ONE ACTOR'S JOURNEY DOWN UNDER WITH 'LANTANA,' ANTHONY LAPAGLIA DIVES DEEP INTO HIS RICHEST FILM ROLE YET.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Anthony LaPaglia didn't move to the United States intending to become an actor. But, of course, he had much more opportunity to get involved in what became his craft in New York than he would have had in his hometown of Adelaide, Australia.

Ironic, then, that years later LaPaglia has had to go back down under to work in the kind of movie Hollywood just doesn't do anymore.

``Lantana,'' a searing study of troubled marriages cleverly disguised as a murder mystery, has been a huge box-office hit and major award winner in Australia. Dealing frankly with uncomfortably real relationship issues - and boasting uncomfortably frank sex scenes - it's an adult movie in multiple, uncompromising respects.

Besides LaPaglia, who plays a middle-age cop in the conflicted throes of his first extramarital affair, the ensemble piece includes Geoffrey Rush and Barbara Hershey, along with the equally fine, if less well-known, Aussie actresses Kerry Armstrong and Rachael Blake.

For LaPaglia, well-respected here (he owns a Tony Award for his work in the 1998 revival of Arthur Miller's ``A View From the Bridge'') but often typecast as East Coast cops or mobsters in films (``Betsy's Wedding,'' ``The Client,'' ``Son of Sam'') and on television (``Lansky,'' ``The Brotherhood,'' ``Nitti''), ``Lantana'' represented a chance to stretch actorly muscles that are rarely called for in fantasy-obsessed Hollywood these days.

``In the last few years, movies have taken a turn for the not-so-good,'' notes the actor who, at 42, speaks with hardly a trace of the Aussie accent he came to this country with in his 20s. ``Now, I kind of read a script hoping that it's at least bearable. It's tough for actors these days; if there's a good script, there are 20 good box-office names that are killing themselves to get it, and the rest of us are kind of left hanging out to dry with what's left. So, when this script came to me, I thought they'd sent it to the wrong person!''

Better late ...

It actually came LaPaglia's way because of a promise made seven years ago by ``Lantana's'' director, the admired but not-very-prolific Ray Lawrence. The actor's wife, Gia Carides, had appeared in the filmmaker's first feature, ``Bliss,'' and knew that he and LaPaglia had similar sensibilities. She arranged a meeting, the two guys hit it off, and Lawrence assured LaPaglia he'd offer him work in the future. The actor just didn't expect it would be another century before the director made his next movie.

In the film, LaPaglia's detective Leon Zat is first seen in flagrante with Jane (Blake). She's recently separated from her husband, while Leon's still living with his lovely wife Sonja (Armstrong) and their two teen-age sons.

Never the most introspective type, Leon isn't sure why he's straying, only that he's become unsatisfied with what had been a long and stable marriage. Basically, he's in a full-blown midlife crisis, which unexpectedly takes on a new dimension after a celebrated local psychiatrist and author, Valerie Sommers (Barbara Hershey), goes missing. Leon's investigation, centering on the woman's husband, John (Rush), stirs up uncomfortable parallels to his own domestic situation - which grow to alarming proportions when Jane suddenly becomes a key witness in the case.

Adapted by Andrew Bovell from his stage play ``Speaking in Tongues,'' ``Lantana'' may be contrived plotwise. But its psychological revelations are so deep, rich and honest that plot seems almost irrelevant - again, a departure from even the handful of adult-skewed movies that Hollywood releases every year around this time.

No one journeys further into self-discovery than Leon, a working-class guy who long ago landed the love of a better-bred and more sensitive lady. According to Armstrong, the actress who plays that lady, watching LaPaglia bring out the character's deeper feelings was a rare treat.

``He's a magnificent creature,'' she says of her co-star and countryman. ``It's like working with the king of the jungle. He just has a complete inability to swallow bull----, an absolute aversion to anything outside of the truth. And I love that.''

Emotional growth

The son and grandson of Italian immigrants, LaPaglia accessed a bit of his own background to nail the truth about Leon.

