BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

The bridge of Owen Wilson’s nose is an hourglass of bone: twice-smashed and corseted by cartilage, it speaks of off-center sensibilities. First broken in high school and then again during flag football at the University of Texas, it will not be ignored. Brando’s broken nose only emphasized his beauty and Mickey Rourke literally effaced himself through facelifts and boxing, but Wilson simply kept himself interesting. This spin intensified the pleasure he took in playing Zoolander’s mindless male model Hansel. The assistant producer of As Good As It Gets and co-author of The Royal Tenenbaums and that mayapple masterpiece, Rushmore, Wilson can also croak. His looks are too eccentric to play straight. "I must look like a freak," he said, "but if I were to change it I would get so much grief from my brothers."

His onscreen confidence pivots on fraternal intimacy achieved through friction. The On The Road films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Odd Couple: this male yin/yang tradition remains captivating. One of three brothers, the 35-year-old Wilson excels only in a team. He first attracted Hollywood’s attention in 1996 with Bottle Rocket, the film he co-wrote with Wes Anderson and in which he and his brothers star. Like much of his other work, it is a koan about emotional context.

In Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights, Jackie Chan’s prideful anguish is balanced by Wilson’s boneless ease. "You’re wound so tight!" Roy O’Bannon (Wilson) exclaims. "You’re the most irritable guy I’ve been around!" Ben Stiller’s skills are also showcased by Wilson’s cleverly serrated edge. In Meet the Parents, Stiller’s Jewish character asks Wilson’s preppy character (Kevin) who inspired him to study carpentry. He coolly replies: "Jesus. I just figured, if you’re going to follow in someone’s footsteps, who better than Christ?"

Wilson’s nature is the deep black velvet on which other talents are arrayed. It is when cast as an individual that he flounders. His search for definition can be desperate. Confronted by paternal authority, he shrinks. In The Haunting, he visibly irritates Liam Neeson with his engagingly hostile insouciance. "Bastard!" he later flails, taking a candlestick to the portrait of the possessed mansion’s late master. "Son of a bitch! Damn you!" In Behind Enemy Lines, he (unconvincingly) plays the rebel to his father’s favorite actor, Gene Hackman. "You wouldn’t know the first thing about serving your country!" Hackman in uniform bellows. (Wilson manfully swallows, but looks just about ready to crack up.)

This said, he can also be perverse. In The Haunting, Lili Taylor really struggles when Wilson (unforgivably, inappropriately, hilariously) improvises: "It’s like those Teletubbies - those things freak me out also – and they sing, so they’re actually even kind of scary when you think about it ..."(Here his lips meet in a lopsided hiss of pleasure.) In Meet the Parents, his character smoothly demolishes Ben Stiller’s modest male nurse with a tour of his house. "Now, for the floor that you’re walking on, I chose this Brazilian wormwood ... I was really lucky I was able to salvage this wood from an old seaman’s chapel in Nantucket ..." He beams white spikes. "There are a lot of Benjamins to be made right now with the Biotech stuff … you know, I don’t have to tell you that … how’s your portfolio?"

He is at his worst in the military porn of Armageddon. Twenty-nine minutes into the film, Wilson appears in dust as a cowboy hat on horseback in silhouette. His brief? To play an eccentric and "brilliant" geologist. "They used somebody else for the faraway shot," Wilson said, "and then for the close-up, they had me on a barrel in the parking lot with a fan blowing on my hair, saying: Yah! Yah!" (A native Texan, he had never learned how to ride.) "I’ll tell you one thing that really drives me nuts," his character lamely announces, "is people who think that Jethro Tull is a person in a band."

Such gentle jokes fade in Armageddon’s testosterone wash (at one intensely painful juncture, Bruce Willis screams: "Dig! Dig! Dig! Chew this iron bitch up!") Unlike Willis, Wilson feels no need to punch strut shout. Aggression is not his element. He seems just as uneasy with Eddie Murphy in I Spy (a near-incomprehensible series of explosions and flashes of Famke Janssen’s thighs); Wilson’s slow, sure-footed irony is corroded by Murphy’s anger. "Owen is a nice guy," Chan wrote in his film diary. "He doesn’t like the idea of having to hit anybody, even if it is not real."

ROY (SHANGHAI KNIGHTS)

"You do that again, and you’re a dead man ... pillow fight!"

