Jake Gyllenhaal’s masculinity crisis

When the COVID pandemic hit early in 2020, Jake Gyllenhaal was wrapping a year-long press tour promoting a unique new project. The actor — revered for his slate of complex, varied characters in films like “Brokeback Mountain” and “Donnie Darko,” and respected for his physical transformations for movies like “Nightcrawler” and “Southpaw” — wasn’t investing in a coffee brand or buying a sports team. Those things could be left to his contemporaries. What Gyllenhaal was promoting was intangible, something that money couldn’t buy and no agent could secure: his personal definition of masculinity.

“[In life], you try to be what your idea of a ‘tough guy’ is, but for me, it never really worked out well,” Gyllenhaal told W magazine in September 2019. At the time, he was making the rounds promoting his campaign for Calvin Klein’s Eternity fragrance, which had been reformulated to reflect modern tastes. Despite being marketed as an eau de parfum for men, the fragrance’s notes leaned more toward typically unisex scents. “All of our definitions about masculine and feminine are evolving … It doesn’t necessarily have to be only for a man. I really like that idea, particularly as the definitions of masculinity are in transition.”

Asked to explain his own interpretation, Gyllenhaal elaborated: “The more clichéd idea of what a man is is something I try to explore through the roles I play. I played a boxer, I played an officer, I played someone in the military, and there’s this sort of sense of a more classic idea of ‘male.’ [These roles] ask questions like, ‘What do we fight for?’ ‘What do we care about?’ I think those things are very important, and that they’re being lost. And they help lead me towards something else.”

By the time April 2020 rolled around, Gyllenhaal had moved into vaguer terminology. His interview with Another Man magazine, conducted just a few weeks before the world shut down, is filled with semi-rambling soliloquies about identity and Instagram — marks of an artist wrestling with a world on the precipice of enormous change. “The idea of being a grown-up, of being a man, was something I was searching for,” Gyllenhaal said. “I’ve spent many years trying to understand what that is. Movie after movie, life experience after life experience, going to certain extremes to say, ‘Oh, is it in the physical world? Is a man who holds a gun? Is it a man who gets in the boxing ring? Is it a man who falls in love with another man?’ What is masculinity? And without knowing it, I think that’s what I was searching for.”

If the truth about manhood is what Gyllenhaal has been seeking, whatever revelations he’s come to over the last six years look strikingly familiar. Lately, his roles — a cop in “The Guilty,” a military sergeant in “The Covenant,” an ex-MMA fighter in “Road House” — have the same flavor, all salty sweat and testosterone, minus the nuance that once accompanied even his most conventional characters. Gyllenhaal’s latest film, “In the Grey,” finds him playing a dismally one-note piece of hired muscle, a supporting character whose only job is, quite literally, to beef up the cast when he’s not throwing out insipid dialogue or firing bullets. This thankless, non-event of a film is a steep fall from the actor’s promising early days and the prestige roles that followed.

However disappointing the shift might be, it’s not all that surprising, either. Our society has once again become disturbingly preoccupied with sex and gender. Traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity have become ballistic weapons in the post-pandemic culture wars. Podcasts are turning teenage boys into radical misogynists. Social media users are obsessed with the manufactured day-to-day lives of tradwives. “Looksmaxxing” has men injecting themselves with unregulated peptides and hammering their jawlines, chiseling their own bone structure like Michelangelo with a front-facing camera.

It’s not accidental that this pattern coincides with Gyllenhaal’s notable shift toward depictions of conventional masculinity. Our current monoculture is obsessed with masculinity. It’s what pays the bills when the kind of mid-budget films that once boasted Gyllenhaal’s richest characters and generated most of his critical praise are being phased out by studio mergers and streaming platforms. In a time when the social climate is as unpredictable as the arts, Jake Gyllenhaal is betting on red-blooded masculinity, and the odds are in his favor.

This is not entirely a bad thing. There can be value in embodying machismo on-screen, if it’s done right. When depictions of manhood contend with the real-life environment outside the movie theater, they can help us put words to the immaterial feelings we don’t always have the time or energy to parse ourselves. Dwayne Johnson’s performance in “The Smashing Machine,” for all the film’s flaws, cleverly reconciled the dissonance between the outward images of masculine power and internal feelings of self-loathing. Notably, that film was also a box-office flop, with the lowest-grossing opening weekend of Johnson’s entire career. That failure can be attributed to multiple factors besides Johnson’s performance. But in a pessimistic reading,  we could say that audiences didn’t want to see a big guy with a lot of muscles disappear into a character’s psyche. The viewer wants the punches, kicks and knockouts, maybe with a few jokes peppered in to keep things lively.

So it makes sense that Gyllenhaal’s 2024 version of “Road House,” a remake of the 1989 Patrick Swayze film, was a hit. Amazon reported that the film reached 50 million users over its first two weekends on Prime Video, making it one of the platform’s most-watched debuts to date. (Whether all those people actually watched the entire movie is another matter.) Like Johnson in “The Smashing Machine,” Gyllenhaal plays an UFC contender named Elwood Dalton, who’s disgraced after a tragedy in the ring. Down on his luck and looking for work, Dalton takes a job as a bouncer in a rowdy bar in the Florida Keys, unaware that the place is being tormented by a local crime boss (Billy Magnussen) and his unhinged henchman (Conor McGregor).

