The Hit List: Bruce Dern

"I like playing people that live just beyond 
  where the buses run."
  Bruce Dern

   There's a moment in "Chappaquiddick" where Ted Kennedy, distraught and disoriented after going off the bridge, gets on the phone with his father to find out what he should do. "Alibi!" the old man hisses. "Alibi!" You don't see the old man. He's just a voice on the other end of the line. But the anger and contempt he conveys with that one word is unmistakable. So is the identity of the actor playing him. You know that voice. It's Bruce Dern.
    "Chappaquiddick" is a marginal movie, except for maybe two or three minutes, and they belong to Mr. Dern. Dern claims not to like the idea of "stealing a scene," but he does it all the time, and he's been doing it in movies for close to 60 years. It's an inescapable fact that when he's on screen , no matter how small the part or obscure the film, you pay attention to Bruce Dern. 
    He grew up in relative affluence on the outskirts of Chicago. His grandfather, George Dern, was FDR's first secretary of war. He angered his family by dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania to try acting in New York, where he auditioned his way into the Actor's Studio and came under the influence of Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. It was Kazan who gave him his first movie role, a small part in "Wild River" (1960), and he's been acting in films ever since. Here are a few of them:

"Silent Running" (1971/Douglas Trumbull)
An eco-sci-fi thriller with Dern as an astronaut caring for the earth's last forest, in space.
"The Cowboys" (1972/Mark Rydell)
Bruce at his nastiest. He shoots John Wayne.
"The Laughing Policeman" (1975/Stuart Rosenberg)
Dern and Walter Matthau play mismatched partners in a detective movie set in San Francisco.
"Smile" (1975/Michael Ritchie)
Dern plays a civic booster in Ritchie's subversive depiction of a teenage beauty pageant.
"Family Plot" (1976/Alfred Hitchcock)
Dern, Barbara Harris, William Devane and Karen Black play the four main characters in Hitchcock's final film. 
"Black Sunday" (1977/John Frankenheimer)
Dern plays a terrorist with big plans for the Super Bowl.
"Tattoo" (1981/Bob Brooks)
Dern's an obsessive tattoo artist. Maud Adams plays his canvas.
"On the Edge" (1986/Rob Nilsson)
Dern's perfectly cast as a blacklisted runner competing illegally in California's Dipsea Race.
"Wild Bill" (1995/Walter Hill)
Bruce does an eccentric bit as a crippled gunfighter who challenges Wild Bill Hickock  from his wheelchair. 
"Nebraska" (2013/Alexander Payne)
Dern got an Oscar nomination playing an old guy who embarks on a quixotic journey across the plains to redeem a sweepstakes ticket. 
"The Hateful Eight" (2015/Quentin Tarantino)
Bruce plays a Confederate general in Tarantino's snowbound, wide-screen western.

   If there's a common denominator in Dern's characters, it's that they're all a little desperate. They long for something more than they can ever hope to get, which hasn't stopped them from trying to get it. Some of them have rejected society completely. Others are convinced that society has rejected them, or are terrified that it will. Their wounds might be self-inflicted, but most of Dern's people are damaged. They exist on society's edges. They haunt the margins. They don't fit in perfectly anywhere. 
    Dern's a runner and has been since he was a kid. He ran track at Penn and came close to making the 1956 Olympic team. He's in his 80s now, and his goal, looking ahead, is to make it to 100, and to be able to run a mile and act in a movie when he gets there. That seems kind of ambitious, but why not? A career like Dern's is at least partly a product of endurance, and Dern himself has always viewed it that way. He's in for the long haul, and I wouldn't recommend betting against the guy. He could be stealing scenes for a long time yet.