So I finally got around to catching JCVD last week. It’s a good film with moments of greatness but what impressed me most was just how stupendously, gloriously, exquisitely old Jean Claude Van Damme allowed himself to look. He didn’t just look old; he looked haggard, wizened, beaten-down, exhausted, like nine miles of bad road leading to nine more miles of bad road.
It reminded me a little of The Wrestler, where so much of the drama and pathos and tragedy of the lead character is sketched into the lines on Mickey Rourke’s face. In their comeback roles in The Wrestler and JCVD Rourke and Van Damme wear their scars on the outside. Van Damme and Rourke both deliver performances that benefit tremendously from the iconic baggage the stars bring to them, especially since in their younger days Van Damme and Rourke weren’t just handsome: they were downright pretty.
Time has been both cruel and kind to Rourke and Van Damme. It has robbed them of their beauty and youth but blessed them with faces with character, faces that tell stories, faces that betray a lifetime of hard-living, self-hatred and bad choices. I turn 33 this month. It is not a young thirty-three. I’m bald. There’s voluminous grey in my beard. When liquor store clerks or bouncers ask me for I.D these days they’re being polite or perverse. Like Van Damme and Rourke, I wear my scars on the outside.
As I get older I increasingly find actors willing to look much worse than their age borderline heroic. This is not to be confused with the perverse reverse-vanity of slumming Hollywood stars in miserablist Sundance dramas.
When Charlize Theron uglies up and squeezes into shapeless K-Mart garb in Sleepwalking or Monster it’s a matter of sacrificing her beauty to the great god of Acting and Authenticity. It's about proving how bad she can look, not revealing herself. Theron is losing her glamorous self inside these wretched creatures whereas Van Damme and Rourke feel like they’re exposing some sad secret side of themselves to the world. In an existential sense they’re playing themselves; Van Damme quasi-literally and Rourke metaphorically.
In this respect these performances echo Bill Murray’s late period turns in Lost In Translation and Broken Flowers. Unlike Rourke and Van Damme, Murray was never a pretty boy but he did manage to retain a youthful spark long after his skin started to sag and his hairline started to recede. I could stare all day at Murray’s ravaged visage in Broken Flowers. He confronts the camera without vanity, without narcissism, with a look that says, “This is who I am.”
The irony of course is that Van Damme and Rourke have such strikingly weathered, unique, old faces today in part because they seem to have had botched cosmetic surgery somewhere down the road. In trying to reverse the aging process they seem to have only accelerated it in strange and wonderful ways.
There is a wonderful Matthew Sweet song called “Get Older” whose title is half-command, half-suggestion. Well, JCVD, Mickey Rourke and Bill Murray all have the courage to get older in public, to expose their wrinkles and blemishes and toupees and sagging skin and pockmarks instead of hiding behind make-up and Botox and Barbra Streisand Vaseline-smeared filters. Nothing would make me happier than if other actors and actresses followed suit. Get older. Wear your years proudly. Kiss the callowness of youth goodbye. You might make us old fogies in the audience feel just a little bit better about our own inevitable march to the grave.