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Finally, he looks like a man. He's played a lot of them: a righteous crime fighter (Q&A, 1990); a World War II soldier (A Time of Destiny, 1988); even a kid who grows into a man, then makes love to his best friend's wife (Everybody's All-American, 1988); but throughout, Timothy Hutton's face held on to the boyish hopefulness and adolescent anguish that won him an Oscar and two Golden Globes in 1981 for his very first film, Ordinary People.
But now, at thirty-five, his face and his manner have some gravity: gravity that befits a man who has become a father; who has been married and divorced; who has lost a parent and too much time making mediocre movies. He shrugs at that question, the one about living up to all the expectations heaped on you when you score so early in your professional life (he was nineteen): "The Oscar was great, you know? It's sort of like getting a trophy at the end-of-season basketball banquet in school," he says. Still, it's hard to look at his career and not wonder, What happened? Watch Ordinary People, and Hutton is all there, every nerve exposed, his face twitching with pain and surprise and the need to be loved that made the country believe that therapy worked. Now, however, it's as if Hutton's onscreen presence has finished analysis: The sadness seems resolved, but the rawness is gone.
When Hutton was twenty-two, Steve Martin pointed out to him that even if he had a five-year career lull, he'd be only twenty-seven when it was over, but as success in Hollywood is measured, Tim has had probably the longest sophomore slump in history. Fourteen films in sixteen years and not only has there been no second Oscar nomination, no Golden Globe nomination, no Tony, no Emmy, not even a nod from MTV for the Cars video he directed, but there has been no box office, no big pull for the hurting, searching characters who became Hutton's stock-in-trade.
Torment of one kind or another leaks through every Hutton performance, but it's not the barely buried fury of, say, an Al Pacino or a John Malkovich: He's more Holden Caulfield; the sensitive boy you'd confide in high school, the understanding guy at work who seduces you with his sympathy.
In this month's Beautiful Girls, Hutton's torture is that of a man on the brink of real adulthood, and, at first, his performance at the twenty-nine-year-old Willie Conway, who returns to his working-class town from his Manhattan life as a sometimes piano player, feels a bit forced. Hutton looks almost too old for the part, and he doesn't seem quite at home in his skin or in his role as the moral beacon of his socially stunted friends who gather for their high school reunion back in Everytown, Massachusetts.
All the boys--Matt Dillon, Michael Rapaport, Max Perlich, Pruitt Taylor Vince--and struggling with commitment, manhood, and the ache of desire. Willie, who has a relationship with a lawyer back in New York, becomes ever so gently enamored of his father's thirteen-year-old neighbor. Hutton's performance measures perfectly the equal parts of lechery, responsibility, and yearning necessary to keep Willie believable and not pathetic. In one pivotal scene, in which he must be both vulnerable and wise, a lump actually pops into your throat as he escapes with his dignity.
It's something Hutton has managed to do with his career as well, regardless of his bankability and despite his ambivalence about the business. "Acting is a funny job," he says, lighting a cigarette in a non-smoking restaurant in Manhattan. "I don't want to say I love it. It's so rare when you do, and then you don't know when you're going to do it again. It's hard to depend on. Not every film is going to be a great film." Disheveled in that charming, East Coast preppy way, he's more sensuous in three dimensions--a Cupid's-bow mouth, blue eyes that live up to all the clichés, and a sexy, easy way with his six-foot frame that Hutton won't acknowledge is part of why he's consistently working.
Another reason, of course, is that he's done good, even great, work. And work that was actually about something: The Falcon and the Snowman (Hutton plays a tightly-wound Christopher Boyce, who goes to jail for selling national security secrets, with Sean Penn's brilliantly manic Daulton Lee), Iceman, Taps. As Hutton was being considered for the Tom Cruise part in Risky Business, he chose to play Daniel instead, the justice-seeking son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the film's title role. If he'd been typecast as anything, at least it was the guy with the conscience.
But then, a few years ago, it was as if Hutton said Uncle and gave himself up to the kind of projects that should have made money: a Stephen King thriller, the Meg Ryan vehicle French Kiss, and the one film he'd actually admit he was unhappy with, The Temp. "It started out to be about people," he says, "but it lost its point. I wasn't asked to do much." Still, he turns out a nice piece of rage, fear, and confusion in what is otherwise standard bitch-torments-hunk folderol.
Lunch with complete stranger who is supposed to divine your essence in two hours "just comes with the job", he says, and his weariness with (and wariness of) this part of it shows. He agrees with Whitney Houston, who recently said, "The media are demons--they're out to eat my flesh," and defends her against a story that called her "difficult on the set." "I don't like when a so-called journalist is invited on a movie set to do an interview--brought to the workplace of someone who has a very hard job with a lot of responsibilities attached. Then the so-called journalist, without doing his or her homework, goes off on a tirade about that person's behavior!" Hutton lets out a weary sigh. "It's not just about staying in character, either, but about sustaining yourself through sixteen-hour days."
