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Joaquin Phoenix The first time I set eyes on Joaquin Phoenix was back in 1997 in The Mint, a seedily kitsch Los Angeles cabaret bar — a hit at the time with the young Hollywood pack on account of Harry Dean Stanton doing a lounge-lizard turn behind the mike. I noticed his friends first — Stephen Dorff and Liv Tyler, Joaquin's then girlfriend. Stephen was acting the goat, dancing with the waitresses. Liv was looking so damned beautiful it was as if there was a spotlight shining especially on her. By comparison, Joaquin seemed kind of quiet and kind of badly dressed, with rumpled hair; but he was holding Liv so passionately that anyone looking at the group that night really wouldn't have been able to take their eyes off him. It was just a moment but I think of it when I see Joaquin on screen. Like the rest of the cinema-going world, I watched Gladiator to see the tigers and Russell Crowe in a skirt. I went home thinking about Joaquin as Commodus, the smoldering evil baby emperor who had skin like dusty lard and gave me goose bumps just looking at him. May 2000. Joaquin Phoenix is in Cannes to promote The Yards. A dark, painterly film co-starring Mark Wahlberg, James Caan and Faye Dunaway, the Yards is about subway trains, families and corruption (think On The Waterfront set in the subway). Joaquin's performance as Willie Gutierrez, a slickly pompadours Latino wide boy (he put on 15lb and dyed his hair soot black for the part) is so brilliant, so tasty, that you want to lick it right off the screen. The Yards will establish Joaquin Phoenix as a leading man. However, today in Cannes, Joaquin is in shy, rumpled mode. He mutters about getting so obsessed with his role that friends walked out of his life for a while. When Willie was required to express tortured emotion, "I hit my head against a wall to feel it." Joaquin regards his work in The Yards as a career best, but with typical self-deprecation he is adamant that Mark Wahlberg (as ex-con Leo) gives the performance of the movie. "He is a genius," he says warmly. The pair have remained friends. "I know this sounds dramatic, but when you go through months of working together under odd circumstances, you build a bond that's like during war. Well maybe not war," he laughs, "but basic military training. When I'm done with a movie, I want to walk away and not have anything to do with it for a while. So it's always an odd thing, the friendships you make." Joaquin Phoenix was born in Puerto Rico on October 28, 1974, the middle of five children (River, Rain, Joaquin, Liberty and Summer). They spent their early years travelling thorough Mexico, Puerto Rico and Venuezuela with their hippie parents, John and Arlyn, who worked as missionaries for the Children of God religious group. In 1977, when it became clear that there was something profoundly wrong at the heart of the 'church' (sexual initiation...we could go on), John and Arlyn got themselves and the children the hell out of it, leaving South America and settling initially in Florida before moving to Los Angeles. The oldest Phoenix children, River and Rain, had already worked as street performers in South America. But in 1982, River won a regular role in a US TV show, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Joaquin soon started appearing in it, too, going by the name of Leaf (he changed back to Joaquin at 15, after discovering that 'leaf' was too close to 'garlic' in Spanish). In 1989, he landed a role in Parenthood (directed by Ron Howard) as a lost kid, wandering through the story with a paper bag full of porno movies, He says the experience "ruined me" because it was so good, and for the next six years he turned down every scrip he read. Instead, he took a break. He spent time with his dad. He went to Mexico. He lost his virginity. In short, he grew up. It was during this hiatus, on October 31 1993, that something terrible happened to the Phoenix family. Joaquin's brother River, the beautiful, celebrated actor, died outside the Viper Room (Johnny Depp's club in Hollywood) after overdosing on heroin and cocaine. Joaquin was with his brother that night and the anguished 911 emergency call he made while River lay dying on the sidewalk was subsequently broadcast across the US media. Today, it's hard to say whether Joaquin has forgiven this callousness, or even begun to come to terms with the obsession that surrounds his brother's death. "I don't really care about anyone else's...everybody can, they can do what they want. I can't control it," he says quietly, "so fuck 'em." A year before River died, "on the tail end of my 18th year," Joaquin started going to New York to do auditions: "I just wanted to get over all the anxiety that goes with auditioning." Then one script came along that his agent was very keen for him to read: To Die For. He was cast by Gus Van Sant despite studio opposition. "They wanted to know why Nicole Kidman would have Matt Dillon killed so