``There's a level of society that, when they're growing up, fathers say to their sons, 'If you cry, I'll give you something to cry about,' '' he notes. ``That is not a particularly educated point of view. 'Life was tough for me, it can be tough for you, too, and you have to learn to deal with it like a man.' I grew up with that, but someone more educated would say, 'It's good you can express yourself, it's healthy to cry.' ''

Which, to sum up a very complicated journey of self-discovery, is the inner voyage that Leon is forced to make.

``They don't represent that in movies very often,'' LaPaglia points out.

Even rarer are films in which lovemaking depicts honest emotional expression. The eye candy factor is usually all that counts, and that makes ``Lantana's'' passionate encounters between well-maintained but hardly ideal, 40-something specimens all the more unique.

Not that having a good deal more experience than the pretty kids who take their clothes off in most movies makes it any easier to act naked. For sensitive guys like LaPaglia, anyway.

``I find sex scenes quite difficult to do; I'm usually more nervous than the girls are, they're normally pretty calm,'' he admits. ``The difficulty is that it's a quite private, intimate act, and unless you're an exhibitionist you're not going to enjoy even simulating sex in front of 20 sweaty grips. So it's hard, but at the end of the day, it was also an integral part of this story that had to be fulfilled.

``But once you start, it becomes pretty easy,'' LaPaglia adds. ``It's getting into it initially that's tough, then it becomes quite technical. You know, your body needs to be here, your heads need to be this far apart for the light, that kind of thing. Still, any sex scene with me in it is not gonna be a pretty sight, I'll tell you that.''

To tell more truth, LaPaglia hasn't really had to become a reluctant sex symbol to attract good work in recent years. He had a terrific role as a self-made millionaire in last year's acclaimed adaptation of Edith Wharton's ``The House of Mirth,'' appeared in ``Sweet and Lowdown,'' Woody Allen's best movie in awhile, and even got a chance to play Fidel Castro in the espionage farce ``Company Man.''

And he's got a full plate of interesting-sounding films coming up, both Australian (``The Bank'') and American (``The Salton Sea,'' ``I'm With Lucy''). Highest profile by far is ``The Road to Perdition,'' the period crime saga starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman and directed by ``American Beauty's'' Sam Mendes. In that one, LaPaglia portrays legendary crime kingpin Al Capone - the kind of role he swore he'd stop doing, but had to make an exception for under these circumstances.

``It's a predictable role for someone like me; if your name ends in a vowel, what are you going to do?'' he says with a laugh. ``I had actually made a decision, a couple of years ago, not to play mobsters anymore. I've done it to death, I'm personally not interested in that genre anymore and it's not challenging to me ... and although it might be a very unpopular thing for me to say, I think that it's a stupid world, the glorification of really dumb guys.

``But this was Sam Mendes, who I love to death. And the stuff I do is with Paul Newman. I'm not impressed by many people in the business, but he's a guy who is everything he appears to be and even a little more.''

LaPaglia has been acting unpredictably for most of his adult life. Trained as an educator, he only became interested in acting after a date took him to the first play he'd ever seen in his life. But the move to America was more an expression of inborn restlessness than anything else; his grandfather had spent some time in New York before ultimately returning to Italy, where LaPaglia's father was born.

``I kept hearing a lot of stories about my grandfather's days in New York, and somehow I got it in my head that this was where I needed to go,'' he says. ``By that point, I was thinking that maybe I would like to be an actor, but I kind of felt that it was out of my realm of possibility, so I didn't take it seriously at all.''

He sure does now.

``I've found the place that works for me, I've found where I'm comfortable,'' says LaPaglia, who still calls the United States home. ``So I make decisions based on that now. I just do movies that I like; if I don't like 'em, I don't do 'em. Of course, my taste is a bit bizarre sometimes.''

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) NAKED EMOTION

Anthony LaPaglia strips down to the raw truth in ensemble film `Lantana'

(2 -- cover -- color) Barbara Hershey

(3 -- cover -- color) Geoffrey Rush

(4) Says Kerry Armstrong of her ``Lantana'' co-star Anthony LaPaglia: ``It's like working with the king of the jungle. He just has a complete inability to swallow bull----, an absolute aversion to anything outside of the truth. And I love that.''