Institute for Robert Downey Jr Studies > Editorials

The Complex Brilliance of Robert Downey Jr. in Ally McBeal

The Golden Globe that Robert Downey Jr. won for Ally McBeal and the loving reception that met him when he accepted it in January, allowed the show business community to display its support for him in the midst of his legal troubles. And though it’s gratifying that the prevailing tone toward Mr. Downey these days is sympathetic rather than snide, the focus, understandably, has gone off his acting.

At the least, his performance as the lawyer Larry Paul, the current man in Ally’s life, has been taken for granted. But it’s a pity to let the tabloid side of the Downey story upstage the fact that he has been steadily providing, most Monday evenings on Fox, a small-screen equivalent of the performances that, in movies like Chaplin, Two Girls and a Guy, and One Night Stand, have shown him to be the most gifted actor of his generation. Mr. Downey’s astonishing work on Ally McBeal may be as good as anything anyone has done on a television series.

It began as a deft, debonair combination of ‘70s-style analysand comedy (the kind Woody Allen made popular) and ‘30s-style screwball. In the self-consciously wacky, implausible manner typical of David E. Kelley’s show, Ally (Calista Flockhart), in the throes of a romantic dilemma in the season opener, visits her therapist—only to find that she’s closed down her practice, leaving Ally’s file conspicuously behind, and that Larry Paul is now occupying the premises. Mistaking his interest in her troubles for professional solicitude, Ally seeks his advice, learning only at the end of the episode that he’s a fellow lawyer.

In these scenes, what we pay attention to are Mr. Downey’s wit and vocal style: the weird, accelerated vocal rhythms; the way he reconfigures punctuation, ramming together sentences and throwing in odd, unexpected breaks, as if he were trying to invent a whole new vocabulary for male-female communication. He’s telling us that something new is needed to get us across the hurdle of the gender gap; that’s what you read in his face, which offers ironic commentary—sometimes comically befuddled, sometimes compassionate—on his own lines or on Ms. Flockhart’s. The deep gaze he offers whenever she speaks, broken up only by rabbity thrusts of his head as if he were working hard to follow her thoughts, is a turn-on. You can see where these two have to end up: what woman wouldn’t respond to a man who listens to her with such absolute concentration?

Three episodes later, she hires him to defend her in a nuisance case and, after a brief game of cat and mouse, winds up dating him. Eventually she learns that he comes with considerable baggage: his resistance to Christmas masks a longing for the son he rarely sees—his touchstone for the rituals of the season—because the boy lives with his mother (Famke Janssen) in Detroit. By the time the show dispatched Larry to spend an unspecified period of time with his son (he returned for the end of February sweeps), Mr. Downey’s character had revealed depths that the first couple of episodes never hinted at.

But whatever may have been Mr. Kelley’s plans for Larry at the outset, the choice to complicate him is a natural outgrowth of the casting, because there’s no such thing as an uncomplicated moment in a Robert Downey performance. His impulse is always to play two emotions, usually opposite ones, at the same time, and when he’s really swinging he can play three - an acting feat so prodigious that it’s tough to think of anyone else who’s pulled it off, besides Lily Tomlin in her formidable one-woman shows.

In one scene, for example, early in Larry’s courtship of Ally, he escorts her home after a date. She waits excitedly for what will be their first kiss, but as he approaches her, touching her hair, his knotted eyes suggest a reticence pulling against his obvious attraction to her. Then, instead of kissing her lips, he thrusts his head back suddenly and plants one, companionably, on her forehead. The next day he explains that he senses this relationship could be right for both of them and that he doesn’t want to wreck it by going too fast, and we realize that, yes, we saw caution in that moment, a sudden application of the brake pedal. But we saw something else, too— anguish, perhaps mixed with terror.

The writing in these early episodes emphasizes Ally’s messed-up romantic history and the possibility that she’s forgotten how to trust her own ability to love. And Ms. Flockhart is lovely in these scenes; Mr. Downey’s partnering grounds her, whisking her joyously off those impossible whipped-cream clouds on which the cutesy writing and arch style of the show have stranded her since its inception. But it’s Larry Paul’s so-far unstated neurosis, his character’s mysterious deep background, that we’re mainly drawn to.

When Larry tells Ally about his son, the level at which Mr. Downey’s performance functions elevates the banality of the language. What he says is that when she has a child, she’ll be amazed at her capacity for loving someone— lines we’ve heard a thousand times before. But there’s a mysterious beauty to Mr. Downey’s reading of them, not only in his application of what William Gillette called “the illusion of the first time”—the actor’s trick of making the lines sound as if they were newly minted— but more movingly in Larry’s struggle to admit to feelings that he tends to submerge because they call up so much loss. Mr. Downey plays this moment as if Larry’s emotions were drizzling down through something heavy and immovable inside him. He sits down at the piano and, after a few false starts on Christmas carols whose sentiments he can’t handle, sings Joni Mitchell’s River, with its rueful portrait of a Christmas scotched by an unfixable lovers’ quarrel. Mr. Downey’s hoarse, reaching-for-falsetto voice and his distended rock-and-roll phrasing, and the pain that comes through his constricted facial muscles, lend the song a throbbing poignancy.

Ally McBeal, in its fourth season, remains a problematic series. But the addition of Mr. Downey, followed by the inspired casting of Anne Heche as a teacher with Tourette’s syndrome who matches up with Peter MacNicol’s John Cage, has given it a singular status. Amid its irritating comic posturings are now, positioned at regular intervals, romantic explorations that are genuinely unconventional rather than just quirky (just as Mr. Downey brings out the best in Ms. Flockhart, Ms. Heche does the same for Mr. MacNicol— as anyone knows who watched their devastating break-up scene in the last episode.) I still don’t respond to most of Ally McBeal, but now I wouldn’t dream of missing it.