AUGUSTUS (2003) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Roger Young
Peter O'Toole, Charlotte Rampling, Ken Durken,
Vittoria Belvedere, Benjamin Sadler, Anna Valle
Pick up any Peter O'Toole movie, and you can just about count on getting your money's worth, if not from the movie, then at least from O'Toole. In fact, what you get with O'Toole isn't just a performance, but two: the actor playing a character, usually several times larger than life, and the actor playing himself. O'Toole's not somebody who vanishes into a role. He's incapable of it. He doesn't become a character as much as he takes a character over and makes it become him. In this movie, O'Toole plays the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus, scheming, clinging to power, looking back on his life and plotting his succession at about the time B.C. becomes A.D. It's a potboiler filmed in Tunisia, and it provides the kind of outsized canvas on which O'Toole seems to do his most impressive work. It's not "I, Claudius", but still, it's O'Toole, at 70, hitting every mark, nailing every line, reaching for the rafters with a relish he's rarely bothered to contain and a precision that allows him to get away with it. It's hard to imagine O'Toole retiring till he's smoked his last Gauloise, but the emperor's death scene gives you the spooky sense that you're not just watching the curtain go down on Augustus. You're watching a great movie star - O'Toole playing himself - bow out, too.
