In anticipation of his latest movie, 'Mr. Woodcock,' we revisit some of Billy Bob Thornton's greatest hits

By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

"A hillbilly Orson Welles," pronounced an admiring James Earl Jones, who starred in "A Family Thing" (1996), one of Billy Bob Thornton's first filmed scripts. Beneath that laconic, laid-back, good-ole-boy style, Thornton burns bright and hot with talent -- as writer, director, actor and musician. Classic directors John Ford, John Huston and Billy Wilder are his creative touchstones -- and he has a sweet tooth for Southern-lit luminaries William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Erskine Caldwell.

On-screen, Billy Bob's got game in comedy and drama, playing buffoons and hipsters, dead souls and sensei, slow-witted Quasimodos and Arkansas hayseeds who amble through movies with hip-shot country-boy grace.

His is not a pretty face -- not the kind of plasticine physiognomy that makes so many movie stars as desirable as Ken dolls. Lee Marvin's the model, a tough guy whose idiosyncratic mug reflected hard living and an authentically unique identity. In the Coen brothers' "The Man Who Wasn't There," the gaunt, deeply scored landscape of Thornton's face recalls the terrible beauty of the young Boris Karloff. And like Karloff, he can look the angel -- sweetness personified or dangerous as Lucifer.

As an actor, Billy Bob's greatest gift is stillness. "People think the hard thing for an actor is crying and screaming, but that's easy," he once remarked. "What's hard is a character who never tips his hand, who toes the line all the time. The hard stuff is never telling yourself, 'Hey, I better do something here.'" Through this wired self-possession, Thornton makes himself the eye of any dramatic storm or comedic action. The movie simply arranges itself around him.

Like most actors, his track record's uneven; as actor/writer/director, he does go slumming sometimes -- witness "Daddy and Them," "Waking Up in Reno," and "School for Scoundrels." But, with a passel of creative lives left to write, direct and play, this cool cat's still got time and space to stretch, and he returns to comedy with "Mr. Woodcock." On "Beautiful Door," his latest CD, Billy Bob gravels out a blues song called "I Gotta Grow Up": in it, a girl opines that "guys like me were a genre ... that was really getting old." No worry, old son, good sippin' whiskey just improves with age.

10. "The Alamo" (2004)
The film's a misfire on almost every front, but Thornton, as Davy Crockett, is so good that you wish somebody would airlift him out of the Alamo and set him down in his own biopic. From the get-go, Crockett's totally conscious of how myth has imprisoned him so that he can't live -- or die -- as an ordinary man: "If it were just me, I might be inclined to slip over the wall and take my chances ... but they're all watching this Davy Crockett feller." Clean-shaven with shoulder-length brown hair, Thornton looks the part of a sly, good-natured backwoodsman improbably elevated to the U.S. Congress ("the fellers made sport of me ... never learned to lie") and impersonated in theatricals by coonskin-capped actors. He's no slouch as a performer himself: David, as he prefers to be called, mesmerizes his fellow soldiers hunkered down around a campfire by recounting the awful details of an Indian massacre. Evening after evening, he listens to Santa Anna's regimental band perform the "Deguelo" ("Cutthroat Song"), signaling no quarter for the Alamo's besieged. Finally, grinning like a loon, Crockett takes his fiddle to the ramparts, bowing such a sweet melody he silences the band and even draws smiles from the Mexicans. Just as Thornton can make decency credible and charming, he's capable of grand gestures that transcend irony.

9. "One False Move" (1992)
The juicy script of this crime movie cum character study was penned by Thornton and longtime Arkansas buddy Tom Epperson. Billy Bob plays Southern white trash to the hilt, dolled up in dirty T-shirt and shiny jacket, sporting tacky earring, lank ponytail and bald spot. For money, he'll pour gas over a girl and threaten to light her up, though he can't compete with the viciousness of his partner Pluto's ice-water executions. Seemingly in thrall to his luscious girlfriend (Cynda Williams, one of Thornton's five wives), he runs hot and cold: falling on her so lustfully in a motel room, he's indifferent to Pluto watching from the next bed; then, later, crowding her, slowly slicing an apple with a switchblade, baiting: "Think I was gonna cut you?" This is dark-side Thornton sans charm, purely dumb, dangerous scum.

8. "Friday Night Lights" (2004) / "Bad News Bears" (2005)
In "Friday Night Lights," Thornton plays a high school football coach in a Texas community that's well-nigh psychotic over winning the state championship. For many of the players, success on the field means a ticket out of Nowheresville, while failure consigns them to an empty future. The still, calm center of this emotional sturm und drang, Thornton's coach projects beleaguered but rock-solid integrity, refusing to kowtow to boorish fanatics, browbeat his already-overburdened boys or lose sight of the game as a potential test of character and courage. "Lights" may not have the courage of any convictions -- it nails the toxic nature of small-town football (especially in Texas) while simultaneously exploiting its rah-rah razzle-dazzle -- but Billy Bob keeps his eye on the ball, never tricking out his quiet hero for cheap cheers.

Morris Buttermaker, Bad Santa's stepbrother (see below), poisons rats, swills beer and pretends to coach a Little League baseball team composed of the most god-awful misfits, including a wheelchair-bound tubby. "Baseball's hard," this unflappable sleaze lectures his "Bad News Bears." "You can love it, but that don't mean it'll love you back. Kinda like lovin' a German chick." Thornton does Walter Matthau's Buttermaker proud in this remake, evolving from authentic numb bum to real live wire without surrendering one iota of his bad-boy charm.

7. "The Astronaut Farmer" (2006)
No sign of Bad Boy Billy Bob in this low-key heart-warmer about a middle-aged farmer trying to regain the dream he lost years ago when his dad's suicide forced him out of astronaut training. Thornton never milks his rocket-builder for laughs or sentiment. So there's uncondescending magic in the film's opening shots of Farmer, clad in a silver space suit, riding his horse through his fields in the soft pre-dawn light. His astronaut wannabe is a foursquare Heartlander, topped by graying brush-cut and given to sweet, easy smiles with just a hint of melancholy. His wife (Virginia Madsen, glowing) and children adore him, charmed and sustained by his faith in the big silver bullet out in the barn -- and though the local townsfolk don't make his launch any easier, it's clear that, push come to shove, his idealism has infected them all. Admittedly pure Capra-corn, but Thornton brings such matter-of-fact hope and despair and triumph to his impossible journey (and role), he turns the film golden.

6. "Pushing Tin" (1999)
"Tin" means airplanes, and ace flight controllers John Cusack and Billy Bob compete in pushing them into tail-to-nose landing patterns. Thornton's Russell Bell exudes dangerous samurai cool under pressure, a Zen state he reportedly achieved by standing below the belly of a descending 747 and getting blown ass-over-teacup in the majorly turbulent wake of its landing. Bell's super-stillness, his flat-eyed disdain for games of one-upmanship, affects Cusack's jittery hipster like an overdose of speed. The man in black (T-shirt, leather jacket, cowboy boots) becomes a walking provocation to his colleague -- and a sex magnet for Angelina Jolie, slinking around in ebony mane and body-hugging hooker duds. Talk about your sexual chemistry ... as Thornton croons "Muskrat Love," La Jolie backs herself up to him and makes like ivy. In the heart of all that heat, Billy Bob, ever the Arkansas stud, just chills.

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