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Gentlemen’s agreement
Alan Rickman takes Mos Def to school in Something the Lord Made
BY JOYCE MILLMAN

In his best-known movie roles, Alan Rickman is often described as "the villain you love to hate." But the truth is, he plays villains you love to love.

Rickman redefined the modern movie bad guy in his spectacular film debut, Die Hard, which was released in 1988 when he was 42 and building a rich and varied theater career in his native England (he was the original Valmont in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s celebrated Les Liaisons Dangereuses). His Die Hard terrorist Hans Gruber, who leads a platoon of Eurotrash thugs through a hostage takeover/robbery of a Los Angeles skyscraper on Christmas Eve, is ruthless and icy. But Hans is also refined, witty, erudite, and, let’s not mince words here, damn sexy in his elegant business suit and fastidiously trimmed beard. It is Hans who is the protagonist of Die Hard; hero John McClane (Bruce Willis) is merely, as McClane admits, "the fly in the ointment" antagonizing Hans in his efforts to rob the Takagi company’s vault and then lie on a beach earning interest.

You may get ticked off at Hans for shooting Mr. Takagi in cold blood, but, hey, the only other civilian he kills in the movie is an obnoxious yuppie cokehead. It is difficult to see Hans as a monster; you keep catching yourself admiring his cunning and tenacity. And when hostage Holly McClane (John’s wife) insults Hans by calling him "a common thief" and he whirls on her and declares, "I am an exceptional thief!", Rickman tells you everything you need to know about the insecure person hiding behind the haughtiness and the big gun.

Of his approach to his characters, Rickman has said that he does not judge them, he just plays them. And because he does not judge, Hans Gruber emerges as a man, not a Hollywood blockbuster caricature of E-vil. When he makes that 30-story plunge at the movie’s climax, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of disappointment that Hans has left the building.

It’s the same way with Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham from Kevin Costner’s direly bloated 1991 epic Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. This bad guy is so entertainingly insane (look, he had a really bad childhood), he alone seems alive on the screen. Even though Costner edited the Sheriff’s part to the bare minimum, Rickman still stole the movie. And then there’s the role that has brought him a new generation of admirers, the inscrutable Professor Snape in the Harry Potter series. In interviews, Potter author J.K. Rowling has said that she based Snape on a teacher of hers that she detested and that she can’t quite fathom why Snape has become the hero of fan fiction (much of it erotic). Well, it’s like this: you take Rickman, who doesn’t look or sound like anybody else (that majestic nose, that creamy baritone), and you take his quirky blend of gracefulness and intense masculinity, and you take his skill at finding the humanness in his characters, whether that humanness is good, bad or ambiguous, and then you put all that in a long black wig and a frock coat, and what you have is a lot more interesting than just the scariest teacher at school.

COMPARED WITH HIS VILLAINS and his costume characters, Rickman’s latest role might sound mundane — he plays a heart surgeon in the excellent and illuminating new HBO movie Something the Lord Made (premiering at 9 p.m. this Sunday, May 30, and also airing at 8 p.m. on Wednesday June 2). But this is no ordinary heart surgeon — he plays Dr. Alfred Blalock, the American Southerner who invented the field. Blalock is about as far as you can get from Snape (no wand waving, no incantations). Yet he’s just as recognizable as a Rickman-type character. Rickman is drawn to the larger than life, the eccentric, and then he shows you what it costs these ambitious men to maintain their individuality and vision. His egotistical and disarmingly dreamy Blalock is no exception. Softening up his usually precise enunciation to a sleepy, honey-dipped Georgia drawl, he gives the impression of a God who considers matters of life and death from a hammock rather than from a pillar on high.

The story behind Something the Lord Made has been told twice before, in Katie McCabe’s 1998 Baltimore Magazine article and in the PBS documentary Partners of the Heart. But it bears retelling as a strange-but-true tale of race relations in the Jim Crow South. Something the Lord Made opens in Nashville in the 1930s, where the genial, if mercurial, Blalock is on the faculty of Vanderbilt Medical School. He hires Vivien Thomas (actor/rapper Mos Def), a black carpenter, to perform menial tasks around his lab. Blalock soon realizes that Thomas has a brilliant technical mind and agile fingers — indeed, Thomas is saving up for college in hopes of becoming a doctor — and he takes him on as his unofficial research assistant.

