Life in A Big Glass

By RICHARD CORLISS

Gerard Depardieu, France's best and best-known actor, is a glutton for adventure. He eats with two hands, acts with both fists. Onscreen he radiates wild energy, acting from his capacious gut, whispering or raging as the role allows and the moment demands. He embodies the primal male caged in modern society, ever raising the ante on his own anarchic instincts. To call him a bear of a man is to give bears too much credit; they have not his strut, his growl, his formidable charisma. It is said that when French bears see a particularly imposing member of their species, they exclaim, "Ah, mon Dieu! Un Depardieu!"

To older American moviegoers, the archetypal Frenchman was a suave seducer: Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer, Louis Jourdan. But French audiences preferred men of the earth -- Raimu, Jean Gabin, Jean-Paul Belmondo -- to men of the world. Depardieu, 42, is cut from this rough cloth. This versatile actor can play comical, tragical and historical, as well as pastoral, but his most famous roles are as peasants: the duped Jean de Florette, the mysterious Martin Guerre, the noble Olmo in Bertolucci's 1900. He has assayed the holy fools of French history and literature: Danton, Tartuffe and, in a recent triumph playing in the U.S., Cyrano de Bergerac.

"He is the heir of Jean Gabin -- the soul of France," says Bertrand Blier, writer-director of six Depardieu films, including the Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and the new Merci la Vie. "Like all the great talents, Gerard is a raw talent -- art brut. They learn a little technique doing theater, but the rest is inside them. Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Mastroianni: he's in that great class." Like those actors, Depardieu is capable of melodramatic excess; to give all is sometimes to give too much. But also like them, he has set an indelible stamp on his country's films, defining current French cinema as fully as any auteur.

Now he has set his sights on America, with his first Hollywood film, Green Card. In this featherweight comedy he is a French musician looking for residence status and finding love and sweet sorrow with Andie MacDowell in exotic Manhattan. For Depardieu, though, the piece is just a five-finger exercise. Director Peter Weir, who wrote the film for the actor, is looking for charm -- any star can manufacture that -- without Depardieu's scary power. The bear is reduced to a puppy dog.

Close up, offscreen, Depardieu gives you the charm and the power. The man can swagger sitting down. His lank hair, which looks as if he swiped it from a schoolgirl who has played hooky all year long, frames a huge face -- bulbous nose and ship-prow chin dominating the small, lively eyes. Devouring a steak over lunch at the swank George V hotel in Paris, he cascades opinions on any subject, from Dostoyevsky to David Letterman, punctuating his effusions with grand, intense gestures. When a waitress arrives to pour the St. Pourcain, Depardieu proffers the larger of his two stem glasses. "But, Monsieur, that's for the water," she admonishes. "No, no," replies the proud owner of vineyards in Burgundy and Anjou, "I like wine in a big glass."

Depardieu, who has two children, 19 and 17, with his wife Elizabeth, also likes life in a big glass. As a child, though, he drank too much too soon -- so much so that his early years play like a more desperate version of his first hit film, Going Places, in which he was a petty thief and vicious womanizer. The son of an illiterate weaver in the nowhere town of Chateauroux, young Gerard stole cars and sold black-market cigarettes and whiskey to American soldiers at a nearby Army base. He carried a gun at school. "But that was a child's game," he shrugs. "I just had the gun a week, to show it to my friends." And what of his story that at nine he participated in his first rape? "Yes." And after that, there were many rapes? "Yes," he admits, "but it was absolutely normal in those circumstances. That was part of my childhood."

In this childhood Gerard was predator as well as victim, yet it created in him an ache for advancement. He quit school at 15 and, through copious, self- administered doses of Dostoyevsky, soon fell under the spell of language. It was love at first sentence. "I first read so that I could communicate," he says. "But the difference in social classes was so enormous! If you come from a background like mine, you aren't able to speak. No one says, 'I love you.' Everyone screams, cries or is afraid. When I arrived in my first drama class and heard the words Je t'aime, I thought, 'There are people who can say that!' "

For a time, Depardieu could say nothing. "I lost the power to speak," he recalls. "I was dumb, from hyperemotion, and because I felt overwhelmed by everything I was reading. I was able to find words by speaking out loud the words I was reading. And it was then, at that moment, that everything became unblocked. It was like a second birth." Since then he has spoken the French of Rostand and Moliere on screens around the world. In Green Card he speaks English, heavily garnished but with assurance. He can even tell when he has been insulted by a TV-talk-show host. "Letterman is very fast, very cynical, very sarcastic. I don't mind that. I don't need to be intelligent or not intelligent. There are moments I am a complete idiot, and others when I'm less of an idiot. That's all."

The Idiot. Who wrote that book? No matter: Gerard Depardieu could play the part. He has the appetite for it.

With reporting by Victoria Foote-Greenwell/Paris