When I made my "Best of 2010" lists, Luca Guadagnino's sumptuous I Am Love came up again and again. It's a film that I admire a great deal and there's nothing I admire more about it than the central performance by Tilda Swinton. One of the most consistently great (and interesting) actors working today, Swinton never disappoints and often surprises with her ever shifting screen persona. Here she plays a much softer character than she typically does, but loses none of her usual intensity in doing so.
It happens all the time. Two great performances exist side by side in a film, one of which is showy and comes courtesy of an iconic actor, while the other is more grounded and from an actor with a much lower profile. The former is nominated for plenty of awards, and even brings home a few, while the latter is largely overlooked. This was certainly true of Away From Her, which netted Julie Christie plenty of attention but saw Gordon Pinsent left in the cold. Christie is certainly great in this movie but it’s her co-star who does most of the heavy lifting.
Seeing The Company Men recently got me thinking about one of my favourite unlauded performances from recent years: Rosemarie DeWitt's fantastic turn as the eponymous character in Rachel Getting Married. The nominees that year were Taraji P. Henson for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Amy Adams and Viola Davis for Doubt, Marisa Tomei for The Wrestler, and eventual winner Penelope Cruz for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. That's a good lineup, to be sure, but DeWitt could give them all a run for their money.
Sure, it's hard to feel too bad for Cate Blanchett. She does already have an Oscar (for The Aviator), plus 4 other nominations (for Elizabeth, Notes on a Scandal, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and I'm Not There). Plus, 2008 had a pretty strong slate of Best Actress contenders (though, as I mentioned when I wrote about Sally Hawkins' performance from that same year, I don't think it would have been a tragedy if Angelina Jolie had been passed over for The Changeling). But Cate Blanchett is so very, very good in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, it's a shame she went unrecognized.
When it comes to awards, comedy is never taken as seriously as drama. We forget sometimes that it takes as much skill to make an audience laugh as to make them cry, and we lavish praise of those actors who jump through emotional hoops, leaving more understated, less flashy performances in the shadows. When Happy-Go-Lucky was released in 2008, it garnered a few awards for lead Sally Hawkins (including a Golden Globe) but she was left out on Oscar nomination day. To be sure, there was some pretty stiff competition in the Best Actress category that year (Kate Winslet, the winner for The Reader, Meryl Streep for Doubt, Anne Hathaway for Rachel Getting Married, Melissa Leo for Frozen River, and Angelina Jolie for Changeling), but I think Hawkins' performance is one that resonates and will stand the test of time.
Melanie Laurent's performance in Inglorious Basterds occupies that ambiguous place between "lead" and "supporting" that so often causes frustration at Oscar time. Given that her Shoshanna Dreyfus is the heart of the film, the character around whom the rest of the narrative is built, it feels natural to consider her the lead character. On the other hand, her somewhat limited screen time means that you might justifiably consider it a supporting performance. She was campaigned (properly, I think) as lead but given how tight last year's lead actress race was and how open the supporting category, this would have been one instance when I would have been quite happy to see a bit of category jockeying. As Shoshanna, Laurent is tasked with grounding Inglorious Basterds, acting as a counterbalance to Brad Pitt's delightfully hammy Lt. Aldo Raine and Christoph Waltz's charmingly psychotic Col. Hans Landa. Those two characters, though well-played, are larger than life and just a little over-the-top. By contrast, Shoshanna is a much more human and identifiable character. The mission that Raine and his Basterds are carrying out drives much of the narrative, but Shoshanna is the story's true hero figure, the one whose success we root for hardest.
As I said at the top, her screen time here is fairly limited but when she does appear, it makes an incredible impact. There are a couple of key scenes that really demonstrate Laurent's skill as an actress: the first is the dining room scene in which Shoshanna comes face-to-face with Landa, the man who slaughtered her family but allowed her to escape. There is a sense that Landa is toying with her (credit for the success of this scene is obviously shared with the magnificent Waltz) but Shoshanna maintains her composure... right up until the second after Landa walks away. Her quick, intense collapse - a mixture of relief and fear - feels very real and mirrors the emotions of the audience watching her.
The other key scenes takes place towards the end and unfold concurrently. One is her pre-recorded speech to the gathered Nazi bigwigs when she declares herself "the face of Jewish vengeance." It's bittersweet because of course we know that her plan to exact revenge will also cost her her life, but Laurent sells that speech so thoroughly that you really can't think of it as anything but an absolute triumph. Meanwhile, up in the projection room, Shoshanna has to deal with an unwanted guest, making it necessary for Laurent to make a quick transition from playing Shoshanna to playing Shoshanna adopting a persona, flirting and seducing in order to distract Zoller and then take him out. When she dies in the process (killed by Zoller rather than in the explosion, as she'd planned), it provides the film with its emotional highpoint.
As Shoshanna, Laurent provides Inglorious Basterds with an emotional center that helps elevate it beyond cartoony violence and slick dialogue (not that those aren't enjoyable, just that those alone don't make a movie great). Laurent's performance is nuanced and incredibly skilled, making Shoshanna a character who resonates despite her minimal screen time.