How Hutton sustains himself at work is the kind of question that brings a grimace, but he's too polite, too much of a pro not to try an answer: "My approach to my work is based on far too many things to talk about. And the minute I talk about it, the awareness of it is way too high--it's too much for me to try and put back in. If how I work is interesting to someone else, they have to respect that I don't find it interesting to talk about." But he will say that a well-written script gives you "so many tools to help you find your character, if you're willing to look for them."
A thirteen-year-old Playboy profile of Hutton makes him smile--he reads it much as he might look at an old college paper he got a good grade on, happy that he "didn't come off like a jerk." But he remembers that piece as the one that shut him down as the media: "What [the write] said about my relationship at the time just wasn't true, and it caused a really big problem." He reads from the piece: 'She might be just any other groupie, except that right now (for who knows how long?) she is Tim's girl.' That relationship was very important to me," Hutton says, indignant. "[The writer] just dismissed her, calling her a starlet! All of this, it just wasn't true!" He guards the relationships he's got now even more carefully: Though the tabloids reported (this very day) that he and Beautiful Girls co-star Uma Thurman were patching up their love affair, Hutton won't confirm that she's the woman he means when he says he's in a committed relationship. He's bothered, too, that his eight-year-old son, Noah, his only child from his only marriage (to Debra Winger) is "a de facto celebrity," with the camera trained on him if Dad takes him to a Knicks game.
Talking about his son, Hutton relaxes; his words come out almost conversationally. Being a parent has made him "more present, more responsible," he says, "and less likely to get on a plane and just take off," something he did regularly during downtime between films. Hutton sees few parallels between Noah's childhood and his own, even though his own parents divorced when he was quite young (he and Winger split up when Noah was two). Nor does he feel he's purposefully trying to avoid the sins of the father, the late actor Jim Hutton, who left the marriage, according to Tim's mother's testimony at the divorce proceedings, because his wife and family were standing in the way of his career. "It's not the same at all, because my father lived across the country," says Hutton. He's made a home for himself and Noah on a big piece of land in upstate New York, "with a pond, where Noah could have a room and we could be together," not far from Winger (with whom he shares custody)--but he doesn't quite see that this is an effort his own father didn't make. "I'm not doing anything in terms of being with him or seeing him that directly relates to how much time I didn’t' spend with my father," says Hutton. "That makes it sort of a conscious effort, and there is none with me. I just want to be with him all the time."
Time is one thing Hutton has a bit more of than he'd like, though it's clear that he's pick idleness over bad scripts. Money's not an issue (he's a serious collector of modern art--he owns a Calder, a Dali, and a Picasso--and he still travels widely, though now Noah comes along). But he realizes that the nature of the business has so changed, actors who do the sort of work he loves to do are being increasingly marginalized. "A lot of movies I made early on wouldn't get today by studios. They might get made by small independents, but Ordinary People wouldn't get made by Paramount. Everyone is backing their bets. They take very complex characters, written by great writers, and then cast it with an actor of limited range. " Like? "No examples. We're talking about if I was in a couple of movies that did extremely well in the last couple of years and I had the opportunity to play a part I wasn't right for. I could probably get that part just by saying I wanted to. I can't do that now because I haven't been in any successful movies for awhile. They're always taking the temperature out there.
"I honestly feel that whatever my abilities are, it's very rare that you can find material or people who will make the most of it. I hate being partially used."
Hutton's positively grateful at the moment. Right after Beautiful Girls, "a great script, a great cast, and a director [Ted Demme, who called Hutton 'the greatest actor of his generation'] who had a real point of view," there's the film adaptation of Jon Robin Baitz's play The Substance of Fire, a project of the old kind, with real moral conflicts, difficult characters, and the heavy-weight role of Martin Geldhart, youngest son of a publishing family fighting over its privately held company, that Hutton feels most at home in. "Martin's a guy who wants to live, then decides he doesn't want to be dragged into the family hell, but realizes that the only one who can take care of their [dwindling] father is himself. And by doing so, he has to decide what price his life is worth."
Hutton eventually did get to live with his father, as a teenager, shortly after his mother moved the family back to California from Connecticut, where Tim and his sister, Heidi, were raised. It was a bittersweet reunion, however. His father died of liver cancer just two years after Tim moved in with him--a year and a half before the Oscar, a decade before Noah was born, and light-years from the point where Tim is right now: a man in love with a woman, his child, his home, just about everything in his life, in fact, except his career--wondering when Hollywood will realize we've all grown up.