“Road House” features plenty of action and frenzied set-pieces that required Gyllenhaal to get UFC-level ripped once again. The film is predictable and devoid of style, yet I was surprised by how much fun I had watching it. As a character, Dalton’s only speck of depth comes from feeling ashamed about his temper, a rage that gets so hot it ruins his life. But Gyllenhaal conveys little of that interiority, letting the screenplay do all of the heavy lifting. Instead, he has the time of his life punching biker bozos and plotting convoluted ways to kill a man in Florida, just to watch him die.

The film is admittedly delightful trash, and that levity was in the air during its premiere at the SXSW film festival, where Gyllenhaal and most of the film’s cast were present. But the Q&A that followed the movie did little to maintain the energy. Most of the questions and answers were about training and diet, the preparation required to make a film brimming with sheer, unadulterated masculinity. It was clear the weekend’s celebration was already taking its toll on the cast. On the way out, a member of McGregor’s posse briefly collapsed in front of me before being rallied by his friends. He’d had a little too much to drink, they reasoned. All that testosterone seemed to change the theater briefly into a frat house. But that of course was in Texas, a long way from the polished glitz of Hollywood, and the same could be said of  Gyllenhaal — at least metaphorically.

Lately, it seems that Gyllenhaal’s been more interested in low-stakes roles, the kinds that come unburdened with Oscar buzz or exhausting promotional campaigns. These roles also happen to be hyper-masculine characters, calculated to appeal to the bros and dads of the world: career criminals with hearts of gold, intrepid war heroes who ignore the greater global realities of the battles they’re fighting, good cops and bad guys.

These movies feel like big-budget remnants of the Bush era, when a violent American nationalism renewed by 9/11 constructed the portrait of modern manhood. That’s what’s peculiar about Gyllenhaal’s recent spate: These characters feel almost outdated, as if he’d fantasized, years ago, about playing parts like these but never got the opportunity when he was Hollywood’s critical darling. The cycles of our obsession are shortening, after all. If ’00s revivals are all the rage in clothing and aesthetics, it stands to reason that the same would be true in cinema.

But Gyllenhaal was never a trend-hopper, nor have his political inclinations ever suggested that he’s hyper-patriotic or conservative. It’s nothing new to see stars rip off the liberal mask for a sudden shift toward MAGAville, but that would be a staggering move for Gyllenhaal. So what’s the catalyst for his noteworthy preoccupation with masculinity and all these archetypal characters who embody its antiquated themes?

While promoting Tom Ford’s 2016 film “Nocturnal Animals,” a stylish and puzzling neo-noir — and one of his few truly interesting characters in the last decade — Gyllenhaal spoke about regularly trying to assess his life and career, both where they are and where they’re headed. “At this point, my own vulnerability and sensitivity are things that I no longer feel like I need to make excuses for,” Gyllenhaal said. “That’s interesting in terms of the identity of a man. We live in a world where men generally search for what masculinity is. We have strange and incredible models for that, but I feel like I’m constantly in that state. And more and more men feel comfortable being vulnerable.”

A year later, Gyllenhaal starred in “Stronger,” the story of Jeff Bauman, a man who lost both legs in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Gyllenhaal co-produced the film and turned in a fantastic, moving performance. But “Stronger” returned dismal numbers at the box office, grossing just $7.7 million on a $30 million budget. The response to that failure threw Gyllenhaal for a loop.

“I pushed so hard, I wanted that movie to be so excellent,” Gyllenhaal said in his 2020 interview with Another Man. “It was a devotion of mine to the guy I played and for myself. I tried everything I could to do his story service — I fought so hard for that movie to get seen, for his story to be appreciated. It felt like a lot of pressure because we made a choice to tell a story about something devastating and real, and a person who I became really good friends with. [The film] didn’t have the response that I really wished for.

“In some ways, in the process of it, I went, ‘What am I doing? What am I pushing so hard for?’ … And I think I realized that I’d sort of lost my imagination. I went, ‘What the f**k is acting, or what the f**k is creation, without imagination?’ So I said, ‘OK, let’s have a little more fun here.’”

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Ah, fun. There’s that word that gets weaponized so often lately to describe things that are bad but somewhat entertaining, which is exactly how I’d describe Gyllenhaal’s output this decade. In so much of modern cinema, “fun” has replaced “safe,” a new adjective with a better connotation meant to save middling films from themselves. It seems that Gyllenhaal isn’t experiencing a crisis of masculinity so much as a crisis of vulnerability — which is fitting, as the two are inextricably linked.

For many men, vulnerability frequently infers fragility, weakness and, perhaps in Gyllenhaal’s case, artistic insecurity. When that openness is met with neglect, as it was with audiences who didn’t show up for “Stronger,” one can respond in two ways: forge onward knowing that sincerity is its own reward, or feel emasculated and run in the other direction. Gyllenhaal has done the latter, it seems, reverting to flattened characters who don’t require bold artistic leaps or personal attachment, and thus don’t cause heartbreak if a film underperforms.

That’s an unfortunate state to get stuck in, but much of the film industry finds itself in stasis right now. Investing emotionally in any piece of cinema is likely to end in sorrow — even Marvel isn’t immune to the world’s changes. It takes courage and determination to keep pushing in the face of uncertainty, especially when you bear the scars of previous failures. But using your privilege and power to advocate for what you really believe in is the true definition of masculinity, one that a man only understands once he falls and picks himself back up again.  The great thing about being one of the most famous actors in the world is that the opportunity to do just that will still be there whenever Gyllenhaal is ready. Until then, we’ll have to endure him playing a few more rounds of cops and robbers.