Hot Damn,He's Good

By RICHARD CORLISS

ORNERY IS A GOOD TEXAS WORD. IT'S probably the word Tommy Lee Jones' teachers were searching for when, on a report card at his Dallas prep school, they described him as "sullen, morose and belligerent." But ornery is just a corruption of ordinary. And this eighth-generation Texan has never been ordinary. Not at Harvard, where he roomed with Al Gore, played on the football team and graduated cum laude. Not in his two-decade career as a charismatic character actor. Not in his parallel career as a Texas cattle rancher, or in his passion for polo. And surely not now, when he is Hollywood's new best bet for middle-aged stardom. If there were a word for Jones, it'd have to be extraornery.

In the summer smash The Fugitive, he plays Gerard, the relentless U.S. marshal. When told by the hero, "I didn't kill my wife," he replies, "I don't care" -- he just has this job to do. In last year's Under Siege he was Strannix, a renegade CIA operative turned nuclear hijacker. "My, my, my," Strannix chortles, high on his own magnificent malevolence, "how hell doth quicken the spirit!" Good guy, bad guy, these are the same man: a smart, volatile, mean sumbitch with too much on his mind. "Damn, I'm good," Jones murmurs in Under Siege, implying few others merit that appraisal. He has the stare that kills. His eyes can burn holes in your ego.

And a chat with Jones can be like an entrance exam to a higher, harder life form. Sit with him at a restaurant in Memphis, where he is shooting the John Grisham thriller The Client, and ask something innocuous, like what he reads. "The New York Times once a week . . . and also some secret trash books that will go unnamed, stashed hither and yon. I don't trust you enough to tell you the titles of all the books I'm reading." Well, which of his parts might he call a breakthrough role? A frown. "Breakfast roll? Oh, breakthrough role. I don't have time to think that way. I've never lived in a world where that question makes any sense." How does this busy man balance his interests? "I don't consider my life a balancing act," he says. "I consider these things to be the components of balance. And if it doesn't jibe to anybody, I've gotten to the point where I just don't care." Marshal Gerard, meet Mr. Jones.

O.K., so he is not a genial, bobble-head doll; he is a demanding actor immersed in his craft. "He'll put a spin on each take," says Oliver Stone, who cast Jones in JFK and in the forthcoming Heaven and Earth and Natural Born Killers. "He can deliver different pitches: slow balls, fastballs, curves, sliders." Stone says Jones is "not a party animal. He's reticent, taciturn." A crew member on The Client notes that Jones "won't talk much about personal things. But he talked to a friend of mine for an hour about Texas horny toads."

His father Clyde worked in the oil fields; his mother Lucille owned a beauty-shop. They married and divorced twice, with Lucille gaining custody of the boy after she accused Clyde of haranguing her in drunken rages. Their son has a more settled sense of self: "I'm a family man. I have two children, a wife. I'm in the cattle business. I'm an actor. I've made my living with my imagination all my adult life. And I hope to continue to grow every day."

Theater-trained, he quickly found a niche in films and TV. He could play thugs with dumb cunning, in Jackson County Jail and as Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song, or frog consorts to movie divas (Faye Dunaway in Eyes of Laura Mars, Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter, Kathleen Turner in the recent House of Cards). He approached both avant-garde stage work (Ulysses in Nighttown, Sam Shepard's True West) and high movie schlock (The Betsy, Rolling Thunder) with energy and respect. "It's no mean calling," he says, "to bring fun into the afternoons of large numbers of people. That too is part of my job, and I'm happy to serve when called on."

On screen, he radiates a dangerous intelligence -- a big brain with a short fuse -- that is so intense it's erotic. "There's an energy that is sexual and intellectual," says Joel Schumacher, director of The Client, "and it's a great combination." Andrew Davis, who directed Jones in The Package, Under Siege and The Fugitive, has heard him referred to as "the new Bogart. He's not the most attractive, smooth-faced guy in the world, yet he has this sexuality. He really is the Southwestern Bogart." Which is why the character closest to Jones may be Woodrow Call in the Lonesome Dove mini-series: a haggard Texan who loves horses and leads men.

Whether acting up a dust storm or working the ranch or raising horses for polo (his team recently won the U.S. Polo Association's Western Challenge Cup), Jones stays rooted in the Texas soil. "Natives of my region," he says, "are heirs to a society whose language, manners, cuisine, habits of dress, transportation, ways of socializing with one another are not so removed from location as others are. We're still tied to a place. We happen to think it's important to be from some place."

He will never go Hollywood, but Hollywood is welcome to go Tommy Lee Jones -- if it can look him in the eye and not flinch.

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Memphis