Today is the birthday of Pierce Brosnan, he is 56. Happy Birthday, Mr Brosnan.

The first time I saw Pierce Brosnan was back in 1995. “Goldeneye” had just been released and everybody wanted to know who the new Bond was. Pierce Brosnan was the guest on a UK TV programme “TGI Friday”. The host introduced him, and immediately played a clip from Goldeneye. The scene was set in a sauna, with Bond indulging in some repartee and rough sex-play with Famke Janssen’s scantily-clad Russian assassin, whose speciality was crushing the life out of her victims with her super-strong thighs. The scene was sloppily salacious and frankly very old Bond, too reminiscent of Roger Moore being beaten up by gimmicky women villains. The clip ended, and the TV host implied that Brosnan had seen Famke Janssen’s breasts in the scene. He laughed and said “Well you know how it is, you’re a boy, you look.” This with a slight shrug, he changed the subject.

It was the reply that intrigued me. Honest, respectful to his co-star, dryly funny, but somehow private. He clearly was not going to go into ego-playtime even when offered the opportunity. This actor made me want to see Goldeneye. But in the 10 years since I am not sure I have found out that much more about Pierce Brosnan. He talks about being transplanted, at the age of 10, from rural Ireland to urban London and being an outsider. Like many men who are outsiders, he is emotionally reticent and, for a movie star, shy about himself. All movie stars say they are shy private people, but I think this is mostly bullshit. I think Pierce Brosnan is the real deal.

And since Goldeneye I have been a Brosnan movie-watcher. I am going to use the occasion of Mr Brosnan’s birthday to talk about his movies. Because if he will not talk about himself, his movies do say a lot about him.

A word about this article. It is long. When I started it I had not thought about the body of work that Pierce Brosnan has produced since 1995. However I wanted to really look at his movies and that meant writing about a lot of them (thirteen to be exact). It was not a difficult task, for even at the outset I could see that he was a versatile actor and that his movies span a number of genres. I hope that you find the article good enough to read to the end and that you enjoy my thoughts on an actor who I think is very interesting and very different.

Goldeneye

Goldeneye was a huge success, and for me it was because Brosnan gave Bond back his arrogance, his certainty, his surety. Brosnan was a fit young actor and he took over the movie, every move fast, sure and confident. The arrogance that Connery had was back, along with a dash of cruelty for its own sake. Brosnan also gave Bond a brio, a joyful lust for smashing things up that made Goldeneye such a thrill-ride. Brosnan moved Bond back to being physical and manly.

There was one other key factor. Brosnan played Bond as ambivalent. The Bond dry humour was now mordant, a far cry from the patrician “I say old boy!” of Roger Moore. It was no longer clear whether the dry humour was funny or just plain cynical. His humour was now as much triumphalism as wit. Brosnan played Bond as slightly bitter but still a loyal assassin with a job to do. Bond was now as implacable as the Terminator, with Brosnan playing him as a man whose superbly-controlled anger will take him past any enemy.

If Connery was the iron-fisted and slick personification of post-war British power and Roger Moore was the British upper-class at war, Brosnan was the spy for the uncertain Nineties. Sworn to duty but too sophisticated to be unaware of the contradictions of his role, he reconciles it all in a manly way, by taking action. Brosnan gives us a glimpse of the inner workings of Bond and after that we could not be complacent, could not relax, because we had to be alert for more surprises from the cynical spy. Goldeneye was a marvellously perceptive and assured performance, especially from a first-time Bond.

Tomorrow Never Dies

Brosnan made Bond his own in Tomorrow Never Dies. Several small things made for a very assured performance. Brosnan made Bond more arrogant, more assured. He did this by making Bond still, a centre of power. He did it by taking away all unnecessary physical action and by making Bond imperturbable in the face of a situation. Once again it was about uncertainty. Roger Moore would raise an eyebrow and make a comment to show he got it, and the comment showed that he had preserved his Brit sang-froid, and was unmoved. Brosnan subtly narrows his eyes to show he’s got it and has a poker-play expression which can change instantly to amusement or outright fury. There was this sense that mayhem could kick off at any second.

Brosnan’s physical presentation of Bond changed. Bond became more deft, balanced, his actions quick and careful. There was a now a kind of master Samurai sense about him, that he could see four moves ahead and was simply anticipating the battle.

