“The Debt,” a smart thriller about past sins catching up to heroes and villains alike, comes out on DVD this week. The film switches between a trio of Mossad agents trying to capture a Nazi war criminal in 1960s Berlin and the same agents 30 years later, dealing with the fallout from the mission.
I liked the film, but I’m hoping the “deleted scenes” section of the DVD includes what seems like a key scene missing from the film — the scene where all three agents get major reconstructive face surgery.
That scene must exist, right? Because that’s the only possible explanation why the actors playing the older versions of the agents look absolutely nothing like their counterparts. It was extremely distracting.
Jessica Chastain and Helen Mirren are attractive women, but Mirren couldn’t be Chastain’s distant aunt, let alone the same person. And what must have Sam Worthington, hunky “Avatar” star that he is, thought when he learned that bloodhound-faced Cieran Hinds was playing his older self?
It’s a recurring casting problem in movies — how does one find two actors who can plausibly play the same person at different periods of their lives, and put them in the same movie? When it works, it can be a real kick. But more often than not, it’s jarring.
Take “The Notebook.” This 2004 romantic drama has become synonymous with “weepy chick flick,” but it actually worked for me, and featured two terrific star-making performances by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. The problem was the framing story, featuring James Garner and Gena Rowlands as the same lovers, now elderly, with Rowlands’ character suffering from dementia.
McAdams evolving into Rowlands, okay. But there is no way that the sharp-featured Gosling would someday turn into Jim Rockford. Just no way. (Actually, this visual disconnect sparked me to come up with my own alternate ending to the movie, in which Garner’s character was revealed not to be Gosling’s character, but the romantic rival played by James Marsden. That would have been plausible. But nobody consulted me.)
More successful, I think, was “Big Fish,” in which Billy Crudup comes to terms with his dying, flighty father, played in present day by Albert Finney and in fanciful flashbacks by Ewan McGregor. Physical resemblance aside, both actors have that same mischievous spark, and it worked.
Also effective was “Stand By Me,” which probably could have worked just as a period piece about four boys on a grisly quest in 1962 Oregon. But Richard Dreyfus adds a note of poigancy as the Wil Wheaton character, now a grown author writing down his memories. Dreyfus is barely in the movie aside from his voiceover narration, and yet you can’t imagine “Stand By Me” without the mix of Wheaton’s unsure face and Dreyfus’ empathetic voice.
The godfather of this sort of casting, of course, is “The Godfather” movies, in which we meet Don Corleone first as an avuncular kingpin in the first movie (Marlon Brando), and then as a lean, ruthless young criminal making his mark in the second (Robert De Niro). Although they look enough alike, this one works because underneath Brando’s mumble-mouthed patriarch, we see the cold criminal mastermind. De Niro stripped the character down to that hard-edged inner core.
Gloria Stuart played the older Kate Winslet in “Titanic,” which worked well enough. An actor named Harrison Young played the elderly World War II veteran in “Saving Private Ryan,” eventually revealed to be Ryan (Matt Damon) himself. Both are little more than cameos, adding a present-day framing device to a period drama to say “this really happened.”
One of the funniest examples of this casting was in the second Austin Powers movie, “The Spy Who Shagged Me,” when Austin goes back in time to the swinging ’60s. It didn’t work as well as the first movie (there’s a reason why people make fish-out-of-water stories, not fish-in-water stories), but there was a great cameo by Rob Lowe as Dr. Evil’s Number Two, played in the present day by Robert Wagner. Nice resemblance, eyepatch and all.
But my favorite example comes in the third Indiana Jones movie, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” which opens with a prologue featuring a teenage Indy (the late River Phoenix) fighting bad guys while on a Boy Scouting trip. What made this so great was Phoenix’s riotously on-target Harrison Ford imitation, from his half-barked line readings (“Everybody’s lost but me!”) to his use of what online film fans call Ford’s Wagging Finger of Doom.
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