mining town. In the early episodes, he comes across as the perfect community GP. Finnix knows his patients and their families. He is their counsellor as well as their best source of medical advice. However, when he starts prescribing them a new “miracle” painkiller called OxyContin, the consequences are disastrous. Along with many of his patients, he becomes hooked to the drug himself.
What most impresses about Keaton in Dopesick is his everyman quality. He is like one of James Stewart’s folksy, provincial characters in old Frank Capra movies about corruption in Washington DC. It’s painful to see this modest, self-effacing man caught in the grip of a destructive addiction after a lifetime spent trying to help others avoid pain. It’s an unusually downbeat role, one that Keaton said he took in tribute to his nephew whom he “lost to drugs” (as he put it in his SAG acceptance speech). He excels in a role that gives him no comic opportunities whatsoever.
You generally expect laughs from Keaton but there are a few other similarly downbeat films in which he is in the same dogged, naturalistic groove. Look at him, for example, as Walter “Robby” Robinson, the newspaper man leading a team of investigative reporters in Spotlight (2015), Thomas McCarthy’s Oscar-winning film about Boston journalists exposing abuses in the Catholic Church. He wears chinos and impeccably ironed shirts. If you didn’t know better, you might think he was an accountant or office manager. Like many of the actor’s most memorable screen characters, he is also competitive and very tenacious. “I want to keep digging,” he tells his team. Nothing will put him off the scent.
Spotlight followed on from an equally significant but wildly different Keaton movie, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014), also a multiple Oscar winner.
It was as if the actor had taken on the two projects back to back to remind audiences that he was still in the game. A decade ago, viewers and casting directors had been beginning to write him off. Mention his name during this period and fans would immediately look back to his glory days in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Batman films. Nothing he was doing was stretching him or exciting fans. He was starring in run-of-the-mill romcoms and action movies. It was a measure of how deeply his popularity had waned that his most successful movie of the period was an animated feature, Pixar’s Cars (2006), in which he voiced Chick Hicks, a gaudy green stock car that always finished runner-up to Lightning McQueen.
Keaton’s faded, shop-worn quality made him the ideal choice for Birdman. If he had still been on a run of hit movies, it’s unlikely that Iñárritu would have turned to him. The years of (relative) failure gave him extras depths and emotional mileage. His character in Birdman, Riggan Thomas, is a once big-name action star now grasping after artistic respectability by staging a very pretentious Broadway play. He has a terrible relationship with his daughter (Emma Stone), a recovering drug addict, and he seems to be having a nervous breakdown.
Iñárritu harnessed qualities that had only previously been seen in separate Keaton movies. On the one hand, the Mexican director allowed the actor to show the livewire energy associated with his Tim Burton movies. On the other, Iñárritu gave Keaton the chance to engage again with his inner schmuck. One scene in particular stays in the mind – Keaton running through Times Square in his underwear. It’s a moment of symbolic comic humiliation in which the actor, locked out of the theatre, is witnessed not just by extras but by real-life tourists. This was Hollywood’s answer to the hazing rituals that college students are put through in movies like Animal House.
Keaton enjoys playing the clown and is brilliant at improvised comedy. You can find old YouTube footage of him in the early 1980s, appearing on the David Letterman chat show, walking onto the stage on his hands. In those days, he was seen as an abrasive new stand-up comic, always ready to roll with the punches.
He had co-starred with Henry Winkler (The Fonz from TV’s Happy Days) in Ron Howard’s comedy, Night Shift (1982). They play morgue attendants who moonlight as pimps, running a prostitution ring from their workplace. Whenever Keaton’s character, Bill Blazejowski, comes on screen, he’s singing lines from the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” to himself or recording his latest brainwaves on his Walkman recorder. He’s hyperactive and very funny. Winkler is his straight man, dry and understated.
Few would have guessed then that this energetic young goofball would go on to become such an accomplished character actor. In his early roles, Keaton was all relentless, manic energy – and yet one of his main passions outside acting is fly fishing. It’s an incongruous image – the demonic people exterminator Beetlejuice standing languidly by the river’s edge, casting his line, trying to catch a trout.
“I would tell friends of mine and they would laugh. They just didn’t know what I was talking about or they would think I was being funny,” the actor told fly fishing website Midcurrent of his unlikely passion for angling. “If they had any knowledge of it, they assumed that, given my personality, I was joking, that that was obviously not the thing I would do. What I don’t think they got – now people kind of get it – is it’s the one place you can drift off but at the same time be totally locked in.”
On screen, Keaton never drifts off. He is always “on”. It was revealing to watch him in The Founder (2016), John Lee Hancock’s biopic of Ray Kroc, the American businessman/travelling salesman who turned McDonald’s fast food restaurants into a global brand – but squeezed out their soul and their standards in the process. Keaton (born in 1951) was in his mid-sixties when he played the role but he was still acting in the same reckless, high-adrenaline fashion as at the start of his career.
The film opens with Keaton in huge close-up speaking directly to camera, giving his sales spiel. It’s uncomfortable to watch. He is creepy and relentless. “You increase the supply and the demand will follow,” he repeats his favourite nostrum several times, speeding up his words. When the camera finally pulls back, we realise that he is in a very modest diner and that its elderly owner is brushing him off. He can’t make any sales. Keaton captures the salesman’s aggressive ambition while also making him a figure of pathos. There are few other actors in contemporary Hollywood who can cover both those bases so effectively. That’s why, after more than 40 years as a star, he is still playing both everyman heroes and Marvel villains. He may now be in his seventies but no one has even thought of casting him yet as an old man.
‘Dopesick’ is available on Disney Plus. ‘Morbius’ is in cinemas now
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