And Brosnan shows us how a secret agent loves,…very carefully. His encounter with his lost love Paris Carver (Terri Hatcher) is notable for the tenderness, the soft look, the gentle touch, that are absent from his more casual couplings. And then Brosnan takes Bond to a new place. When Bond comes across Paris’ murdered body, he opens the man up, in a way we have never seen before. It is not just the loss, but the meaninglessness of the death, the finality, the loss of future. This is a small scene but its key to Brosnan’s Bond. Brosnan makes Bond mourn like a real man mourns and it makes the audience feel closer to him.

And of course, this unleashes in Bond the anger necessary to destroy the villain Elliott Carver. Brosnan plays Bond like a man who has an internal switch, which, once activated, he will stop at nothing.

Changing the game….

I believe that the next movie, though a commercial failure, paradoxically showed what a great actor Pierce Brosnan is.

Grey Owl

Moving from mystery to eco-statement, Grey Owl was Richard Attenborough’s bio-pic of the life of an Objibway Indian/Scottish half-breed fur trapper who became one of the first champions of the native environment (in this case the Canadian wilderness) and a huge celebrity in England and Canada. The mystery lay in the fact that Grey Owl was in fact an Englishman who had been adopted into the Ojibway tribe, and is eventually exposed as such.

Brosnan gives us a gruff, mostly humourless man, who is ill at ease in the white world. Once again there is a kind of stillness, a zen in which Brosnan cloaks the character. Brosnan builds a man of utter simplicity, who undertakes each task with total concentration. This is a wise man, who judges the world in his rare utterances. Where Bond had arrogance, Grey Owl has power, and native wisdom. Brosnan does power very well and his Grey Owl is an imposing figure.

Once again it is the small moments in Brosnan’s performance, gem-like scenes where he lets us into the inner character. There is a wonderful moment early on in the film, where Brosnan is acting as a guide for a young woman he does not particularly like (but will eventually fall in love with) and takes her to his adopted Ojibway tribe. The chief starts promoting Grey Owl as a husband, to his evident discomfort. The small tics, the nervous glances that give Brosnan away, are beautifully done.

There is a deliberate rhythm to Brosnan’s Archie Grey Owl. When he is in his place and his power he is fluid, deliberate and spare, with no wasted movement. However, as his secret starts to overwhelm him, his actions begin to stutter, his guilty pauses get longer, sentences that start out calmly explode into anger. Brosnan’s performance grows and grows, and he shows us the immensity of his guilt growing with it. The tension in the man becomes tangible and heart-wrenching as Brosnan increasingly bares the two halves of Grey Owl’s soul. The progression from (supposedly) simple woodsman to troubled eco-celebrity is marked by Brosnan progressively showing the depths of this man’s emotional pain.

This is a masterful performance, Brosnan is the film, because the subtle complexity of his performance outclasses every other aspect of this film.

And back to Bond..

The World is Not Enough
This is a great Bond movie, mythic, manly and with a sense of real danger. This one works so well because it taps into one of Brosnan’s great strengths, the ability to play men who are both powerful and troubled. In The World is Not Enough, Bond is compromised by his failure to save the life of a British industrialist (and friend of M). He is further compromised by M’s use of him, to spy on a woman who may be endangered by Bond’s actions. Once again, Brosnan shows us a man who lives on the edge, showing us the little signs of a man who is getting closer and closer to being a merciless killer, but never overplaying those emotions.

What is so great about this movie is that Brosnan gets the tone perfectly right. This is a very real menace (stolen Russian nukes to be detonated in a major city) and Brosnan’s Bond has never been harder or more deadly. But this is also Bond, and Brosnan is truly funny here, the jokes and quips are perfectly timed, delivered in that slightly menacing tone. The sight and situation gags are done perfectly and Brosnan is as slick as hell in doing them. Here Brosnan gives us the Bond he had always promised us, the mature, cosmopolitan sensualist, a man in great physical shape, who happens to be a killer.

Masterpieces and changes
For me Brosnan really hit his stride with The World is Not Enough and I think this emboldened him to become even more creative. His next movie was a risky undertaking and turned out to be a masterpiece.

The Thomas Crown Affair
A re-make of the original Thomas Crown Affair by Pierce Brosnan’s own Irish Dreamtime productions, this is a superb movie that knocks the original into a cocked hat. This version plays out an art-heist that is colourful, exciting and fun. Brosnan plays the head of a Mergers and Acquisitions boutique bank, whose rogue alpha male superiority leads him into pulling heists.

