Michael Douglas as the 'Solitary Man'

It's hard to be the child of a movie star: Ask any of Marlon Brando's progeny. Even stars who had stable marriages and did good works, such as Gregory Peck and Paul Newman, had suicides within their families.

If you want to challenge Dad at his own game, it's that much harder, and I can well imagine that the famously competitive Kirk Douglas would have made it as hard as it gets— and probably, at 93, still does.

So Michael Douglas deserves some props. He lacks Kirk's leonine looks, steely eyes and wondrous jaw— a face so striking that it could half-steal any scene just by showing up. He lacks Dad's smoldering energy and temperament, too. The eyes are a bit watery, the chin a bit weak, the voice reedier and less resonant.

I must confess that, for a good while, Michael seemed to me an inferior knockoff— a good, hard-working actor who unfortunately happened to remind me of a better one.

But Michael has made himself into a star, a Hollywood powerhouse, a force to be reckoned with in the industry. He has made his share of forgettable films, but he has also accumulated a respectable body of work. He may not be his Dad, but he is his own man.

High rollers brought low

It's nonetheless interesting that one of Michael's specialty numbers is playing a man knocked off his perch and hitting the bottom— not necessarily to recover. That's the story line of his Gordon Gecko, the financial high roller of Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), who gets his comeuppance after tangling with the most Kirk-like actor of his generation, Martin Sheen; of D-Fens, the downsized defense worker of Falling Down (1993) turned avenger of the American Dream; and now Ben Kalmen, the disgraced auto kingpin of Solitary Man.

We meet Ben as a man in his mid-50s with a string of successful car dealerships in the New York tri-state area, who's become a modest celebrity by performing in his own TV commercials. He's breezy and brimming with Gecko-like self-importance, but he gets bad news from his doctor on a routine checkup, and a dissolve takes us into the present, four and a half years later.

Ben's confidence, and his libido, seem fully intact, but he's been convicted of a scam that's sent him to jail and cost him his little empire. Money's running low, old friends shun him, and he seems, despite his reflexive salesman's smile, locked in a self-destructive spiral.

Ben doesn't see it, but we do: He gets into a fracas with a snarky kid in front of the college library that bears his name; he can't recognize that he's been blackballed in the industry he once seemed to own; his compulsive sexual behavior finally extends to his mistress's daughter (Imogen Poots), a mistake in more ways than one, since the mistress (Mary-Louise Parker) has serious connections that land him in the hospital.

Ultimate humiliation

Before this happens, Ben has been reduced to begging a waiter's job from an old college buddy (Danny DeVito), though even in this ultimate humiliation he can't resist trying to work his wonted charm and swagger. This is a Willy Loman who can't quit and never doubts his star.

Ben's closest stab at self-understanding comes when he laments that age has robbed him of the charismatic aura that once made him the center of any room he entered. This seems a poor excuse for a man who has not only cheated customers and colleagues (we never do learn the details) but blown off every personal relationship he's ever had, down to a long-suffering daughter (Jenna Fischer) and doting grandson.

In short, here we have a man taking himself down with a vengeance, but what he's revenging in or about himself isn't made clear until the film's last scenes, when his new doctors discover the heart trouble he's been in denial about ever since— as we now learn— he skipped out on his initial diagnosis. It's a cheap out for the script, and a letdown, certainly, for the viewer.

The last thing Ben wants for himself, and the last thing we want to feel for him, is pity. No matter how far he falls, he never loses faith in his ability to come back: a sinner who seeks redemption only in himself.

Susan Sarandon, bored

This is the flip side of American Puritanism, the hero who is first and last a law unto himself, and Douglas makes us feel this quality in Ben viscerally. When, brought low in the cathedral of medicine, he undeservedly gets his second chance in the form of a compassionate ex-wife (Susan Sarandon, looking distinctly bored in the role), we're more than half hoping he won't take it.

At this point, one is put in mind of Billy Wilder's great 1951 noir classic, Ace in the Hole— perhaps the greatest American film ever, after some of Chaplin's and the first two of Terrence Malick— in which Kirk Douglas's Chuck Tatum, bad to the end, dies gut-shot in the last frame, eye staring up the camera.

You want Ben to go out that way, not getting fitted prematurely for adult diapers. A genuine villain is far too precious a thing to waste.

Solitary Man is unconvincingly plotted and indifferently directed by Brian Koppelman and David Levien. Michael Douglas could have phoned in his performance, if the film seemed worth his time in the first place.

But something in Ben Kalmen appealed to him, and he exposes more of himself here than is probably safe— which is, of course, what an actor should do. Sometimes it takes a bad film to draw out an extraordinary performance. Kirk should be proud of his son on this one.