Beyond The Fringe

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TRUE BELIEVER Directed by Joseph Ruben; Screenplay by Wesley Strick

James Woods is not exactly an obscure actor. The man has actually had an Academy Award nomination, among other show-accolades. But compared with every Tom, Jack and Dustin, he is truly one of the unsung actors in movies today.

His cult knows where to find him: playing fringe characters in fringe features like Videodrome and, just a couple of months ago, portraying a man succumbing to the twin addictions of ambition and drugs in The Boost. His Oscar nomination was for Salvador, a feverish performance of Yanqui journalism confronting Latin revolution that never found the audience it deserved. The big crowd, catching Woods occasionally on television or doing heavy duty in a mainstream movie, has yet to get his message. Or maybe that message is too clear and the public hates what it is hearing.

For this is the age of the really cute guy, and James Woods is a really scary guy, as he shows in his portrayal of lawyer Eddie Dodd in True Believer. At the start of the film he sticks his face into a jury box and yells. It is a demonic face, hollowed out by unfathomable passions, the eyes agleam with an anger that may be authentic, or may be faked for persuasive purposes. Or maybe its roots are in something that happened to Eddie in kindergarten. Who knows?

Only Woods. But he's not telling. He's just behaving, out there on the enigmatic edge of the sociopathic, as the sole ruler of the emotional territory that he has made uniquely his. And what is he screaming about? Why, the violated constitutional rights of his client, who just happens to be a guilty-as-sin drug dealer. Eddie bullies the jury into an acquittal all right, but behavior like this is not calculated to get an audience rooting for him.

Neither is the plot in which writer Wesley Strick and director Joseph Ruben (himself something of a cult figure for The Stepfather two years ago) enmesh him. Eddie's main business may be straightforward enough: to free from Sing Sing a Korean American named Shu Kai Kim (Yuji Okumoto), who is doing hard, not to say life-threatening time for a murder he did not commit. But the path to belated justice is a sleazy maze, twisted as a paranoiac's logic. A key witness is a man who believes the telephone company assassinated John F. Kennedy.

Neo-Nazis and a plumbing-supply merchant with sidelines in piety and jealous rage lurk there, along with a mastermind whose ends may justify his means but not his perpetual sneer. Youth gangs, corrupt cops, drug smugglers and, yes, some late-model toilet bowls also have their places in a tale whose complexities would devour most actors.

But Woods' angry energy is clarifying as well as terrifying, and when he unleashes it (usually without warning), the effect is to focus our attention where it belongs, not on a suspense story but on the mysteries of human behavior. Not that there are any comfortable conclusions. Woods' idealistic young associate (Robert Downey Jr.) keeps hoping that Eddie will rediscover his '60s idealism. A private eye (Margaret Colin) is standing by to offer redemptive love. These easy, familiar motivations are avoided. Eddie Dodd is not going to be anybody's exemplary case. He is a marginal one, a hard one, and, like the actor who plays him, proud of it. And proud to do what he does superbly.