Eric Bana: bruised and bewildered
He's talented, charismatic and good-looking – so why isn't Eric Bana the biggest star on the planet? Joe Queenan thinks he knows what's eating him
Eric Bana in Hanna. Photograph: Alex Bailey
Do you ever wonder why movies stars sometimes vanish from the screen for years at a stretch? Not the way Mel Gibson did (no films between 2004 and 2010, largely because personal issues induced him to keep a low profile), but the way major stars will retreat from the limelight for awhile. Hey, what ever happened to Jon Voight? Gosh, what's Neve Campbell been doing the last few years? Wait a sec, is Jean-Claude Van Damme still alive?
The following, then, may be of interest to you. In 2009's rollicking blockbuster Star Trek, the Romulan commander of the aerodynamically implausible, hydra-like spaceship that is threatening to destroy Earth with the deadly weapons mounted in its weird tentacles somehow manages to muff the assignment. Even though his ship is a hundred times bigger than the Starship Enterprise, and even though it boasts infinitely more firepower than its puny target, and even though the Enterprise is under the command of a punk-ass 21-year-old who has not yet graduated from astronaut academy, the Romulan spacecraft ends up being blown to smithereens.
To a lot of people who were sitting on the edge of their seats wondering if the precocious post-adolescents Kirk and Spock could defy the preposterously long odds against them and save Planet Earth from almost certain destruction, this miraculous Romulan screw-up must have come as a bit of a surprise. But not to me. As soon as I saw that Eric Bana was commander of the Romulan spacecraft, I knew Kirk and Spock's victory was in the bag. No matter what the film, no matter what the plot, no matter what the level of competition, Bana is a guy who was just born to finish second.
Please, please, please don't get me wrong: I like and respect Bana, one of the few actors who has successfully managed the transition from standup comic to serious dramatic actor. (Bill Murray, Lily Tomlin, and I suppose, Robin Williams, are the other names that immediately come to mind.) But there can be no denying that Bana is consistently cast in roles in which he doesn't get the girl, doesn't finish the job, doesn't save his planet, and usually winds up six feet under by the time the credits run.
Consider his track record. In Star Trek he is blown into tiny little pieces and his entire race is wiped off the face of the solar system by a wise-ass who drinks too much. In Troy, where he plays Batman (Hector) to Brad Pitt's Superman (Achilles), his Myrmidon rival makes mincemeat of him, butchers his father, enslaves his wife, puts his city to the sword, and makes sure that his race is exterminated. In Munich he accepts an assignment to track down and kill the 11 terrorists responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, but two-thirds of the way through the assignment, he inexplicably throws in the towel and moves to Brooklyn to chill out. What, I ask you, is up with that?
There is more. In The Time Traveller's Wife, Bana goes into the future one too many times and winds up dead as a doornail, leaving his long-suffering wife and adolescent daughter wondering what the hell was wrong with this peripatetic loser. In Funny People, his wife is snatched right out from under him by a noticeably shorter, less debonair and immeasurably less good-looking Adam Sandler, who may be dying of cancer. That's right: cold-cocked by a carcinogenic cuckolder, a fate worse than death. Going way back to the beginning of his career in Australia, let us recall that one of the first film characters Bana played cuts off both his ears in order to get an early release from prison, an unusual jailbreak tactic no matter how you look at it. The film was called Chopper. Somebody has a sense of humour down under.
I raise the Bana-the-bumbler issue because I do not enjoy seeing movies in which the biggest star on the marquee gets nuked. I go to the movies to see good triumph over evil, but I would prefer that at the end of the film the good are still standing, while the bad and the ugly have gone to meet their maker. Movie stars, for the most part, understand this. John Wayne bit the dust in just four of his films. Cary Grant in none that I can think of. Humphrey Bogart perished early and often in his career, but almost never died after he hit the big time with Casablanca and stopped being cast as a hood. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Jimmy Stewart rarely breathed their last on screen. Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman have hardly ever been on intimate terms with the grim reaper. Among contemporaries, Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe, Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx almost never die. And when they do – Pacino in Scarface, Gibson in Braveheart, Cruise in Collateral, Crowe in Gladiator – they tend to go out in a blaze of glory.
