When Michael Madsen died, the first movie I thought of was Free Willy.
You read that right: Free Willy, the 1993 feel-good drama about an orphan boy named Jesse (Jason James Richter) who befriends an orca trapped in an aquarium and plots to break him out and release him into the ocean. Madsen’s performance as the hero’s foster father, Glen Greenwood, is an example of the range Madsen rarely got to show. His career was defined by greedy, smug, hot-tempered, sadistic and otherwise villain-coded characters that turned his smile to malevolent ends. Glen in Free Willy is a basically decent, not-too-eloquent guy who owns a tow truck and is married to a schoolteacher named Annie (Jayne Atkinson). It’s a movie about a kid who saves a whale. But it’s also about a kid who thinks he doesn’t deserve love finding it. And it’s about a man who never saw himself as father material learning how to be a dad and turning out to be good at it.
I saw Free Willy when it came out. A coworker asked me how it was. I told him I was surprised by how much I loved it, and that Madsen’s performance was the best thing in it.
“Michael Madsen is in Free Willy?” my coworker asked me, laughing. “What does he do, tie the whale to a chair and cut its ear off?”
That was a reference, of course, to the role that put Madsen on the map: in Quentin Tarantino’s debut film Reservoir Dogs, where he plays Mr. Blonde, the psycho who starts randomly killing people during a jewelry store heist, kidnaps a young cop, brings him to the gang’s warehouse hideout, ties him to a chair, and tortures him with a razor while dancing to “Stuck in the Middle With You.” Mr. Blonde has no reason to do this besides hating cops and loving to watch people suffer. The instant that scene unfolded it was clear it was to Reservoir Dogs as the shower scene was to Psycho, and that would be thought of as the defining moment in Madsen’s career until something else displaced it.
Nothing ever did. My colleague’s joke about Madsen torturing the whale showed that, barely a year into his tenure as a somewhat-known screen actor, he had already been typecast — fruitfully so, for fans of action and crime films. Madsen worked several more times with Tarantino, always playing morally compromised (or simply amoral) characters, in the Kill Bill films, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. He stood out in hard-edged, often hypermasculine movies by other filmmakers, including Donnie Brasco, playing brutal mob boss Sonny Black, and Sin City, in which he and Mickey Rourke were the cast members who best embodied the spirit of 1940s and ‘50s noir. Madsen also got to star in an incredible number of mostly awful suspense, action and gangster pictures, the majority of which went straight to video, and that I’d rather not even get into here (except to say that the hostage drama The Killing Jar is worth seeing, if only to watch Madsen channel Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest).
Madsen, who was found dead yesterday of congestive heart failure at his home in Malibu, was a superb and prolific actor. His sister Virginia Madsen matched him in talent and dedication, and they had a mutual respect that went beyond shared DNA. Upon his death, she released a statement calling him “mischief wrapped in tenderness” and “a poet disguised as an outlaw.”
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I wish we’d gotten to know more of the poet — Madsen literally was a poet, publishing several volumes of Charles Bukowski-esque verse — and seen more of the tenderness. But that’s showbiz. I love Madsen as a tough guy, a killer, a thief, a monster. He’s often great even when the movie is terrible. As many times as I’ve seen Reservoir Dogs, I still feel a chill when Mr. Blonde shows up in the warehouse in his Ray-Bans, cooly sipping a soda as a man lies dying on the floor. That face is the one you see when you’re at your absolute lowest and realize it’s all over but the bleeding.
Masdsen told The Hollywood Reporter he worried that he’d been “more believable” in violent roles “than I should have been. I think people really fear me. They see me and go: ‘Holy s—, there’s that guy!’ But I’m not that guy. I’m just an actor. I’m a father, I’ve got seven children. I’m married, I’ve been married for 20 years. When I’m not making a movie, I’m home, in pajamas, watching ‘The Rifleman’ on TV, hopefully with my 12-year-old making me a cheeseburger.”
Free Willy grossed almost $150 million, nearly eight times its budget, and inspired a sequel, a TV series, and other spinoff material. A part of me hoped Free Willy would propel Madsen into a career like the ones his contemporaries Kevin Costner and Bruce Willis had, where could play a lot of different kinds of people, not just ones who were comfortable with violence.
If Madsen had never been in Reservoir Dogs and gone straight to Free Willy, would he have had a very different but equally successful career, and done a wider array of parts? The Free Willy movies are a glimpse of an alternate reality. Madsen knows exactly who Glen is. He gives him dignity by eradicating cheap sentiment. What’s left is honest emotion. Glen agrees to take in Jesse mainly to please his wife Annie (Jayne Atkinson), a schoolteacher. When he’s signing paperwork brought over by Jesse’s social worker Dwight (Mykelti Williamson), Dwight jokes that when he bought a car recently, he had to fill out 37 pages of paperwork. “Well, this is a lease,” Glen says as he signs custody papers, “I ain’t buying yet.”
Of course by the end of the movie, Glen is all-in. The climax of the plot is on the poster: Willy jumping a seawall, sailing above Jesse as he cheers him on. But the peak of the film’s human story happens earlier when Glen, who’s been racing around with Annie on the night of the aquarium bust-out, finally locates Jesse, and rather than order him to give up his crazy scheme and go home, he helps him. “There’s a ten-foot length of chain in the seat behind the truck. Go get it.” Madsen has played the role so well that you know what Glen really means: “I love you because you’re my son, and I’ll always be in your corner.” It’s in the eyes, and in the matter-of-fact way Madsen says the line. He’s just a regular guy, doing what his heart tells him.
