RIP Robert Forster, One of the Good Ones

Reflections of a Golden Eye Forster: #hubbahubba

When beloved character actor Robert Forster died recently and was warmly remembered as a gentleman and an artist, a profoundly talented actor and a kind and decent human being, his breakthrough role in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool wasn’t mentioned as prominently as I had imagined it would be, given the groundbreaking New Hollywood masterpiece’s richly merited reputation as an Important Motion Picture that captured the zeitgeist of the times like few films before or since. 

Forster spent his career happily playing supporting roles and character parts but he was unmistakably the star of Medium Cool with the possible exception of writer-director and superstar cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who created a new kind of American cinema with an incendiary manifesto that combined drama and activism and documentary in revolutionary ways. 

I suspect that Forster’s central presence in a key film of the 1960s wasn’t mentioned as often as his roles in Jackie Brown and Twin Peaks in part because the Forster of Medium Cool is a decidedly different animal than the elegant, warm, avuncular older gentleman we fondly eulogized when he passed recently at 77. 

The Forster of Medium Cool is almost disconcertingly sexy, a brooding young hunk in a furious hurry to make his mark on the world. He’s arrogant and narcissistic and intense in a manner I imagine owes much more to Wexler, Medium Cool’s writer, director and guiding spirit, than the actor playing him. 

The Forster we remember, the Forster of the public imagination, is not the hot-blooded stud of Medium Cool but rather the warm, paternal mensch of 1997’s Jackie Brown, a man of character and integrity, a man who had lived and had the stories and the scars to prove it. 

Like all great character actors, Forster was a character himself. The many years he spent in the professional wilderness added immeasurably to his performance in Jackie Brown, lending it a deeply lived-in sense of life and loss, experience and pain.  

The Robert Forster of Jackie Brown is the dad you wish you had, even if you have a winner like I do. He radiated decency and kindness from every pore. When Jackie Brown brought Forster back in a big way he was still very handsome but in a decidedly different way than in Medium Cool or his even sexier 1967’s screen debut Reflections in a Golden Eye, where he shared the screen with two icons of white-hot sexuality: Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. 

Forster looked his age in the best possible sense. Time was kind to Forster. He aged gracefully, with dignity. As an actor, Forster was blessed with effortless truth and authenticity. It didn’t matter how stupid or ridiculous the film was: Forster gave it his all. He was in many, many bad movies but he never delivered bad performances. It didn’t matter if Forster was a supporting actor in a ridiculous jock fantasy about an orphan who acquires Michael Jordan’s magical basketball shoes like Like Mike, or a South Korean science fiction movie about dragons, like 2007’s Dragon Wars: D-War; even in the stupidest of circumstances, in the dumbest conceivable movies, Forster lived his truth onscreen. He was real and authentic in an industry where those qualities are as rare as they are wonderful. 

Forster made a LOT of movies. Character actors act. That’s what they do. Even after Jackie Brown Forster seemingly appeared in everything he was offered, including a large number of short films he made in the final two decades of his career. 

A post-Jackie Brown Forster had northing to gain professionally by appearing in lots of short films in addition to big studio projects and prestige television like Breaking Bad and Twin Peaks. God knows Forster didn’t appear in short films for the money or attention. No, there’s only one reason a guy like Forster would agree to appear in short films when he didn’t have to appear in anything that didn’t compensate him, and compensate him handsomely for his time. The only reason a guy like Forster would appear in short films at that stage of his career is because he was a kind and empathetic human being who wanted to help other people realize their dreams the same he was able to live out his own.

So goodbye and thanks for everything, Robert Forster. The world will be a colder, less kind, less gentlemanly place in your absence just as it was enriched immeasurably by your blessed presence. 

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