Word: pupils
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...Pupil...
...McKellen, we'll have you know--and he will too--is not an old man, though you wouldn't guess that from his two new movies. He plays the frail, 67-year-old movie director James Whale in Gods and Monsters, and a Nazi near 80 in Apt Pupil. "People must think I'm in my 70s," he says with a sigh. "My danger is being typecast older than I am." But that, ladies and gentlemen, is Acting. Sir Ian is a lithe 59, two years junior to Redford, Nicholson, Hoffman. He doesn't care to be cast forever...
...risk, no regrets, for in his new films, Sir Ian demonstrates how a lifetime of stage wizardry can be poured into a screen character. In Apt Pupil he is, in director Bryan Singer's phrase, "an old, alcoholic, sitcom-watching Nazi" hiding in California anonymity 40 years after the war and amused to perform a facsimile of his old mischief on a curious teenager (Brad Renfro). As Whale in Bill Condon's film, McKellen is sunset charm incarnate, a gay man melting inside his decaying body for the gross, cheerful fellow (Brendan Fraser) who works in the garden...
King is also responsible for the psychosexual themes that run underneath what is, in its way, a sort of "coming of age" tale. Our hero, however, does not go from foolishness to wisdom but from good to evil, and this is perhaps the most problematic aspect of Apt Pupil. The key line in the movie perhaps comes when Dussander, at a dinner party and unflappably suave, says, "Speaking the truth is a privilege of young boys; it is one, however, that men must regrettably relinquish," raising his glass knowingly to the other men at the table. Lying, suggests Apt Pupil...
...movie that suggests that the world is an evil and corrupt place where the men who realize this play dirty and survive while all the others are naive babies: Chinatown, The Godfather and a number of other fine movies create this kind of world. The problem with Apt Pupil, of course, is not its structure but its subject, suggesting that a former S.S. agent is knowing and mature while the Todd Bowdens of the world, striving after justice, are hopelessly naive. Toward the end of the movie, a Holocaust survivor spots Dussander, who, it turns out, killed his wife...