Douglas Does Don Quixote

Mounting decrepitude and had grooming are doing Michael Douglas a world of good. Partly, it’s the reverse vanity that age affords certain male actors with especially good bone structure (think Peter O’Toole, for instance), actors who can play characters who crawl from the wreckage of life and salvage an Oscar nomination from the twisted scraps. And, partly, it just makes good dramatic sense. We’ve seen enough of Mr. Douglas as a master of the universe. It’s vastly more involving to see him as raw and vulnerable, driven by demons that are harder to shake than Glenn Close’s nut job in “Fatal Attraction” or even the henchmen-for-hire of “The Game.”