One of the problems with the original was that Steve McQueen did not understand who he was playing. In the romantic and action scenes he was fine, in the scenes where he plays Crown as a businessman he was embarrassingly bad. The truth is actors rarely understand how to play businessmen. They play them well when they play them as greedy, as stupid, as unable to relate to other people. They do know how to play them positively, as gamblers, risk-takers, fighters and winners.

Having worked in Mergers and Acquisitions myself, my assessment is that Brosnan’s Thomas Crown is pitch-perfect. Early on there is a wonderful scene, where Brosnan strides confidently across the floor of his boutique bank, left hand in his pocket. He slips from one conversation to the next and as he nears his office he stretches out his right hand and says to the guy sitting at the next-to-last desk “Give me good numbers Jimmy”. Gesture, timing, tone of voice, posture are all perfect, the complete high-risk banker. Brosnan is just as good in all his other scenes. He clearly understands who this man is and he shows us, the audience, all the little facets of character that make this man the successful Alpha male he is.

Brosnan really inhabits this role. He has often been considered the successor to Cary Grant and here he shows the qualities that got him nominated. He is funny, suave, sophisticated and charming. Playing a rich banker gives him the chance to play wealthy and cultured and he does it with silky ease. He is a classic body-shape and the clothes in the movie (bespoke tailored by Campagna of New York) are perfect on him, he has the sensitivity and sensibility to understand the importance of those tailored suits.

And this movie is a feel-good movie, there is no violence, the real world is somewhere outside, along with Mergers and Acquisitions.  Brosnan dominates the movie, yet the scenes are with Rene Russo as his love interest/adversary are balanced, intimate and beautifully paced. Brosnan is a generous co-star as he shares the screen with Russo. And Brosnan plays off Russo, perfectly in character. There is a pivotal moment where the masterful, successful Thomas Crown has to admit to Russo that she is the first woman to visit his secret Caribbean home. By doing so, he loses a skirmish in their battle of wits and admits, by implication, that their relationship is more than just sex. He plays it with just the right amount of confusion and embarrassment.

And Brosnan plays Crown as a manly man, successful, a solitary risk-taker having the adventure of a lifetime, who is suddenly confused by the appearance of love. This movie was Brosnan acting as a classic Hollywood movie star and he did it to perfection. Audiences loved it.  For me it is a favourite film.

Deliberately messing it up….

The Tailor of Panama
This was the movie that told us that Brosnan was never going to be content to be an action hero. It starts with Andrew Osnard MI6 (Brosnan), being exiled to Panama in disgrace. So I thought it was going to be a kinda Bond spy movie….

Well, everybody gets it wrong sometimes, including me. The Tailor of Panama is a truly black comedy about British and American interference in other countries. And Andrew Osnard is a truly evil man, even by spy standards. Amoral and self-obsessed, he invents a wholly imaginary conspiracy against the Panama Canal, with the intention of rehabilitating himself with his boss and getting back to a plum posting.

To do this he finds vulnerable and foolish people and uses them without mercy. He intimidates, blackmails and threatens these people in order to make them do his bidding. Brosnan holds nothing back in the role, is truly frightening, completely evil. Osnard watches these people like a cat watching a mouse, takes pleasure in their pain and then you can see him calculating how to inflict more. He is intelligent, articulate and with a quickness and a savagery that scares the life out of his victims. Brosnan finds a cruel, sadistic part of himself and has no compunction about unleashing it onscreen. His face does the work here, the smile becomes a sneer, the twinkle in the eye becomes a glare. There is no concession to his earlier hero persona at all, he takes a hammer to it in this movie and clearly has a great time doing it.

Along with a wonderful cast he makes a movie so blackly funny, you have to laugh or you would cry. An unexpected departure for an actor who clearly had something to say.

Die Another Day
Next came Die Another Day, Bond is betrayed, to the North Koreans. Brosnan gives us a Bond who is not only vengeful but paranoid, slightly world-weary and short of patience. There is a new ruthlessness about Bond and Brosnan plays him as a man who wants satisfaction, whose impatience shows in his abruptness and his short fuse. And it’s time for Bond the hedonist, who meets his like in CIA agent Jinx (Halle Berry). As Bond, Brosnan throws himself into sex with Jinx and their sex scene is passionate, athletic and feels very real. This was Brosnan’s darkest Bond, his thinly veiled anger being acted out the set of his shoulders, the light in his eye and the tone of his voice. In many ways this was Brosnan’s Bond at his most real.

