Alec Baldwin releases gusts of invective
You’re the guy in the boat movie?’ asked Kim Basinger, sizing Alec Baldwin up for a date. It sounds like a slight, although Baldwin didn’t take it as one. For some reason he was more upset that he didn’t get to play action man hero Jack Ryan in Patriot Games, the sequel to the boat movie (aka The Hunt For Red October).
That honour went to Harrison Ford who, Baldwin tells us, is ‘a little man, short, scrawny, and wiry, whose soft voice sounds as if it’s coming from behind a door’.
The good news is that Baldwin’s memoir is studded with similarly sour appraisals. Nobody, no matter how powerful, escapes Baldwin’s ire. Oliver Stone is ‘the director as hostage taker’. Donald Trump ‘has abused power at every station stop of his life’.
Not since All About Eve, in which Baldwin’s heroine Bette Davis counselled everyone to ‘Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,’ has an actor flown so high on gusts of invective. (Just so you know, Patriot Games’ director Philip Noyce is ‘a marginal talent’ and the movie ‘made less money than Hunt when adjusted for inflation’.)
Thankfully, the griping and groaning don’t overwhelm the more reflective parts. Baldwin has dug deep into himself for the family sections – telling you about his ‘hardscrabble’ childhood on Long Island, his grandfather who’d been a DA in Brooklyn until he was found taking bribes, his respected yet not quite successful teacher father, about his ‘frightened, wracked’ mother and her numerous slaps (‘like Navratilova’s backhand’).
He is honest, too, about his problems with booze and drugs – cocaine-laced cigarettes, anyone? – and about all the times he’s been asked if he’s gay. ‘How much better my life might have been,’ he jokes, ‘[had I been] interested in men sexually.’
It’s such candour that has made Baldwin more famous than his stalled movie career ought to have allowed. Wit and charm have made him one of today’s stars – most recently for his praised impersonations of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live.
At one point Baldwin asks his movie-buff father whether he has what it takes to be an actor. ‘I think you need to be intelligent,’ he answered. ‘You’re pretty intelligent. So, you have a good chance.’ Sorry, Alec, but dad was only half right. Your non-ghosted memoir is testament to your considerable brain power but, as Tom Stoppard once said, ‘it helps if an actor is a little stupid’. You never really were the guy in the boat movie.
Not since Bette Davis has an actor flown so high on gusts of invective