LAURENCE FISHBURNE
PRESENCE OF AUTHORITY DEVELOPED IN STEPS
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
Laurence Fishburne often gets mistaken for another actor.
But nothing can be further from the truth as the talented actor has carved out a legendary career in Hollywood by working alongside the best filmmakers and the leading stars .
For starters, Fishburne landed an iconic role in the seminal allegorical film about the Vietnam War in director Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).
Fishburne’s character gets posted to a US Navy PT Boat meandering up the Nung River into Cambodia with an ensemble cast, including Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper and Harrison Ford.
Fishburne is just 18 years old at the time of the film’s release in 1979, just barely old enough to enlist in the navy, but the film had been four years in production making the young actor just 15 years old when cast as the boat’s gunner, Tyrone.
The film script was inspired by the Joseph Conrad novella, The Heart of Darkness (1899), in which traveling a river in Africa becomes an allegory for exploring the inner human psyche.
The fortune of the characters begin to go sideways in the dangerous Cambodian jungle when Tyrone receives a recorded voice message from his mother.
Coppola recasts Fishburne just a few years later as Midget for the dramatization of the S.E. Hinton novel Rumble Fish (1983).
The narrative follows the legendary struggle growing up on the tough streets of America with street gang members escaping a fragmented home life only to find gang street violence.
Fishburne’s feature film career gets a reboot costarring with Sean Connery in Just Cause (1995). Fishburne plays a police officer involved in an investigation of a murder.
That same year everything falls back a lot as the protagonist in a dramatization of William Shakespeare’s Othello (1995). The tragedy about a black Moore military general was written in 1603. The well known story has Othello becoming increasingly jealous and paranoid as a result of the manipulation by people close to him, so much so that he kills his beautiful new wife in a fit of rage.
The iconic role as Morpheus in the Matrix Trilogy (1999, 2003, 2003) was a logical and artistic progression from Othello.
Fishburne plays the commander of a subterrain on-line rebellion in the dark world psychological thriller The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003). The popularity of the trilogy of films rises at a time of the rise of the Internet and people exploring the different worlds within the online universe.
The franchise stars Fishburne, Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving.
Morpheus becomes a dynamic leader not only strategizing the rebellion but mentoring his crew before and after missions deep inside the on-line world controlled by artificial intelligence.
The trilogy of films were considered seminal pieces on special effects, winning four Oscars for the first installment as well as commercial success and widespread popularity.
The sequels went head to head at the box office with the Star Wars Trilogy of Prequels, the Spiderman Franchise and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
Fishburne then joined the Mission Impossible franchise for the third installment as the IMF begins to go off on another direction with rogue operations undermining the command of Director Theodore Brassel, played by Fishburne.
Mission Impossible III (2006) and the Director’s authority begin to really go sideways when Brassel hears a radio transmission of a popular song from inside the IMF HQ.
Brassel knows he cannot control everything, but the Director does his best not to be disparaged directly to his face by agents under his care who clearly have developed their own means to conduct operations.
Mission Impossible III marks a shift in the franchise with more elaborate intertwining plots and stunts to follow in the next installements, as well as a bit more deception both internally, by off the grid agents, and externally against opposing interests the IMF seeks to undermine so as to maintain the territorial integrity of the United States of America.
Fishburne initially needed to stand behind the gunner to establish authority as a young teenage actor in the Philippine jungle set for the Cambodian River scenes in Apocalypse Now.
But the actor gradually developed a certain stature in Hollywood that soon enough gave him a presence all on his own to portray authority figures controlling and/or resisting internal rebellions.