When Daniel Craig made Casino Royale, a lot of nonsense was talked about James Bond, by newspaper journalists who had no understanding of Bond or his story. Like many men I have long been a James Bond fan. I loved Casino Royal and thought Daniel Craig was a tough hero. But the real Commander Bond? The archetypal Bond of Fleming’s books?

Brosnan was the better Bond. Sean Connery defined Bond and consequently cannot be beat, but Brosnan comes a close second.

Evelyn
I have to be honest; I did not want to see Evelyn. I had heard that it was sentimental, set in fifties Ireland (a period in English history defined by poverty and parochialism) and about a trial, none of which interested me. But my wife, that gorgeous girl, told me it great and she was surprised, given my appreciation of Brosnan, that I was not interested in it. At the time I was absorbed by Brosnan the action hero, worried that he had descended into soap opera.

I was an idiot. Evelyn is a wonderful movie and I am happy to tell you why.

Evelyn is the true story of Desmond Doyle, an Irish painter and decorator, who, in fifties Ireland, has the misfortune that his wife leaves him. His three young children are taken into care by the Catholic Church, acting at the behest of the Irish government. Desmond loves his children and this working-class man pits himself against the state to reclaim them.

Brosnan is marvellous as Desmond Doyle, he gives a breathtaking performance. His Doyle is a loving father, irresponsible and charming. Brosnan already had that part down pat, the cheeky grin, the quip, the smooth charm. But he goes much deeper into the character, playing Doyle as a frightened, desperate man. Brosnan gives us a man who simply cannot be still, whose courage comes in sudden bursts. He switches emotions so quickly, so that we can see Doyle go from a courageous speech to shrinking with fear, looking around furtively for an escape from the consequences of his own courage. Brosnan hoods his eyes, bites his lip and draws furiously on a cigarette, eloquent in fear and frustration. But when Doyle talks of his love for his children, his voice is calm and clear, full of love and conviction. Brosnan gives Doyle a voice from the heart, a conviction that will move the planet on its axis.

But above all of this, it is the painstaking care and respect that Brosnan shows for Desmond Doyle’s life that makes this such a marvellous performance. If Doyle acts like a fool, Brosnan shows that it is lack of knowledge that makes act that way, that he has a quick mind and an honest heart. He never coarsens Desmond Doyle or insinuates he is less of a man for growing up in poverty. Rather his Doyle is very honest about his life, has an innate pride in himself (for all his fear) and knows that his children are his life.

And Brosnan makes Doyle grow through the movie. His speech becomes calmer, his actions more considered and we thrill to his new-found self-esteem and urge him on in his fight to get his children back. Yet even in the final climactic scene when Desmond Doyle fits with everything he has got, the fear is still there. And I had to ask myself how do I know that? Watching that scene again, I realise that Brosnan had kept Doyle’s frightened quick breathing whilst adding in all the other physical changes that showed Doyle’s growth. Though it is almost imperceptible, you can hear Doyle’s fear as he fights for the breath to reclaim his children. The scene and the acting is simply magnificent.

The more I see Evelyn, the more I see what a wonderful movie it is. It is a Frank Capra movie for our time. Full of struggle, but respectful of ordinary people’s lives, it manages to be fun, uplifting and joyous at the same time. Simply wonderful.

After the Sunset
After the Sunset continued the rounding out of Pierce Brsosnan’s movie persona. Set on a Caribbean holiday island, After the Sunset is a lightweight romp that advertises itself as a heist movie but quickly turns into a comedy. The joke is that Brosnan is a master jewel-thief who is smoking hot at heists, but it soon becomes apparent that he is a bit of loss at anything else. So it was a disappointment for us Thomas Crown fans, but the more I see the movie I realise that it has a lot going for it.

The first of these is that Brosnan plays jewel thief Max Burdett without ego. He happily plays sloppy and stupid and lets Salma Hayek’s fiery Lola play off him for laughs. There is a laugh-out loud scene where Brosnan’s Burdett meets the Island’s crime kingpin, Henri Moore (Don Cheadle) who tells Burdett that he has developed a life philosophy based on the songs of the Mammas and Poppas. The scene cuts to Brosnan driving his car, listening to “Go where you wanna go”, nodding his head like an idiot, with that earnest puzzled look on his face. Perfect.