So integral to Blalock’s work does Thomas become that when Blalock is appointed chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins in 1941, he takes Thomas (whose dream of college vanished when he lost his savings in a bank failure) to Baltimore with him. At Johns Hopkins, Blalock is challenged by pediatrician Helen Taussig (Mary Stuart Masterson) to find a solution to the fatal "blue baby syndrome," a congenital heart defect that diminishes the supply of oxygen to the lungs. Experimenting on dogs in Blalock’s lab, Thomas re-creates the syndrome model, and the two men devise a bypass to deliver blood to the lungs by way of a shunt (built by Thomas). In defiance of the prevailing medical dogma against operating on the heart, Blalock declares that he is ready to try the procedure on a dying baby. In the operating room, Blalock shocks his assembled peers by insisting that Thomas stand by his side on a stepstool to observe and advise him through the groundbreaking surgery.

But Blalock and Thomas were men of their times, and their partnership in the lab and the operating room could not extend to the wider world. Because he was black, Thomas could not be classified or paid above the rank of custodial worker at Johns Hopkins (in fact, Blalock paid him extra to serve as a bartender at his family’s parties). And despite Blalock’s personal affection and respect for Thomas, he was willing only to bend the rules of a segregated society on his behalf, not to break them. On their first day at Johns Hopkins, a guard tells Thomas that he can’t come in through the front door, and Blalock makes one protest, but when the guard persists, he abruptly turns away and tells Thomas he’ll meet him inside. And when the "blue baby" operation is a success and Blalock is hailed as a hero, Thomas gets no credit, and Blalock does nothing to set the public record straight.

Written by Peter Silverman and Todd Phillips and directed by veteran Joseph Sargent (the Emmy-winning HBO movie Miss Evers’ Boys), Something the Lord Made is moving without being maudlin; it doesn’t over-inflate the inherent drama of the two men’s relationship or the era in which they lived. It’s a lovely little film, not least because of the easy rapport between Rickman and Mos Def. Blalock and Thomas are more alike than they can admit. They are proud, old-fashioned gentlemen with a shared curiosity about the inner workings of life. Thomas’s serene personality offsets Blalock’s hot temper, and as they grow comfortable with each other, they begin bantering like a long-married couple.

But when Thomas, who is no wave maker, finally confronts Blalock over the latter’s failure to give him due credit, he discovers the limits of Blalock’s brotherhood. Blalock chastises him for not showing more gratitude: "We made history together. We changed the world." Mos Def poignantly captures Thomas’s disappointment in his mentor when he softly and gravely answers, "I’m invisible to the world. I don’t mind that, I understand that. I thought it was different in here." Mos Def is impressively understated, but it’s no easy task playing a good man, particularly when the part as written makes him seem a bit too saintly — and when the not-quite-as-good man is played by Alan Rickman. Rickman offers up such a compellingly whole, fallible person that you can’t see Blalock as a bad guy. He offers an honest portrait of a maverick, and like many mavericks, Blalock was both insecure and hugely confident of his abilities.

Rickman has a pair of masterful moments that reveal the measure of Blalock’s weakness and strength. In one, Blalock overhears colleagues laughing about how he needs Thomas by his side in the operating room, and he freezes; at first, you think it’s the racial slur the other doctor used to describe Thomas that stops Blalock in his tracks, but then you can see it in his eyes — it’s his own pride that feels the blow. In the other, the dying Blalock tries to make amends to Thomas while struggling to retain his dignity, and Rickman’s emotional restraint is devastating. Rickman’s last moments on camera and Mos Def’s beautifully timed reaction a beat later are almost mirror images of each other. The two actors make you see how deeply Blalock and Thomas were connected by a partnership that was more than what either could have imagined yet less than what it could have been.


Issue Date: May 28 - June 3, 2004
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