James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, As Good As It Gets) trusts Wilson’s capacity to wrangle success. "For somebody else, it could be they’d forget their purpose. For Owen, that built-in ironic prism in front of his eyes will pull him through all that stuff." Self-aggrandizement has never been a refuge. "Because I didn’t study acting or think about it as a career, I have never taken myself that seriously as an actor," Wilson said.

Free-association is his hallmark. "We were rehearsing a scene," Anderson, director of The Royal Tenenbaums, recalled, "and Owen was kind of mumbling and reading off the page and we had Gene Hackman there. I said, ‘You’re supposed to have it memorized.’ Owen’s like, ‘I don’t memorize before the rehearsal.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Wes, this is my seventh movie. This is the way I do it.’ Somewhere around Anaconda, he made a shift that I didn’t even know about."

Wilson’s feel for dialogue is real. "It’s not like hard work," he explained. "It comes, you know?" Chan noted his dedication on the set of Shanghai Knights. "Owen works a little harder ... because he is always trying to improve the script and make it funnier. He likes to try out different jokes that he comes up with on the spot ... [he] is very good with dialogue." This talent was translated into a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination for The Royal Tenenbaums in 2002. "It is only a matter of time that he will win one," Chan said.

ROY (SHANGHAI KNIGHTS)

"What in our history together makes you think I’m capable of something like that?"

The classic middle child, Wilson prefers mild play."You’ll be okay," he tenderly assures a new gang member in Shanghai Noon, "I’ll keep an eye on you." His voice is all early morning candor. That soft blond consciousness is real. In the same film, Chan approaches him in his first cowboy hat and gruffly asks, "How do I look?" It is an unexpectedly moving moment. And Wilson, conscious of his terrible power, dissolves. "I think you look great," he warmly says. "I think you look like a real cowboy. Very dapper. Wear a bandana." (He illustrates by lightly touching his throat.) As Hansel, he first appears in Zoolander on a razor scooter, wearing a baby blue shearling coat embroidered with gold, flying through air. His conversation concerns spider monkeys and peyote. His peers are Sherpas, skater punks, singing dwarves. He disarms villains with his break-dancing and yo-yo. Framed by Greco-Roman angel wings, he drawls that the life of an astronaut never appealed. "I was always interested in – uh – what bark was made of on a tree."

This ease is natural, but also a disguise. When Wilson (buried to the neck in sand in Shanghai Noon, all boyish charm and lemony surfer hair) yawns, "Just me and the buzzards, pickin’ at my head," he wants something. His seduction play is passive. For the greater part, Wilson’s intelligence is masked. The Haunting documentary shows a different expression in his eyes: controlling, clinical, cool. Chan has spoken of Wilson’s love of reading (Mark Twain, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolf). It is a passion he downplays. That stoner persona is infinitely more accessible. Keanu Reeves and Ashton Kutcher have built careers on looking dazed. And Wilson is private. Despite announcing Best Costume Design at the 2002 Oscars with Ben Stiller, he prefers to avoid the hype. "I definitely feel people don’t know who he is," Luke, his younger brother, has said. "A lot of people say he’s a goofball. I don’t think of him as a goofy guy."

A "goofy guy" could never engineer such a powerful professional trajectory. L. M. Kit Carson, the producer and co-author of Paris, Texas, first met Wilson and his brothers ("movie maniacs") in their family home. "Their father had asked me over for dinner for the express purpose of talking them out of a career in movies. I figured out pretty quick that there was no way anybody could talk them out of it." When producer Barbara Boyle was shown the Bottle Rocket script, she remarked they had "caught lighting in a bottle." Polly Platt, another high-profile producer, said she had never seen anything like it. "As a producer, you live for - you pray for - finding that kind of writing. It was unique, unhomogenized, brilliant." In his introduction to the The Royal Tenenbaums’ screenplay, director Peter Bogdanovich writes: "I thought the script was brilliant. The picture is superb. Wilson ... [is a] comic genius."

ELI (THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS)

"What?"

RICHIE

"I didn’t say anything."

ELI

"When? Right now? (Pause) I’m sorry. Don’t listen to me. (barely audible) I’m on mescaline. I’ve been spaced out all day."

RICHIE

"Did you say you’re on mescaline?"

ELI

(nods) "I did, indeed. Very much so."

