Jon Hamm Is a Great Actor, So Why Can’t He Find Another Great Role?
Owen Gleiberman, Chief Film Critic, August 27, 2017 | 08:45AM PT
In his latest movie, “Marjorie Prime,” Jon Hamm plays a hologram who gives tender therapeutic advice to the aging lady he was once married to (it’s complicated), and if that doesn’t strike you as exciting, you’re not alone. The movie is a precious indie bauble that has already whiffed at the specialty box office. Hamm is crafty and spry in it; you might say — as some have — that it’s an adventurous role for him, in the same way that playing a violent sociopath with choppy shaved hair in “Baby Driver” was an adventurous role for him. These characters aren’t what we “expect” from Jon Hamm, so they make it look like he’s in there, trying on audacious things and working it. The question is: Why does Jon Hamm now look like he’s trying so hard?
I think what I’m asking is: Why isn’t Jon Hamm a movie star? It’s an awkward question to pose, because we all know the entertainment industry doesn’t mint movie stars the way it once used to. It now mints franchises that are bigger than any one star. Beyond that, Jon Hamm’s image as an actor rests on a television series that, as much as any series in the history of the medium, proved that television could vibrate with an artistic electricity heady and bold enough to rival that of any contemporary movie. To presume that Hamm, after “Mad Men” (which ended in 2014), should have “graduated” to the movies may sound like outdated or even patronizing thinking.
Yet let’s be honest: If you compare him to the two other greatest actors of the new golden age of television, Bryan Cranston and the late James Gandolfini, Hamm, on “Mad Men,” had a tall-dark-and-handsome sharky elegance combined with a glamorous film-noir danger that made him seem, uniquely, like the 21st-century version of a classic movie star (think Robert Mitchum with a touch of Gregory Peck).
His look alone — the inky perfect hair, the thrusting chin and reluctant smile, the killer eyes that could melt or freeze you — was worthy of 007. Beyond that, Hamm inhabited Don Draper’s slithery soul in a way that invited the audience into a fascinating complicity with him. Over those years, I read a lot of great “Mad Men” recaps, but a blind spot shared by more than a few of them was the tendency to judge Don’s sins from on high, and to presume that the show viewed his hungry and often illicit soul with that same moralistic detachment. I’d argue that the ambiguous glory of “Mad Men” was how much it submerged the audience in Don’s point-of-view, and it was Hamm’s sonorous force as an actor that allowed that.
It’s that force that’s been waiting to be unleashed, to find a role — a great role — ever since the show ended. We now inhabit a culture so fickle that there are those who would write off Hamm as a one-hit wonder. (I expect to read a comment to that effect within 10 minutes of this column being posted.) But I don’t buy it. Hamm will be a true star again. In the years since “Mad Men,” however, it’s become more and more apparent why he’s fumbling around in movies that aren’t worthy of him.
He is, for one, a grown-up actor in a universe that’s increasingly kiddiefied; almost surely, he would have done better several decades ago. Yet Hamm’s biggest sticking point in terms of casting is tied to the very quality that made him so enthralling on “Mad Men”: He’s a victim of Intellectual Actor Syndrome. For all his swarthy allure, he’s an intensely brainy and articulate actor who leads, in spirit, from the neck up, and whose excitement and danger reside in his thoughts. That requires a script that can channel, through words, the actor’s energized quality of mind. Without it, he comes off as a ghost of himself.
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