What's more, they still manage to get the job done even though they themselves may not live to see the Promised Land; by the time the films have run their course, Scotland is freed from the English yoke, the demented Emperor Commodus is dispatched, the Mexicans wish they had never attacked that dilapidated little mission deep in the heart of Texas. And when these stars do not succeed in accomplishing what they have set out to do, they at least make sure that a good time is had by all before they exit. Tony Montana being the obvious case in point.
A few years ago Bana crossed paths with Jennifer Connelly in Ang Lee's epic bomb Hulk. This did not surprise me; in a weird way, these two were meant for each other. In Hulk, Connelly played a brilliant nuclear biologist who is seduced by a shy mutant who is shot, worked over, impaled, barraged with heat-seeking missiles, and finally has to polish off his own father before disappearing into the jungles of the Amazon for ever. As usual, nothing goes right for Bana throughout the film, and by the time the credits roll, he is washed up as a scientist, lover, son and even a human being. Once again, Bana finished out of the money, while his co-star flourished.
In Bana's defence, he was outgunned from the start. If there was ever a co-star Bana was born to be upstaged by, it was Connelly, the black widow of Hollywood. A few years ago, I wrote a story pointing out that in movies starring the talented, striking Connelly, the characters played by her male co-stars always ended up in dire straits, and usually dead. Ed Harris buys the farm in Pollock. Ben Kingsley kills himself in House of Sand and Fog. Jared Leto winds up armless, cashless and miserable in Requiem for a Dream. Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't make it to the end of Blood Diamond. More recently, Keanu Reeves screws up the mission and takes the pipe in The Day the Earth Stood Still, while Joaquin Phoenix is flattened by an SUV in Reservation Road. Connelly literally makes mincemeat out of guys like Eric Bana. Mincemeat.
Yet Connelly never stops working. Never. Is anyone in Hollywood paying attention to this?
Yes. Eric Bana.
More than a year ago I went online to see what exciting new Bana releases lay in store. There weren't any. He did not have a movie out in 2010; nothing since The Time Traveller's Wife. A friend of mine who is knowledgable about the industry suggests that the parts may have dried up – that if Bana were being offered juicy roles, he would be grabbing them. But the work is not there.
Well, that's one theory. But I think the truth lies elsewhere. I think that Bana deliberately took himself out of the mix. I think he finally figured out that the reason so many of his films tanked at the box office is because the public is tired of seeing movies about runner-ups. I think Bana has made it clear to the powers-that-be that until he's offered similar jobs to Eastwood and Bruce Willis, and Hugh Jackman and Clive Owen, where you're still alive and kicking at the end, he's just going to stay at home and sulk. He is gifted, good-looking, and charismatic and he has worked hard to get where he is. But he is sick and tired of playing incompetent extraterrestrials, dithering assassins, audiophonically challenged psychopaths, knock-kneed sons of Ilium, time travellers burdened with a rapidly approaching expiration date and namby-pamby executives whose wives are having it off with a cancer-ridden standup. Until he gets offered a few roles in which he is cast as the conquering hero, putting some points up there on the scoreboard, we won't be seeing Bana a whole lot. And that's final.
This week, at long last, Bana can be seen in Hanna, an engrossing film about a precocious teenaged assassin raised by her dad in the wilds of Finland. It stars Bana as her father, the CIA operative who taught her how to kill. It also stars Cate Blanchett as a remorseless intelligence agent who is trying to track her down. It's a good movie. The kid is mesmerising. Blanchett does a nice Cruella de Vil turn. And Bana, as usual, is a warm and charismatic presence. So if you haven't seen the movie, and you're looking forward to it, trust me on this one: it's worth the price of admission.
As for the male lead's ultimate fate, I don't want to spoil the ending, so let's just put it this way: for Bana to make it through a movie from beginning to end would be just great. It would make such a nice change. It might even mark a turning point in his career. So enjoy the film. But bear one thing in mind: this is a motion picture in which Blanchett and a sociopathic teenaged girl both have high-powered rifles in their hands, and loads of ordnance in the boot, and don't seem to have an ounce of compassion between them. So if you're betting on Bana to still be standing tall when the final credits roll, by all means, make that wager.
But don't bet the house.
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