A plague called irony

Average height, average build, average, slightly pale looks. A dry, self-deprecating style of speaking. At first sight, Edward Norton may not look like the hottest, hippest young movie star in the world. But, even if he doesn't appreciate the label, that's what he is. In the four years since making his movie debut, Norton has been in six films, received two Oscar nominations, and been hailed as the great white hope of his acting generation. Some of those movies have been better than others, all have been interesting at least. More importantly, the 30-year-old actor has emerged from each one with his reputation enhanced.

In his first film, Primal Fear, a relatively humdrum courtroom drama was raised out of the ordinary by a brilliantly achieved twist in his role, as a young vagrant accused of murder. He turned in charming performances in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You and The People vs Larry Flynt, before changing gear entirely to play an amoral cardsharp in Rounders and a racist killer in American History X. Last year, he took the lead in David Fincher's provocative, controversial black comedy, Fight Club, as a young corporate wage slave who forsakes the dubious pleasures of Ikea and designer coffee for a life of streetfighting and urban terrorism.

It's a long way from Fight Club to the gentle romantic comedy of Keeping the Faith, Norton's directing debut, in which he takes the self-effacing role of an Irish-American priest, leaving most of the fireworks to his co-stars, Ben Stiller and Jenna Elfman. Was it a deliberate decision to choose something so gentle? "Not everything I've done has been too hard-boiled," he points out. "Sometimes I've got that question because it's a natural angle for journalists. But I don't think audiences come to movies so analytically. When you sit down to watch Midnight Run or Analyze This, you don't sit there saying `Oh it's awfully strange to see De Niro being funny', you just go with it, and afterwards you go `I loved seeing him like that'."

The reference is appropriate - Norton has been compared more than once to the young Robert De Niro, especially since American History X, in which his portrayal of a neo-Nazi skinhead reminded many viewers of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. The "best actor of his generation" tag is likely to be rolled out again with the release of The Score, the movie he's currently shooting in Canada, in which his co-stars are De Niro and an icon of another era, Marlon Brando. He accepts that the breadth of the roles he has taken may be unusual, but certainly not unique.

"I do that kind of work because the stories I find challenging are where the characters travel a distance," he says. "But mainstream Hollywood cinema has been pretty dynamic in the last couple of years. Someone said to me that I'm becoming a flagbearer for my generation of actors. That's nonsense. There's always a media need to write `Best of', just because it's not good copy to write `a very good actor among many other very good actors'. But there are a lot of very good people doing good work."

But there must be some pressure to conform to the requirements of what the industry requires, which is identifiable stars, not chameleon-like actors?

"People talk about a star system, but there's no such thing as a career path in which the actor is not complicit," he says. "There's no system anymore. Nobody's under contract, and nobody can dictate to anybody what they should do. So if someone wants to take on that kind of iconic persona that's their choice. The business side of the industry likes to have these known quantities to rely on, and some people are happy to fill those roles. I don't think it's so much that I've eluded that niche, but some people make choices which end up with them being a safe, bankable bet. It's a question of what impulses you have."

He hopes to be in Ireland next spring to work with writer/director Conor McPherson on a film which Neil Jordan is producing for the DreamWorks studio. "I'd love to do it, but there's all that usual stuff about getting the studio to do it the right way," he says. "It's tentatively called The Actor and it's a wonderful kind of a farce, almost like Tootsie, about a young, not very good actor, who works as a dresser for an older, famous has-been actor in his regional company, touring Shakespeare. He's playing sword-carrier number two roles and trying to decide if he's cut out for a life in the theatre. It involves him being able to play all these different characters brilliantly in real life, but he's never able to translate it into his work on the stage." Coming from a wealthy family, with a Yale education behind him, Norton's story is hardly a rags-to-riches one; everything seems to have come remarkably easily to him, I suggest. "I don't know about that," he argues. "When I did Primal Fear, someone said something to my mother about overnight success, and she said `Yeah, overnight and 20 years.' She witnessed the years off-Broadway and doing college theatre and community theatre. For me, it's a phase in a long continuum. I think more than anything, it's the fact that when I started working in films I did a whole bunch of films that all came out at once, so it seemed like I'd emerged fully formed. But that's uncommon only because it's unusual for someone as little-known as I was to get a role as good as the one in Primal Fear."

LIGHT and frothy as Keeping the Faith is, its theme of twentysomething arrogance colliding with reality clearly has some personal resonances. "When I showed the script to Milos Forman (his director on Larry Flynt, who takes a small role in this film), he said that I had to forget that it's a rabbi and a priest. If they weren't a rabbi and a priest, what would this movie be about? I said I thought it was about turning 30, or reaching that stage where certain assumptions about yourself, which you've reached a little too confidently, get shaken up and you have to evolve into a slightly more mature, humble understanding of your own condition, an awareness that you're always going to be developing, changing and not getting too set in the ideas borne of your own early success. Irrespective of quote-unquote success, I think that's something a lot of people coming to that point in life can relate to.

"Ben Stiller (who plays the rabbi) is the bronzed god, for whom everything, including faith, has come a little too easily. In the movie he doesn't really become a rabbi until he has to apologise to the people he's leading. You are not going to be the person you want to be until you put a little faith in other people."

The line reminds me of the closing scene of Woody Allen's Manhattan, another New York-set film, but with considerably more neurotic characters than Keeping the Faith, where Allen's young lover (Mariel Hemingway) tells him exactly the same thing. "Right, and the irony of that is that Woody always sets himself up as a character who at the end of the day is reluctant to do exactly that. Because when she says that line, the last line is really his look, which is saying `Mmm . . . I don't know." That's what I find beautiful. The scepticism in Woody as a person, and maybe even the dysfunction, he rises above all that in his art, which is more hopeful."

He admires the way in which Allen has created his own portrait of New York City, and tried to do the same thing in Keeping the Faith, but his main inspiration was classic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, such as The Philadelphia Story. "I liked the idea of combining screwball comedy with substantive real issues. Not in too preachy a way, but it kind of humanised them. I've gotten a little tired of irony as a comic device for deflecting vulnerability. Irony has in some ways become the plague of our generation, and I like these characters for the fact that they aren't dealing with their dilemmas by deflecting them through self-conscious, glib irony. They confront their vulnerabilities head on."

Keeping the Faith is on general release