Sunday Best: Rest in Peace David Warner

 

photo by Rory Lewis

David Warner passed away on July 24th.  For as long as I've been watching movies, David Warner has been a presence in the background.

One thing that always impressed me about Warner was that even though he was trained in the Royal Shakespeare Company, he was not someone who reserved his talent only for "prestige" movies.  He could be found in high-brow drama, low-brow comedy and everything in between.  He would use his considerable gravitas as an actor in all situations, twisting the narrative to his will.

When I say he had gravitas, I don't use that word lightly.  Whenever he was on the screen he always seemed to be the most important person in the room.  His English accent carried with it always a tone of knowledgable menace.  Perhaps that's why they cast him to play the agelessly evil Ra's al Ghul in Batman: The Animated Series.  I must confess that whenever I read a comic book with Ra's, I always here Warner's voice, especially when he calls the Dark Knight "Detective."  He also provided the voice for Jor-El in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

As I wrote, Warner was not snobby about the work he did.  He found himself in bloody controversial films like Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs.  He would also do B-movie horror like the bat horror film Nightwing.  I can remember seeing him in silly films like The Man with Two Brains, My Best Friend is a Vampire and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.  In this last one, I can still see him dancing in the crowd as Vanilla Ice rapped "Go ninja, go ninja, go!"

The general public probably would recognize him best as Cal's Valet in Titanic.  Fans of science fiction will recognize him from his two appearances in Star Trek films: The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country.  In each film, he played very different characters, which is a testament more to his skill than to the amazing makeup effects.  But one of his biggest sci-fi roles was as Dillinger/Sark/Master Control Program in TRON.  He infuses all of these characters with his unique flavor of condescending arrogance, but Warner was smart enough to play them all slightly differently.  The MCP is a cold being that thinks of itself as purely logical, but revels in its power.  Dillinger is a man who is over his head and slowly realizes that he is powerless.  Sark seems like a one-note villain, but we can see that this is a facade.  When the MCP tells him to take on a User (the gods to the programs), you can see his hesitation and palpable religious terror.

But for my money, there are three David Warner performances that will always stay with me and are the best testament to his legacy.

The first is the part of Evil in Time Bandits.  This is a strange movie that seemed very simple to me when I saw it as a child.  Warner's Evil is a stand in for the Devil, but one that is tied to the idea of technology.  To my childlike eyes, he was horrific and horrible; he was everything I imagined evil to be.  As I got older I was surprised by the level of biting humor found in Warner's performance.  One of the funniest moments in any movie I have seen occur when Evil surrounded by his lackeys in his fortress of infinite darkness.  He has just destroyed one of his followers for suggesting that God created him.  And then another asks, "Why, if that's the case, have you remained in this fortress?"  I will not spoil it, but I have rewatched this moment over and over again and it remains hysterical.

The second role is that of Jack the Ripper in Time After Time.  When I think of Warner, this is the first thing I think of.  He plays a psychotic genius, 19th century English doctor who finds himself in 1970's San Francisco.  It is amazing to me how he never acts falsely to his roots but fits right in.  When confronted by the hero, HG Wells, Warner expresses genuine enjoyment at his presence, like two old friends sparring over chess.  But he has with him the bearing of someone who could easily cut your throat.  All the while, he has a charisma that almost makes you want to earn his approval.  You can see this in the way Wells interacts with him.  Warner projects intelligence, power, and menace in everything he does.

But the best performance of his career was in the two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Chain of Command."  In this episode, Captain Picard is captured by Cardassians, where he is subject to increasingly cruel tortures by Warner's Gul Madred.  In a performance that could have been a one-note brute, Warner created a character that was equally hateful, sympathetic, cruel, likable, commanding, and diabolical.  It is one of the truly great television performances.  Putting on the Cardassian makeup sometimes causes people to over-act or sometimes you can feel the actor's sense of embarrassment.  But Warner wears the makeup like a Shakespearean costume.  Nothing about it seems false.

Watch the episodes and you will see a master at the peak of his craft who takes his fantastical Sci-Fi surroundings as seriously as anything else because he found the humanity in the performance.  Everything about him is terrifying and he is out to break Picard, and by extension the viewer.  And yet, he shows so much tenderness to his daughter that you don't find a single note of menace when he speaks to her.  His monologues are so vivid that I can still see the images he conjured.  He describes a time he found these disgusting raw eggs as a child and how it was like finding treasure because he was starving.  I can still hear the shameful excitement in his voice as he speaks and the horror when he realizes he has overshared.

The entire episode is a battle fo wills between himself and Picard.  His final interaction is still burned into my memory.  He holds complete control and so believably brings Picard and the audience to the breaking point.  But you can see his facade finally break when he is ordered by his captain to release Picard and he is robbed of his final victory.  The fact that there is a small part of me that is sad for Gul Madred is a testament to Warner's ability to insert his charisma and humanity into this villain.

Warner died from complications resulting from lung cancer.  He was married and divorced twice and is survived by one daughter.

I know little else about his personal life.  But I will pray for his soul.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.  May his soul and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.  Amen.

Rest in Peace, David Warner