Paul Newman had nearly every attribute a leading man can hope for—good looks, an appealing baritone, the kind of confidence that puts others at ease rather than setting them on edge. His greatest talent as an actor was his ability to make audiences believe that a person with all these winning traits could still be a loser.
It’s not uncommon for A-list stars to slum below their genetic pay grades by depicting characters whose lives are unfolding; few actors in the history of Hollywood have done so with the same level of conviction as Newman. The best example is his Oscar-nominated turn as an alcoholic, ambulance-chasing lawyer in the 1982 legal drama The Verdict, directed by Sidney Lumet.
The performance shouldn’t work because it’s difficult, at first, to watch the film and not question how an attorney with Newman’s innate charms didn’t stumble into a partnership at some white-shoe law firm and all the accompanying perks. By the end of The Verdict, though, it’s impossible to imagine any other actor in the role.
Life has a way of breaking in favor of the beautiful and the charismatic. Paul Newman spent a chunk of his career proving that it was possible for someone as blessed as he was to experience a wretched existence. The Verdict may be Newman’s peak “loser role”, but my favorite work of his in this register will always be director Robert Benton’s 1994 comedy Nobody’s Fool, a film that shares a name with the Richard Russo novel on which it’s based, even though Small Town Bum would have been a more evocative title.
Newman stars as Donald “Sully” Sullivan, a broke, aging construction worker who never escaped the depressed upstate New York town of North Bath where he grew up. There, Sully subsists on a steady diet of one-off menial labor jobs and low-stakes poker games at the local watering hole. The arc of the story is set in motion when Peter (Dylan Walsh), the son Sully abandoned, shows up in town with the grandson Sully never met. Suddenly, the man who spent his life ducking responsibility and not showing an inkling of ambition has to reconcile with the life choices that led him to where he is.
It’s a weighty premise, but Benton, who adapted the script from Russo’s novel, injects a lighthearted sensibility that keeps the proceedings from ever approaching downbeat. He populates North Bath with a cast of characters who are more stock than real. There’s an incompetent one-legged lawyer named who can’t win a case to save his life, a snot-nosed police officer named who takes his job as a glorified meter made way too seriously, and a doddering old woman prone to taking walks down the middle of the town’s streets, oncoming traffic be damned.
Within this offbeat tableau, Sully serves as the linchpin of the town’s social scene on account of his insouciant charm and fundamental decency. He keeps a watchful eye on Miss Beryl (Jessica Tandy), the aging widow from whom he rents a room, and is a devoted friend to Rub (Pruitt Taylor Vince), his mentally challenged construction partner who would struggle to find work without his help.
He’s enmeshed in an ongoing and low-stakes feud with Carl Roebuck (Bruce Willis), the sleezy owner of the local construction company, and consistently needles Miss Beryl’s classless son Clive Jr. (Josef Sommer), a banker unable to see the folly in his plan to revive the area by financing the construction of a theme park on the outskirts of town. Sully also maintains a flirtatious yet supportive relationship with Carl’s cuckqueaned wife, Toby (the luminous Melanie Griffith), a woman seeking the courage to ditch her husband and start fresh. At one point, Toby sums up Sully’s appeal when she tells him, “You always cheer me up—I think it’s because you’re the only person I know who’s worse off than me.”
Nobody’s Fool isn’t a great piece of art. Its fatal flaw is that it never fully commits to the opportunity it has to take an incisive look at life in a small town where the best days are squarely in the rearview mirror. Still, it is eminently rewatchable.
The film was released in 1994, a moment when the network sitcom was one of the most influential forms of entertainment, and it often feels like an elongated sitcom. Benton keeps individual scenes short and sweet, and his script relies on dialogue that features the rat-a-tat rhythms and cheesy one-liners that are staples of television comedy writing (“I should have known better than to hire a one-legged lawyer”; “There are women in this town that I could hang out with who would be cheaper than you”).
In my experience, life in depressed small towns can carry a hint of menace that springs from the crappy realities of everyday life and lack of any long-term prospects. In Nobody’s Fool, North Bath feels a bit like the bar in “Cheers”—a place where everybody knows everyone’s name and conviviality pulses through the air.
The real reason Nobody’s Fool is such an easy film to revisit time and again, though, is Paul Newman. Watching him slum around the streets of North Bath as Sully is a little like learning that the telegenic quarterback of your high school football team ended up as a short-order cook at a dive bar. Sully is a likable bum, but he’s a bum nonetheless—that’s the only way to describe an unmarried dude in his 60s who still routinely cracks jokes about the size of his penis. Yet in Newman’s hands, Sully comes across as the person every other man in North Bath wishes he could be.
His scenes with Griffith crackle with sexual tension. His dismissive interactions with the sniveling Seymour Hoffman, who plays Raymer like the proverbial dweeb who became a cop to project
the power and authority he naturally lacks, are laugh-out-loud funny. His moments with Willis are
particularly instructive. At the time of the film’s release, Willis was in the prime of his career and a
bona fide action star thanks to the success of the Die Hard franchise. Yet when he’s onscreen with
Newman, he looks like he’s two feet tall.
Newman also tempers Sully’s mischievous qualities with brief yet poignant expressions of pain, keeping the film from becoming too slapstick for its own good. It’s revealed that Sully’s father was an abusive husband and that his less-than-ideal childhood may be the reason he didn’t make more of his life or stick around to be a father to his own kid.
The most powerful scene in Nobody’s Fool entails little more than a shot of Paul Newman staring at the house where Sully grew up. In those few seconds of screen time, Newman turns his famous blue eyes into little oceans of pain, and all of a sudden, you forget that you’re watching one of the paragons of onscreen masculinity and find yourself enveloped in the tragic life of a man for whom family is synonymous with suffering.
If you squint your eyes and look hard enough, there’s an anti-capitalist parable nestled in the story of Nobody’s Fool. After all, Sully, a man who doesn’t have $40 to his name or much in the form of ambition, is the hero, whereas the two most conventionally successful characters (Willis’ Carl and Clive Jr.) are portrayed as a couple of scumbags who would sell their family just to make a buck. The message is clear: what Sully lacks in material comforts, he makes up for in warm relationships. His willingness to put people over money is why he is nobody’s fool.
In this sense, the film is of a piece with the era in which it was released; the mid-1990s were not a time when being a white male who projected disaffection with mainstream values and rejected conventional markers of success was considered the epitome of cool. Nobody’s Fool ends with Toby, now fully committed to leaving Carl, presenting Sully with two plane tickets to Hawaii as a way of trying to entice him to run away with her. He, of course, does the noble thing and politely declines because he’s not about to skip out on the second opportunity life has given him to be a father and a grandfather.
If Nobody’s Fool were made today, there’s a good chance it would be conceived of as a television show. (In 2005, HBO released Empire Falls, a mini-series directed by Fred Schepisi and based on another Russo novel.) As it stands, Nobody’s Fool is a testament to Paul Newman’s singular star power. That power is palpable from the very beginning of the film to the very last scene, which is just a shot of Newman’s character passed out on a chair, a smile spread across his face.
It’s not clear what he is smiling about. Is he happy to have a grandson who loves him? Is he dreaming about rubbing coconut oil on Toby’s naked body while lounging on some tropical beach? Is he just pleased that he ended up in the black after that evening’s poker game? Whatever the reason is, it is incidental. In that moment, the camera confirms what it spent the previous 109 minutes revealing:
Even when playing a small-town burnout, Paul Newman had more charisma in his left pinky finger
than most actors can summon with all their beings.