Post-holiday blues? Pork fat rules!
By Herb Drill
All that cheer of the holidays got you down now that we're back to business-as-usual, with medical appointments, therapy, medications, etc.? Need a boost?
Tyr Bacon!
I’ve always liked Bacon, and put that with a capital “B” because bacon was a treat when my mother (may she rest in peace) made the most delicious bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches. It’s also because I think highly of another Bacon, actor Kevin, from his portrayal of the self-destructive Fenwick in memorable Diner to joining Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in the powerful A Few Good Men.
Along the way, there was his nomination for a Golden Globe Award for his role in The River Wild, followed the next year by the hugely successful Apollo 13. He and older brother Michael have a successful band called The Bacon Brothers, and their father is acclaimed architect Edmund Bacon, a native Philadelphian like me. I’m a Southern gentleman now, y’all.
This brings me – circuitously – to the point. If you enjoy finer work in a good movie, go to see the detective Kevin Bacon plays in Mystic River. Your mind might wander to “Mike Hammer,” or “Spenser,” or roles that the movie’s director, Clint Eastwood, has played.
How could you forget Dirty Harry?
For the record, Mystic River is the haunting account of childhood trauma and repercussions among some grown-up working class Bostonians, Kevin Bacon plays Sean Devine, a detective with the state police, who is investigating the murder of a friend's college-age daughter. Slim, taciturn, and in no-frills cop attire, he has an Eastwood-esq part. Eastwood is there – as the movie’s director, and that’s his role in Mystic River.
Bacon told an interviewer: "If there's a connection there between my performance and all of those Clint movies, I think it's unconscious." He stars
in the film with Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Laurence Fishburne, Laura
Linney, and Marcia Gay Harden. "Here's a guy who plays it very close to the vest and has a troubled past... . But you don't see him really dealing with it demonstratively, and that's a real Clint kind of thing."
It’s reported Bacon, 45 and left Philadelphia in the mid-'70s, relished a chance to work with Eastwood. The actor-filmmaker is famous for shooting fast and cheap, and Bacon - who directed his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, in the '96 Losing Chase - was keen to watch, and work, with the master.
Did he and Eastwood talk over Bacon's role, or the themes - guilt,
loss, retribution – which flow through Mystic River? "We didn't discuss much, to tell you the truth. You know Clint, that's just really not his style to talk, talk, talk. It's more shoot, shoot, shoot.”
Bacon researched his role, talking to Dennis Lehane, who wrote the novel Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential) adapted. He hung out with a Massachusetts State Police homicide investigator, and Penn suggested the cast get together and do read-throughs. "Clint certainly approved all of that," Bacon said, "but he had no interest in being there. Then on the day, we just showed up and did our work."
Bacon admits he always updates the menu of his roles, “especially if the last thing you did makes money, then they definitely want to see you do the same thing. "So, you have to fight against that, and that's what I've done my whole career. I really try to keep switching it up, because that's what feeds me."
Can’t you just hear the sizzle?