Behind Enemy Lines was Wilson’s first attempt at playing The Leading Man. In it, he is Chris Burnett, a Navy pilot hunted by Serbs in war-cracked Bosnia. His performance is all blue eyeshadow and soap flakes. The film is far too big a canvas, and Wilson’s smarts sabotage the formulaic role. Skewered innocence and the fibrosis of resolve: only Tom Cruise could make such porky fare wholesome. Wilson does not work with primary colors; his palette is subtle. Think of the moment Hansel channels a bird, or when Eli plays straight man to a painting (two men in ski masks riding a motorcycle after a screaming girl in a bikini). Silky, unforgettable cinema. Hackman, who worked with Wilson in The Royal Tenenbaums and Behind Enemy Lines, said of his performance in Shanghai Noon: "He looked like a movie star. He was wonderful."

In terms of gender archetypes, Wilson has always been careful to remain within the dotted lines. Emphasis on risk has always cemented alpha status. "The weird thing is that in my family," Wilson said, "I was the athletic one, and I got the most girls." His characters are defined by their physical pursuits. As Kevin, he skis, sky-dives, snorkels. As Hansel, he practices tai chi, bungee-jumps, ice-sails, luges. ("I grip it and I rip it," Hansel, with a snap of his fingers, explains.) As Luke in The Haunting, he wears a baseball mitt. As Chris Burnett, he plays football. These characters are thus respectively tagged yuppie, counter-cultural icon, average guy, and jock. Sport as the marker gene of males.

ROY (SHANGHAI NOON)

(helping Chon from horse) "There you go, Chon, straighten up here."

CHON

(walking bow-legged) "Roy, it hurts so bad."

ROY

"I know, Chon, but I’m not gonna walk with you if you walk like that, come on."

Never married, the Catholic Wilson has collaborated only with men. Wes Anderson, Ben Stiller, Jackie Chan, Eddie Murphy, James L. Brooks, his brothers, even his father (the source of that immortal seduction line in Shanghai Noon: "Let me put it this way ... my horse is definitely not my best friend.") Cowboys and Indians, soldiers, spies: male archetypes define Wilson’s range. He avoids excessive emotional exposure. There is a certain pathos in his need to please. Expelled as a boy from St. Mark’s Academy for cheating, he was enrolled in a military academy in a different state. (In Shanghai Noon, he is revealed to be playing cards with an ace up his sleeve.) In this, the suggestion of an unflinching paternal hand.

His cheating reveals a real lack of confidence, and therein the subtext of his charm. (As Roy, he despairs of being "a screw-up … the only thing I’m good at is talking," and has said that Eli suffers "the insecurity of somebody who doesn’t really feel that they’re successful ... so he’s on drugs and stuff.") His father is a sternly cultivated man. The founder of Wilson Communications in Dallas, Robert Wilson ran a public television station and in this capacity, inspired Jim Lehrer to create Newsroom. He also contributed to the Boston Globe and responsible for Character Above All: Ten Presidents from FDR to George Bush, the book and television series that evolved from his university lectures. It cannot be easy for Wilson to feel worthy of his father’s respect.

HANSEL

"Richard Gere’s a real hero of mine. Sting. Sting would be another person who’s a hero. The music he’s created over the years - I don’t really listen to it, but the fact that he’s making it, I respect that. I care desperately about what I do. Do I know what product I’m selling? No. Do I know what I’m doing today? No. But I’m here, and I’m gonna give it my best shot."

His mother is also unusually accomplished. A photographer who collaborated with Richard Avedon (In the American West), Laura Wilson also wrote Hutterites of Montana (Yale University Press). Her muscular black and white portraits feature in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Washington Post Magazine, and London’s Sunday Times. Educated in "the rural New England described by Robert Frost," she believes in "a very strong respect for the arts, for reading, for culture."

Wilson was raised in the field of his mother’s lens; two of his characters are introduced through photographs (Rushmore’s Edward Appleby, Meet the Parent’s Kevin). On some level, he also registered his mother’s fascination with frontier lore and changed himself accordingly. "[Eli] would kind of adapt this Western look for himself and then just lose himself in it," he has said. In Armageddon, The Royal Tenenbaums, Shanghai Noon, Shanghai Knights, and the upcoming Shanghai Dawn, he acts under a Stetson. Sheryl Crow also amended her intake of glamor (snake-skin pants, high heels) for that Wild West brothel feel (thighs apart, half-sneering in worn leather).

ELI

"I did find it odd when you said you were in love with her. (Pause.) She’s married, you know."

