HOLLYWOOD MAY DAMN HIM TO HELL. BUT HERE’S WHY HE’S NO RACIST
NO, actually. I don’t think Liam Neeson is a racist. However, you could certainly make a case against him, were you so inclined. You could lock him up in political correctness jail. You could slam the bolt on his career, his reputation, his life.
You could damn him to hell forever, because he has certainly committed a terrible sin by Hollywood standards.
The ultimate sin, perhaps. The definitive transgression. When asked a question, he tried to tell the truth – one that led to the cancellation of his new film’s New York premiere.
Of course, there can be no excuse for his vigilante nonsense, even for a twentysomething hothead from Ballymena who had yet to learn how to process emotions in a civilised way.
It was a certainly a fantastically awful thing to do, to arm himself with a cosh and go looking for a black man, any black man, upon whom to vent his rage. It was foolhardy to admit it, too, almost half a century later.
Not only does it bolster the racist notion that people of colour – and black men in particular – are collectively accountable for the wrongdoings of one person. It also fortifies the antiquated mindset that when a woman is sexually violated, it is the satellite men in her life who are most deeply injured, not her. No wonder everyone has been outraged. But if we spool back, what do we find? A crucial point, which is that the young Neeson contemporaneously realised his thinking was wrong and irresponsible. He was ashamed and horrified at how he felt, both then and now.
And let us not forget that he didn’t actually do anything violent. No lynching took place, he just seethed, handsomely, in the shadows.
‘I was trying to show honour, stand up for my dear friend in this terrible, medieval fashion,’ he said.
What on earth made him say such a thing? Boredom, nonchalance, the urge to impress?
Journalists asking actors about inspiration and motivation is a pretty standard inquiry on the press junket circuit. I’ve interviewed dozens and dozens of film stars and at some point you always say: ‘Please, tell me about your inspiration for this role, in which you are uncommonly brilliant.’
This is because stars usually won’t tell you anything else, as that’s too personal and they are too precious. They just want questions that will highlight their charity work or their genius – but even then you can’t be sure of a good reaction.
When I asked Ralph Fiennes about his character-motivation, he held his head in his hands and moaned: ‘I’m finding this incredibly intrusive.’
Jack Nicholson was the opposite. ‘Honey,’ he told me, ‘go ahead ask me anything you want.’
So you never know how it’s going to go, only that it is rarely going to go your way. Especially today, when the Hollywood publicity machine is so tightly controlled that stars can only survive the process by being as bland and evasive as possible.
In a recent interview, Bradley Cooper (who once had drink and drug issues) was asked if he tapped into his own experiences to play the alcoholic lead character in A Star Is Born. He refused to answer, only to say that ‘the whole point of creating art is to deal with the desperate reality of being alive’.
When asked to explain, he merely said: ‘The wound was the wound of being a human being.’
Enter Liam Neeson, who has no truck with such pretentious opacity. Woundingly, in his case. But to be honest, does this shaggy revenge tale of his even begin to make sense? It hardly stands up to scrutiny.
If Neeson went out repeatedly looking for a black man in the black area of this unspecified town, how come he didn’t find one? And did he really have a cosh? Or was is a mythical shillelagh he kept in his subconscious knapsack, a weapon to smite bad men with once the beast had stirred in his soul?
PERHAPS the strain of becoming Hollywood’s late-life No 1 vengeance hero has bled into Neeson’s private life. Since the death of his wife, Natasha Richardson, he has spent nearly all his time on screen rescuing assorted damsels in distress and despatching baddies with deadly zeal.
He has become like a Special Agent Grandpa Bond, forever deployed On Her Majesty’s Secret Pension Plan, an unequivocal force for good.
Neeson has been condemned by all the usual suspects on the fashionable left, yet there is nothing in his lifetime of public pronouncements to suggest racism. Indeed, apart from his misgivings about #MeToo investigations into historical sex allegations against the likes of Dustin Hoffman (‘a witchhunt’), he has impeccable liberal credentials. Despite playing armed action heroes bristling with weaponry, he believes there are too many guns in America and that the current situation is ‘a disgrace’.
In a recent film, Widows, his character is married to black actress Viola Davis. The film opens with the couple in bed, sharing a long and sexy kiss.
Inter-racial romance such as this is an unusual narrative to be deployed so boldly in America, where race relations remain fraught. It seems unlikely that anyone who harboured feelings of bigotry would accept such a role.
Yet Neeson’s comments this week have been unleashed into a world where the Black Lives Matter movement campaigns against the murder of innocent black people by the police and other tinderbox situations.
One can see why so many find his words so inflammatory. There are some things you can never take back, so perhaps it is better not to say them in the first place.
Can Liam Neeson survive this scandal? No doubt fans hope that his decades of unimpeachable behaviour, his reputation as a man of substance whose own life has been stalked by tragedy, might stand him in good stead. Others might suspect that in these febrile times he will be haunted forever by these words uttered in a moment of macho madness. And I think the others might be right.