The eccentric, shy actor commands attention with The Yards

Toronto Sun

TORONTO -- James Gray, the director of a Toronto filmfest movie called The Yards, turns to the door of a room in the Hotel Inter-Continental yesterday to shoo away actor Joaquin Phoenix.
A few minutes earlier, Phoenix had scurried in to sit in the director's lap. He was back now for another shot of security, the kind that Gray, as a kind of surrogate older brother, can give his fragile, shy star with a little friendly attention.
"Not now," Gray cautions him quietly, with affection in his voice. "I really have to finish this. I'll see you later."
Phoenix leaves. Gray smiles and says of his friend and Yards star: "He's fantastic. But he's crazy."
At the very least Phoenix is a genuine eccentric, driven by strange impulses that are catapulting the younger brother of the late River Phoenix to Hollywood fame.
In The Yards, Phoenix plays opposite Mark Wahlberg as the two young guns who get caught up in a socio-political scandal involving the mob and the New York transit system.
In Gladiator, the best toga epic in decades, Phoenix aced the complex role of Emperor Commodus and helped Russell Crowe guarantee that the movie was chockablock with intense personal moments and not just spectacle.
Phoenix, 25, seems to gravitate to the dark side in choosing his roles. But don't use that term.
"I really hate when people put that label on a film, that it's 'dark.' I don't know what that means. What people call dark, to me actually makes it more interesting.
"For example, I think that the characters are really complex and ambiguous in The Yards. I don't think that, for James (Gray), that things are black and white or good and evil or dark or light. I think that it's all things, that the world is complex. If other people see black and white, I see a lot of colours.
"That's certainly something that I've tried to do, which is to find all parts of the person that I'm playing in my films, to understand what leads them to the place where we find them in the film."
The young men of The Yards -- his scheming, upwardly-mobile character Willie Guttierrez and Wahlberg's stoical ex-con Leo Handler -- are complex because they are part of a generation of lost youth with particular problems.
"In The Yards, it's clear without it being shoved down your throat like you might find in flashbacks in other films, that there is no familial support," Phoenix says.
"They are really a misguided generation, a generation with divorced parents, a generation that doesn't really have support of their parents. They don't have that guidance."
Which means that the characters create their own moral code and make serious errors of judgment.
Phoenix, however, is not such a young man. Although his now famous parents are divorced, Phoenix grew up in a warm, loving, hippie household with four siblings. He is still extremely close to his family.
Joaquin, who once used the name Leaf, is the middle child. River, who died of a drug overdose in 1993, would have been 30 this summer. Rain is 27, Liberty is 23 and Summer is 22.
Their parents, John Bottom and Arlyn Dunetz, changed their legal surname to Phoenix and created a family of actors and chain-smoking vegans. Life is full of contradictions. Yesterday, several cigarette butts were smashed into the ashtray in Phoenix's interview room. He politely offers not to smoke during The Sun's interview.
But the nicotine withdrawal makes him edgy and nervous. Enough that, by the end of the interview, he needs another hug from his director pal James Gray. 

By BRUCE KIRKLAND