RICHIE

"Yeah."

ELI

"And she’s your sister."

Wilson’s only serious public relationship was with Crow. Six years his senior, the celebrated musician and singer had a cameo in The Minus Man. Their chemistry crackles; the movie (Wilson stars as an impassive serial killer) otherwise flat-lines. Wilson has spoken of "turn[ing] on the high beams" to attract Crow, whom he described as "a fighter, kind of scrappy." In turn, she said: "But I love Owen. He’s so talented, and a great, great person." The lyrics of her most recent CD, C’mon, C’mon, were said to be inspired by him ("I wanna get over you/ But you’re everywhere/ And I just can’t get away.") The two are no longer together and photographs capture his tension in her presence, but older women are an important theme. Rushmore pivots on the preternaturally self-possessed 15-year-old Max Fischer’s unrequited passion for an intelligent and bookish widowed teacher.

MISS CROSS (RUSHMORE)

"Has it ever crossed your mind that you’re way too young for me?"

MAX

"It’s crossed my mind that you might consider that a possibility, yes. "

Fischer’s jealousy is extravagant; she inspires him to write a play; he builds her an eight million dollar marine observatory; a serious accident is staged to evaluate her feelings. Hansel - a role written by Ben Stiller specifically for Wilson - enjoys similar proclivities. Zoolander’s official character biography reads: "While other boys his age were content to cop a feel, Hansel was enjoying full-on e-fueled love parties with his teachers! It was at one of these multi-generational ‘hoe-downs’ that the slim-boned looker was discovered." In The Royal Tenenbaums, Wilson’s character (Eli) is quietly obsessed by his lover’s mother.

ELI

"Could we have dinner with your mother sometime?"

MARGOT

"What for?"

ELI

(shrugs) "I don’t know. I’d just love to see her."

Wilson’s sexual impact is less prosaic than that of a beauty like Brad Pitt. In Anaconda, Jennifer Lopez barely registers his presence. Cast against Catherine Zeta-Jones’ quivering nostrils and raspberry ripple lips in The Haunting, his charm falls flat: she is indifferent. Liv Tyler (Armageddon), Gwyneth Paltrow (The Royal Tenenbaums), Liz Hurley (slim-armed and improbably reading Heidegger in Permanent Midnight) ... he never seems to get the girl. Zoolander is one of two films in which he plays a man who is sexually successful. In The Big Bounce, the upcoming Warner Bros. production based on Elmore Leonard’s novel, Wilson plays a "charming drifter" explosively seduced by The Girl. (Ryan O’Neal undertook the same role in 1969.) The I Spy scenes in which his character crumbles when confronted by a woman are more typical. Even in Shanghai Noon, he works hard to earn love. To the impassive squaw he is struggling to seduce: "I am like a wild horse – you can’t tame me. You put the oats in the pen, though, and I’ll come in for a nibble every day ... but if you ever shut that gate, I’ll jump the fence and you’ll never see me again."

Slightly built and with that full pink moue, blond shag unkempt, dirt-streaked, sweating, awkwardly twirling pistols in his leathers, he is irresistibly funny. Or on his back, petted by blowsy frontier prostitutes, in bright red longjohns, stretching as he purrs: "Come here, devil woman." Wilson’s humor comes on little cat feet. His comedic impact rests in persuasion and not force. Unlike Adam Sandler or Jack Black, he coaxes laughter from his audience. His is not the schizophrenic genius of Mike Myers. In his work, something of early Steve Martin: astonishment, tender ineptitude. Wilson devastates with sweetness.

This is reflected in his writing. The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore are not simply cinematic works of art; they are products of genuinely delicate sensibilities. Such worlds are rare. Both films are eloquent, big-spirited, vibrant with forgiveness and love. Wilson likes it that way. Even Hansel finally makes friends with his rival. This perspective translates into real-world terms: Wilson was paid $2,000,000 for Zoolander (2001) and $10,000,000 for Starsky and Hutch (2003). Political turbulence has always created an appetite for gentle comedy. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope understood this need for reassurance that life is ultimately good. The compensatory nature of certain desires does not negate their importance. Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, and Mae West also made a dark world laugh. In this respect, Wilson has taken his place in the pantheon. His humor, his work, his very face - all promote real tolerance of difference.

Not an inconsiderable achievement.

* Originally written for HQ magazine

* Reproduction w/out permission of author actionable.