Three years ago, Ed Norton met with writer-director David Jacobson to talk about an odd script Jacobson had crafted called Down in the Valley. “I started thinking,” recalls Norton, “‘This is so weird, maybe we can't pull it off.'” In Norton's world, this was a good sign. He'd had the same feeling — a “frisson,” he calls it — about Fight Club, American History X and The 25th Hour. “Movies like that, I generally have had the feeling of, ‘Wow, this might not work,' and when I've had that feeling, it's generally produced the more interesting stuff.”
That may be the way art works; it is not the way movies and the actors in them usually do. But though Norton is just 36, and has been making films for only about a decade, he's already getting to the point in his career that he's not sure how much longer he wants to keep acting onscreen. The process isn't usually all that rewarding, especially for an actor used to the sustained rigour of the stage, as is Norton, where performers live and die in the spotlight each night. And he's always prided himself on being a bit of a lone ranger, trying to forge new paths in an overworn landscape.
Which is an apt metaphor, if you consider the “so weird” project he was talking about, which is now playing in Toronto and Vancouver. Norton stars in Down in the Valley as one Harlan Carruthers, a drifter outfitted with a cowboy hat, a lazy drawl and an old-school chivalry. Harlan strikes up a romance with an underage girl (Evan Rachel Wood) named Tobe — short for October — who is trying to squeeze out from under the thumb of her watchful father (David Morse) while providing the only friendship in the life of her shy foster brother, Lonnie (Rory Culkin).
Harlan seems like a character from another time, and for a while he and Tobe exist in a swirling fantasyland of open hearts, old-fashioned manners and white horses in open spaces. What young girl, after all, wouldn't fall for a handsome fellow who offers her this sort of beguiling advice: “You can do anything you want to do; you can be anything you want to be. You just have to decide on it.”
Actor Edward Norton poses for a portrait, Saturday, April 29, 2006 in New York. Norton plays a charismatic cowboy in director David Jacobson's movie 'Down In The Valley.' (AP)
But Harlan seems to have taken those words to heart more than might be strictly advisable: Taking inspiration from the filmic myths of the American West, he has escaped the harshness of his own life by creating himself, a man more comfortable being out of time than living in the soulless present. (Jacobson based the story on his own upbringing in California's San Fernando Valley, bereft of meaningful cultural information beyond the flood of American movies, TV shows, music and other media.)
“I really liked the idea of making a western about the West, as David and I and people our age are actually experiencing it, and kind of looking at that fantasy, looking at whether it's something that existed that's been lost — or did it only exist in the movies in the first place?” says the Boston-born Norton, sitting in a spartan hotel meeting room abandoned by his publicists and other journalists. The table is a postprandial wasteland, dotted with empty bottles of mineral water, crumpled napkins and cookie crumbs.
“You could argue that some of America's delusions about itself, if those are delusions, some of them are dangerous because we anchor our pride in them,” he continues. “Our president still puts on a cowboy hat. He's a rich kid from a Connecticut family who still acts like a cowboy. Maybe he's as deluded as Harlan is.
“I think it's interesting to prick holes in the myth of the West or the myth of America, because some people still think that's what we are, and you know, we've pretty much paved it over and left people adrift, and we're not really accounting for the psychic consequences.
“I like the idea of a man and a girl trying to ride on a horse across the West. If you did that today, what you'd actually run into is about six freeways and about seven tract-housing developments. In that sense it felt to me like something that people might be able to recognize their own experience in.”
So that initial frisson of anxiety, of walking the line of being able to pull it off, wasn't the only thing about Down in the Valley that reminded Norton of those other films of his: “In the broadest sense, I felt that they're all dissections of the way we're living right now, on many levels,” he says.
“I recognize in it my generation's spiritual issues, in a way. And this will sound like a strange comparison but, not dissimilar to Fight Club, it seemed to me like it was about people trapped in a modern world that makes them feel very numb and very disconnected to each other, and very inauthentic, seeking desperately, almost, a feeling of authenticity.
“Harlan, in a lot of ways, is not unlike my character in Fight Club, in that he's willing to engage in desperate fantasy to create that feeling of the real.”
Down in the Valley has had a troubled history. After appearing at last year's Cannes Film Festival, it failed to find a distributor, so Jacobson (with Norton, one of the film's producers, looking over his shoulder) cut about 20 minutes from the film. Even if the result is an often-hypnotic spell of themes and action, the film had trouble shaking its bad aura.
For Norton, though, the experience of the work itself, and the notion of art spreading ideas, is enough reward. The Down in the Valley press kit includes a biography for Norton that stretches out to a page and a half, outlining the various social and environmental organizations to which he belongs: the Enterprise Foundation (affordable housing), Solar Neighbours (providing solar-power technology to low-income homeowners), Middle East Peacemakers Fund (a program at his alma mater, Yale, to provide grants for students to travel to the region) and Friends of the High Line (involved in the conversion of an elevated New York rail bed into a public park). He is also a major financial supporter of about a dozen environmental organizations.
Because, while he got into acting thanks to a compulsion to perform, it is the effect of art on people that keeps him in it now.
“I think sometimes, at its best, with things that are unformed or unconscious in our heads collectively, art can help crystallize them,” he says.
“People talk about this idea of memes, ideas floating around like in an evolutionary sense, you know? And I do think that's part of the role art plays. Art has the capacity in a way to seed thought, to seed ideas, and it is a vector through which ideas move, and which people — with things they're only dimly aware of — start to crystallize.
“Something will suddenly really communicate, and in those moments maybe what you're hoping to do is speed the process of reconsideration forward. I think that's good.”