she could be with me," he laughs. Today it's impossible to image which other 20-year-old could have played the dirty, sexually brooding, white-trash Jimmy Emmett. "It was, like, 'Whoa, this is what I've been missing these last few years'." After To Die For, Joaquin made Inventing the Abbotts, where he met and fell in love with Liv Tyler (they were involved for nearly three years). Then, just as one century flipped over to the next, Joaquin made the three films that are taking his career to another level: The Yards, Quills (a dark historical satire about the Marquis de Sade) and, of course, Ridley Scott's Gladiator. The genius of Joaquin's performance in Gladiator hardly needs replaying here. The scene where Commodus lies down on his sister (Connie Nielsen) to kiss (rape? crush?) her. Here's a cinematic moment as charged, repellent, sexual and magnetic as Sigourney Weaver and the alien coming face to sweating face in Scott's movie Alien. Joaquin wanted the kiss not to be about sex, but "trying to capture that sense of contentment one feels as a child. I'm always trying to find out what's more interesting," he says, "not just doing the clichéd thing." Explorations of incest aside, he was initially terrified of Gladiator — when he saw the scale of the sets, the size of the crew he thought, "what the fuck am I doing here?" It was Russell Crowe who rescued him. "He was like a big brother to me — very generous, always throwing parties, taking people out on boats. It was wild." Another Joaquin story: It's the Victoria's Secret party at Cannes. I'm watching the celebrities sashay in when I spot Joaquin, head down, wearing a stiff-looking suit and doing an awkward, half-running walk. When the loitering guests take their seats for the runway show, Stephen Dorff leans forward and tries to shoot meaningful glances at his buddy, sitting a few seats from him in the front row, but Joaquin doesn't see. He's staring straight ahead, like an uncomfortable kid at church, his eyebrows like thunder. And when the girls start galloping down the catwalk in angel wings and sequined bras, Joaquin stands bolt upright and leaves. "Oh you saw me," groans Joaquin. (A few more months have passed. Joaquin is in New York now, and we're talking on the phone.) "It's just not my cup of tea. I don't really like to stare at girls' bodies. It's just not my thing. There were men there, like dribbling, and it bothered me, so I left. I'm an idiot; I didn't know that Victoria's Secret was lingerie. Everybody else was like, 'what else did you think it was, dickhead?' I went outside and had a cigarette." This is what Joaquin is like when he's relaxed. Yes, he is famously principled (as a vegan he refused to model leather shoes when he did a spot of mannequin work for Prada), but he's pretty funny about it, too. Maybe it's because his childhood had funny, crazy elements, or maybe it's because he lost his brother in such awful circumstances, but there's a tendency for stories about Joaquin Phoenix to paint a picture of an intense, fragile nut. Given everything he's been through, I'd say there's something refreshingly unaffected about him. He rents an apartment in New York, in the same building as his beloved director Gus Van Sant, and his best friend and To Die For colleague, Casey Affleck (brother of Ben). His sister Summer (21), also an actor, has moved into the building, too. Between jobs, Joaquin reads scripts, listens to John Lennon or Marvin Gaye and has recently fallen in love with e-mail. "Right now, everyone's kinda spread out. Rain has a place in Los Angeles, my mum, [now divorced from Joaquin's dad] is doing work in the northeast, and we're all e-mailing each other. My dad and I are just going crazy writing back and forth." I suspect Joaquin adores e-mail because he loves his family so. He's chest-burstingly proud of his sisters. Liberty, who's 24, is bringing up her baby, Rio (which was River's nickname). Summer's performance in Esther Kahn was also celebrated in Cannes, and Joaquin's elder sister Rain is in O, Tim Blake Nelson's reworking of Othello. I ask Joaquin what's more important than acting? "It's clichéd, but my family, my love, my sanity and happiness and my family's happiness." Is he in love at the moment? "I'm meditating. Uhmmmm. Ohmmmm. I'm meditating on love, yep." Joaquin is making me laugh and I tell him how it's sad that we haven't seen his funny flipside on screen. "It seems I have to choose between dark films with some social relevance or a goofy popcorn piece of shit. I'm always looking for a fantastic slapstick comedy. Most of what we call comedy in America is just ridiculous. I'd love to work with my sisters and with Casey Affleck again, and all my friends. There are so many people..." It is time to go, and as we say goodbye, I give myself a little pinch. Joaquin Phoenix may have lived a lot of life already, but the story of his brilliant career has only just begun. Thanks to Jule for supplying the missing piece of this article. |