It also gave Brosnan the opportunity to play out his dry sense of humour to great effect. This works so well in a scene with his nemesis, Agent Lloyd of the FBI (Woody Harrelson);

Lloyd: Just because you’re British you don’t have to hide your feelings.

Burdett: I’m Irish, we tell people how we feel. Now Fuck Off.

Timing and delivery were dry, delivered with relish. Watch it and see.  The battle of wits between Burdett and Agent Lloyd is truly great fun. 

Like Grey Owl, After the Sunset is less than the sum of its parts. But Brosnan gives us a character we can care for. Once again he is the movie.

Matador
Brosnan made Matador after the Eon productions told him that they did not want him for a fifth Bond. If Matador was not Brosnan’s revenge movie for being denied a fifth Bond, I will eat my hat.

Julian Noble is a hit-man with delusions, a “facilitator of fatalities” as he puts it. Sleazy, unwashed, with a vile little moustache and nasty clothes, he has a taste for booze and young girls. Unwholesome does not even begin to cover it. Brosnan revels in the role, deliberately making Noble as offensive as possible. And it is non-stop, just when you think it cannot get any worse, he gets that little bit more provocative, Julian’s tone gets just that bit more self-justificatory and whiny. And Brosnan so obviously loves doing it, he revels in playing a human Gollum.

Julian is burnt-out and starts to suffer panic attacks at the precise moment when he is meant to be killing someone. One night Julian meets Greg Kinnear’s businessman in a bar in Mexico. Brosnan is hypnotic as he befriends the businessman with all the sleazy charm he can muster. Julian is obviously soul-deep lonely and Brosnan plays this as a switchback of bluster and blubbing. He starts by being macho and loud, switching in a second to being plaintive, weak and whiny, then back to bluster. Brosnan has always had the ability to hold two opposites in a character and here he uses that gift to its fullest extent. If there was an ambiguity in some of his previous roles its ambiguity squared here. And Brosnan inhabits this unflattering role to its fullest extent. Matador is quite simply one of his finest performances.

Brosnan acts out Julian’s loneliness. There is an outrageous scene where he walks through the lobby of a plush hotel clad only in a tiny pair of speedos and black ankle boots. The clientele are appalled but any reaction is better than no reaction as far as Julian is concerned. Thomas Crown it is not. And the other side of the coin is the Brosnan charm, which he deploys to the full as he tries to wheedle Greg Kinnear into being his only friend.

This is a car-crash movie, you are fascinated and horrified at the same time, you cannot look away. The worst thing is the Brosnan charm. You can actually see yourself becoming buddies with the monster that is Julian, and then shudder at the thought. And it is not the plot, or the action, it is simply this incredible monster that Brosnan has built. A performance built of courage, insight and great acting talent.

Having made the break with conventional expectation…..

Seraphim Falls
Brosnan has talked on the record about how he had failed to get roles because he was considered too handsome, too pretty, how Matador and Julian Noble was his answer to that.

In Seraphim Falls he goes to what is for him an unexplored movie style, the western. The movie opens with a cowboy, heavily bundled in furs, cooking a rabbit in a snowy forest. He looks up and we see a hairy, bearded man and realise its Pierce Brosnan. His face looks as if carries all the sorrows of the world. He stands and looks around at the snowy vastness of the Ruby Mountains of New Mexico. All is peaceful; the only sound is the crackle of the fire. As he starts to kneel to his food, a shot ring out and he falls to the ground.

And it is a pretty shocking opener for a western vengeance movie, a chase though the wilderness of America. Brosnan is being tracked by Carver (Liam Neeson), who is obsessed with killing Gideon (Brosnan). Is Gideon the good guy or the bad guy? Should we want Gideon to live or Carver to catch and kill him?

In a way Seraphim Falls is the measure of Brosnan’s work as an actor. A few years earlier we would have assumed that Brosnan is the hero. But now, after The Tailor of Panama and Matador, we just don’t know. I think that he has always calculated his screen persona to have this effect. I think he revels in finding ways to keep it fresh.

Brosnan plays Gideon as a man burdened by a terrible guilt. Once again, a lot of his interpretation is in the physicality of the character. He walks as though pursued by something he cannot shake off. He is always looking inward and his conversations with others are notable for the degree to which he is detached and simultaneously holding some inner dialogue.

