A Championship Season for Tommy Lee Jones?

Tommy Lee Jones has, to paraphrase a line from one of his characters, a lot of hard bark on him. When I first interviewed him for River Rat (that was in 1984--it almost hurts to do the math), I first called his former football coach at Harvard, who told me he knew the Texas schoolboy would be a starting guard--in fact Jones would go on the be an All-Ivy standout and play in the famous Harvard comeback against Yale in 1968--when most of the paint was chipped off his helmet's front at the end of the first practice.

Jones hates that he's gained a reputation as a difficult interview; the truth is he gives your better questions a fair shake and chips some paint off your helmet for the dumb ones. I refreshed my knowledge of this before 400-some members of the Screen Actors Guild after a screening of Paul Haggis' In the The Valley of Elah recently and ended up bleeding only slightly as Jones delighted the crowd with tales of injuries (that pained walk in Valley of Elah, more disguised in the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men, is for real--" a function of the degeneration of my lower spine; I would like everyone to believe that was a choice"--and described his Hank Deerfield character this way:

The character's cranky; that can be awkward for other people, and I think that was the intention of the writer/ director. I didn't like the character as much as Paul Haggis liked him; Haggis has more respect for him than I did, but I of course did my best to play whatever Haggis wanted to see.

Valley drew considerably less critical acclaim and was little saluted at the box office, topping out around $7 million. (No Country debuted this past weekend a remarkable per-screen average of over $40,000). Still, the New Yorker's David Denby noted Jones's "great, selfless, and heartbreaking performance that completely dominates this elusive but powerful movie... [creating] a rarity: an American film that convinces you that its protagonist is genuinely a great man." (It's interesting that the performance of Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, shot near some of the Marfa, Texas locations where No Country filmed landscapes, is being touted on the premise that the increasingly solipsistic Day Lewis is himself a great man.) The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan said, " The considerable power of the film is contained in Jones's hard-bitten, movingly understated performance."

As writer-director Paul Haggis answered my questions about the writers' strike while walking a picket line recently, I asked him about the performance Jones gives. He says the actor's noted steeliness doesn't mean he isn't communicative: "You just talk to him, like anybody else. He's a very smart man and a wonderfully intuitive actor, so if he understands what you' going for, he can give it to you. Directing him, Tommy Lee gets better with every take and he knows it -he doesn't always like that idea, but you just see it coming alive." Opposite a de-glamorized Charlize Theron, who let her hair revert to its natural shade and picked her wardrobe off the rack at Target and J.C .Penney, "The more dialog I cut away, the better the movie got."

Jones was quick to praise the relatively inexperienced actors who played the squad mates of Hank Deerfield's murdered son: "Those kids did very well--they tried very hard and they were really interested in what they were doing. Most of them were veterans of the current war, and fresh home from Iraq; some of `em had some experience in local theaters. They went far beyond any expectations anyone could have had of them." He admitted he advised them to slow down and enunciate--as Jones does so deftly, especially with a line like "I haul gravel," in a manner that summons up the whole nine yards of Deerfield's life and times.

The restraint which Jones the actor has learned to master over the years doesn't mean he's not still going hard--he's just leveraging his wise, slightly sad eyes, that indomitable cut of a mouth, and a certain glaring intelligence to make us watch him just as hard in his moments of silence as when he's speaking. (This isn't to say he can't display a lickerish glee as say, Batman's enemy Two Face or the no-good who--guilty pleasure alert--takes over a Navy vessel in Under Siege. He scored his supporting actor Oscar as a U.S. Marshall in a forthright if smart entertainment, The Fugitive.

Now people are talking about another one, with the twin topics this time being a supporting nod for his work in No Country For Old Men--even with co-star Javier Bardem making his own serious bid--and a second possible nomination for Best Actor for In the Valley of Elah. No Country is generally being pegged as one of three Best Picture nomination shoo-ins, along with Atonement and Michael Clayton, while Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War waits in the wings.

Jones arrived at the Fine Arts theater in a chauffeured Bentley and one of the subdued suits he wears very well, even with the extra midriff that one might have thought was a choice for Deerfield. His pretty third wife Dawn, a fine polo player in her own right, was with him. He does sparing press, and the writers' strike means the typical TV rounds will be curtailed. He's proud of his feature directing debut, 2005's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, whixh won him Best Actor at Cannes, and hopes to follow up with an adaptation of a Hemingway novel he's written with William Witliff (whose Lonesome Dove adaptation with author Larry McMurtry endeared Jones to a wide television audience.) The sprawling saga includes submarine chasing and lots of work on water, but Jones says, "It's not prohibitively expensive" and with a number of juicy roles for bankable stars, "We designed the screenplay to be full of irresistible parts that can be shot out in a week, and entice people with lots of talent to work for not much money and have a lot of fun out on the ocean." He's fervently hoping the strike will end soon so he could find a window to shoot when hurricane season won't come along to raise the production's insurance premiums.

A championship awards season wouldn't do his project any harm, and with No Country, Jones, who tends to deflect most film-wonk queries with a quick, " You just read the screenplay and do what you can with it," seems to have inspired even himself. A cum laude English grad whose thesis was on Flannery O'Connor, he's friends with No Country author Cormac McCarthy and devoted to the language the Coens' lovingly adapted from the book. With sheriff Ed Tom Bell, Jones says, "The character's starting to feel old as a law enforcement officer. The book is a contemplation of morality; the screenplay is centered around the question of morality and this character is contemplating what is moral and what is not. The predicate for the piece, the supposition, is that evil changes...and he is pursuing that. He's not used to seeing drugs come across the river in that quantity and he's not used to seeing people killed. He feels over-matched, and he feels overwhelmed."

The actor views as extremely illogical any notion (mild spoiler alert) that the Coens would have supplied a more conventional ending to McCarthy's piece: "They used to call them talking pictures and that's where the narrative comes from...there's a rhythm and then with the thought Cormac puts into it, which and you're invited to draw out of it as a reader or as a viewer--that's the end of the book. But if you think you're waiting to conclude the movie with a great big shootout, you're-- happily disappointed."

(Left to right, Ethan Coen, Tommy Lee Jones and Joel Coen at the Los Angeles premiere of No Country for Old Men; photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

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