Storyteller’s Rulebook: Not All Determination Needs to be Grim

Here’s an old New Yorker cartoon I’ve never fogotten:

Just as we only ever seem to find “staunch Republicans”, another two words that always seem to go together is “grim determination”. Therefore, when we write, the easy fallback position is to pair those two qualities together.

But The Fugitive shows how much fun it can be to separate the two: U. S. Marshal Gerard could not be more determined to catch Richard Kimble, and the standard way to show that would be to render him increasingly angry and humorless. Indeed, on first glance, we might describe Gerard that way, but one closer inspection it’s not true.

Tommy Lee Jones won an Oscar for this movie, which is astounding, because this sort of part would never normally be nominated. As is so often the case, Jones hadn’t just acted the hell out of the script, he had also tweaked the dialogue in subtle ways. You might assume that Jones would crank up Gerard’s intensity to amplify his dramatic impact, but no: All the great badass lines were already in the script (such as “I-don’t-bargain.”), According to Davis’s DVD commentary, Jones’s additions were almost always technical jargon or goofy asides, such as “We’ve got a gopher” (“Here’s another Tommy line. He’s always looking for goofiness.”) Other Jones lines included “Think me up a donut” and, most famously, “I don’t care!”.

What makes this movie so wonderfully rewatchable is the lovable-but-hyper-competent camaraderie amongst the marshals. They’ve discovered something that no other movie heroes seem to know: you don’t have to be grim to be determined. Indeed, one thing that makes them so scary is that they do such impressive work without getting upset about it. They’re used to working this hard, and they trust themselves to do this. This is a challenging day at the office, but it’s ultimately just that, and there’s no reason to break their routine. As it plays out, that feels utterly bad-ass...and utterly refreshing for audiences tired of lazy “first choice” characterization.

(By the way, I never saw the semi-sequel U.S. Marshals. Did anybody? Is it any good?)