And here the rage, the power, is in him from the beginning, a rage to live. Gideon wants to live and flees from Carver. Brosnan plays him as a wild animal of man, a soldier, a killer, a mountain man. Gideon is resolute, almost silent, his face locked in a grimace of anger, guilt and a confused desire to survive. Brosnan gives him the walk of some homicidal soldier, marching along, part killer, part beast. And yet when he speaks, his voice is educated, measured and knowing, a soft growl. The voice does not belong to the body; it belongs to another man, another time. This is one of the deliberate contradictions that keep us watching Gideon.

Brosnan plays Gideon as a dried husk of a man, tough as leather, driven onward only by his own indomitable will. He stares but does not see, he kills competently, without remorse, he moves on. Yet, in the company of a simple farming family he weeps with such anguish that that we share his pain, yet we still do not know why he cries. In any other actor this would become tiresome, but this is what Brosnan does so well. His performance is calculated and magical; he shows us how the strength of a man can battle with his inner pain and still function. We understand that Gideon is tied to Carver in some fatal way, but we do not know how. He invites us to come see the crisis, the battle of the self, and like every hero’s journey, we are drawn to know the answer.

With respect to Liam Neeson’s measured and powerful performance, this is Brosnan’s movie. There are long stretches where there is only Gideon and the landscape. We stay with the movie because Brosnan progressively reveals the growing desperation of Gideon, the increasingly desperate stare, the cracking voice, the confusion in him as he recedes from humanity and cannot really understand what people are saying.

Without Brosnan, Seraphim Falls could be just a western chase movie. He elevates it, by giving us a character study that enthrals us, as his story unravels.

Butterfly on a Wheel (“Shattered” in its DVD release)
…is a mystery within a mystery. Gerard Butler (the 300) is Neil Randall, a corporate high-flyer and Maria Bello is his wife Abby. They have a wonderful life, a designer home and a beautiful baby daughter, Sophie. Suddenly a violent psychopath appears in their life. The psychopath is Tom Ryan (Brosnan) a mystery man who tells them he has kidnapped their child and will kill her if they do not do as he says. He then proceeds to wreck their lives.

Tom Ryan is the absolute concentration of anger, hatred and cruelty. Holding their child is frightening enough but it swiftly becomes clear that Ryan is only just this side of sane, and Neil and Abby’s fear that they might tip him over the edge, increases the tension ten-fold.

This is a Brosnan master-class. There is no gradual build-up, just an outpouring of anger, hate and control at a colossal level. From the moment he appears on screen, Pierce Brosnan gives a blistering performance of great intensity. Some off this we have seen before, the quickness of an animal, the inhuman stare, the sadistic enjoyment of another human’s plight. Some of it is new, like the unnerving Irish voice, cold, measured but about to slip over the edge into ranting madness. He makes Ryan mercurial, changing mood on the young couple in a split second. Hell, this is scary stuff; you really do not know what is coming next. If Brosnan was evil in the Tailor of Panama and Matador, he was redeemed by the fact that those movies were black comedies. Here he is pure evil, the personification of death, or is he?

Neil and Abby want to know why this man is persecuting them, and for different reasons so do we. Tom Ryan clearly has a motive, but what could it be to drive a man to these extremes of hate? The clue is in the duality that Brosnan plays so well, Ryan is another character under tension from two extreme and opposite forces, and the revelation of these explosive energies is the climax of the movie.

There’s a powerful intuition about Pierce Brosnan’s acting. “Butterfly” is frenetic, high energy, it unfolds at a very fast pace. Brosnan matches it; he is scary because he is fast, physically and mentally quicker than Neil and Abby, outwitting them at every turn. In so many of his movies Pierce Brosnan understands the tempo, the pace and the timing that will make the movie a success. This is one of them.

Married Life
This movie just passed me by, I don’t know how it was marketed, maybe my attention was elsewhere. But I was intrigued by the concept of the movie and glad I caught up with it.

Married Life is set in 1949, and initially centres on a relationship between two friends, two businessmen, stockbrokers I think, in upstate New York. The milieu is the professional middle-class and the requirement back then was for men to dress well for work. So the early scenes are all beautifully cut suits, fedoras and brightly-polished shoes, in bars of polished brass and glossy cherry wood. Pierce Brosnan is one of the few modern movie stars who understand how to wear clothes well, and in that respect alone he is right for the part.

Brosnan is Richard Langley, a handsome, elegant bachelor who is a very successful ladies man. His best friend is Harry Allen (Chris Cross), who is known to be very happily married to a lovely wife. The movie opens with Harry telling Richard that he is having an affair with a young beautiful blonde, Kay Nesbitt (Rachel McAdams) who he loves. Unfortunately, as their lunch ends, Harry chooses to introduce Kay to Richard, who is instantly attracted to her. In that moment, in a very genteel, imperceptibly quiet way, all their relationships start to go to hell.

This is a subtly drawn, intelligent and wryly funny story of a group of friends, whose secrets are exposed and who have to deal with the resulting chaos. It needs actors who understand how to discipline themselves, play their parts like a jazz ensemble, not over-emote. In a stand-out cast, Brosnan is the best, the living heart of the movie. As Richard he has the task of stealing the love of Kay and betraying his friend Harry. But Brosnan refuses to play the role as a conventional cad. His Richard is considerate, softly-spoken and ever so slightly duplicitous. Brosnan’s ability to portray worldly confident men serves him well here, because he simply inhabits that friendly confident grin, the considered aside lightly delivered. Nothing is too visible, too showy, he acts with the lightest of touches.

It is also a cerebral role, with Richard delivering the 50s style narration that holds the movie together. Once again he has a role with two contradictory pulls, though without the intensity of previous roles. Richard is a man and without making a fuss about it the movie delineates the difference between fifties men and modern new age men. Richard is puzzled by his sudden attack of love but rather than spend time analysing it he goes after what he wants, Kay. Brosnan plays Richard as an essentially good man, who will not stop until he has got what he wants. It is the way that Brosnan plays out the set-backs, the embarrassing moments, the final betrayal that gives this film so much of its enjoyment. Watching Brosnan derail Richard’s smoothness, panicky pauses as he tries to say the right thing, the relaxed slouch as he (internally) frantically backpedals is a delight.

The role of Richard suits Brosnan down to the ground, with its style, thoughtful action and quiet good humour. He tackles it with love, verve and quiet dedication. This is an actor at the very top of his game, who knows how to produce an original screen presence and evoke many emotions in the audience, as he leads his character to the story’s culmination. In the final analysis Married Life is a character study, a quietly intelligent movie that asks some very searching questions about being married. Pierce Brosnan gives us a character that is truly worthy of the movie. This is not Bond, not Desmond Doyle, but it is virtuoso acting.

The story up till now…..

So here I am, with my view of Mr Brosnan’s movies. I have been slightly partial and missed out a couple of movies from the last ten years. I have missed out Mamma Mia. I admire Pierce Brosnan for having a punt at it, much as I admire any man who has a go at anything outside his comfort zone. But as a role I do not think it tells us anything about the actor.

A personal plea…

Like many men, I rate the Thomas Crown affair as one of the greatest movies of all time. Also, like many fans of the movie, I have been waiting a long time for Thomas Crown 2. I do not know about all you other men out there but I want that movie. So please Mr Brosnan, make the movie soon!

Anyone who has stayed with me through this long piece will have guessed that I am a fan. But writing this has made me see Pierce Brosnan’s work more clearly and I think it is truly worthy of appreciation.

He is a movie star but more importantly he is a superb actor. He is a great actor because he understands how to give us a character. He does not burst onto the screen and emote for 2 hours. He builds a character, showing him to us bit by bit, building a person and, in the end, we see that character as he does. If some movie stars are one note, Pierce Brosnan is a symphony.

In all of his films he shows an enormous respect for his roles and for the audience. This would not be enough if he did not fill them with life. But he always gives energy to his characters, a truth that makes them very real. But it is his discipline, his hold on the integrity of his characters that make him a superlative actor. He builds characters for us to see and marvel at and that is the one true and best thing that an actor can do.

Thank you very much for your movies Mr Brosnan, they are much appreciated and greatly enjoyed.

 

Reference Information

Here are movies discussed in the article, in the order in which they appear:

Goldeneye

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Tomorrow Never Dies

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Grey Owl

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

The World is not Enough

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

The Thomas Crown Affair

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

The Tailor of Panama

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Die Another Day

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Evelyn

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

After the Sunset

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Matador

Get it in the UK here and the US here. 

Seraphim Falls

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

 

Butterfly on a Wheel

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Married Life

Get it in the UK here and the US here.