There are a number of performances from Kirk Douglas that would qualify as "unsung" but the lack of recognition for his work in Paths of Glory (not to mention the lack of recognition for the film in general) is particularly egregious. His performance as the crusading Col. Dax, fighting an unwinnable battle against the military hierarchy, is easily one of the best of his long career. Set during World War I, Paths of Glory is essentially about class warfare. In it, French officers (who come from society's upper echelons) use the enlisted men as pawns, objects that can easily be sacrificed either to gain glory for the officer or to take the fall for his mistakes. In this world, a man like Col. Dax is decidedly out of place. When approached by his commanding officer Gen. Mireau and informed that he's to lead an attack on "the ant hill," he knows that the success of the mission is next to impossible but he accepts the task because Mireau is determined to make it happen and Dax would be loathe to force his men to follow someone else into what is almost certain death. His sense of justice, however, is offended by Mireau's offhand remark that half the men are likely to die in pursuit of the objective - unlike Mireau, Dax recognizes the men as people rather than numbers.
The mission is an utter failure and, in an attempt to save face for having ordered it, Mireau blames the inherent cowardice of the soldiers and orders that three of them be executed. Recognizing this gross injustice, Dax insists on representing the men at their trial, though the results are a foregone conclusion as far as nearly everyone else is concerned. Douglas is at his most skillful in the trial scene, in which he must play Dax as contained and respectful in the face of his superiors while also making it clear that he knows what is happening is wrong and that it not only upsets him, but disgusts him.
Dax's rage only grows in the scenes following the trial, even though he's able to deliver payback to two of the film's villains. One is a lieutenant whose cowardice brought about the death of one man during a night patrol, and who uses the opportunity to pick a soldier to be executed to cover that earlier incident up by picking the only other person who knows what happened during the patrol. Dax knows what he's done and settles the score as best he can by choosing the lieutenant to take charge of the executions, forcing him to face what he's done. The lieutenant tries to weasel out of it but Dax is firm and the mock-friendliness with which he delivers the order is chilling. The lieutenant is the only person he deals with to whom he can actually met out some form of punishment, and Douglas puts so much bite into the scene that you almost feel bad for him.
Mireau gets his comeuppance with the help of his superior Gen. Broulard, the man who put the idea of taking the ant hill into his head in the first place and who insists to Dax that he's the only person in the situation who is completely innocent. After Mireau shuffles off to receive his own punishment - a punishment that will likely have more consequences in the court of public opinion than anywhere else - Broulard makes the mistake of congratulating Dax, assuming that he has outmaneuvered Mireau in order to get his job. At this point, Dax has reached his limit and Douglas begins to let go of some of the anger that has been bottled up inside the character for so long. The games these people make of human lives disgust him, but as Broulard persists in his failure to see his own fault, Dax comes to an important realization. Being angry at men like Broulard or Mireau is useless because they simply aren't capable of seeing how inhuman their actions are. They are worthy of scorn but more than that, they deserve pity for their lack of humanity.
The final moments of the film are quiet for Dax. He's spent his rage and realized its futility and all he can do now is lead what's left of his men as best he can. Throughout the film - particularly in a scene where Dax marches through the trench - Douglas' silence says more than words ever could, his expression grim but determined. Douglas carries the film ably, creating a strong sense of morality at its centre. It's a must see performance in a must see film.
It takes courage to play a character as thoroughly unlikeable as Julia and it takes skill to make her half-way human. In her performance Tilda Swinton doesn't try to make the audience like her; her unselfconscious portrayal allows Julia to be one of the nastiest pieces of work ever to grace the screen. It isn't, however, simply a matter of letting herself be unlikeable. Swinton is also able to convey a sense of the character's increasingly distressed mental state, of the wheels turning in her head as she has to make quick decisions to keep her scam afloat, and of the tiny shred of humanity still alive at her core. It is a bravura performance that puts to shame many of the more celebrated performances of the last decade of film. The first thing that must be understood about Julia is that she's an absolute mess. An alcoholic who spends most of her time trolling bars for booze and one night stands, her life is a shambles and she herself is kind of pathetic, though she defiantly, angrily refuses to see herself that way. She attends AA meetings but has no desire or intention of getting sober and she is nastiest to the people who most want to help her. When one day someone comes to her for help, Julia is quick to brush her off but the promise of a big payday perks her interest.
The woman in need is Elena, who promises to pay Julia a large sum of money to help her kidnap her son, whose wealthy grandfather has custody. Though reluctant at first, Julia agrees, but only because she's thought of a way to double cross Elena and get more money. When she realizes that Elena isn't all there and won't be able to give her any money at all, Julia decides to cut her out of the equation and handle things herself. She kidnaps the boy, treating him roughly, scaring the hell out of him, and unsettling him with the sometimes violent mood swings brought on by alcohol (or the lack of it). See, the thing about Julia is that she can't stay sober long enough to pull this thing off skillfully; she gets drunk and behaves stupidly and seems to diminish her chances of success with each horrible decision she makes.
In these early scenes with the kid, Swinton doesn't hold back. She allows Julia to be deliberately, unrepentantly cruel and as viewers we're scared for the boy because there's really no telling what Julia will do. We believe that she's capable of anything. A strange thing happens, though, after Julia has the boy in captivity and after she abandons the sobriety which has pushed her personality right to the edge: she starts to get kind of funny. "So... I guess you're mad at me," she states, totally drunk, at one point after leaving him tied up in the shower all day. Later still she attempts to use the fact that she hasn't actually shot him to persuade him that she's not really a bad person even though she's spent most of their time together training a gun on him. In her own special way, Julia is just as out to lunch as Elena is and though her inability to own her actions brings about the film's few lighter moments, it's also what makes her especially dangerous. If she can never take responsibility for the consequences of her actions, how is she ever supposed to recognize that she's gone too far?
The ability to quickly and believably shift gears with this character is a big part of what makes Swinton's performance so good, but there's more to it than that. At one point Julia finds herself in the position of having lost the boy to another set of kidnappers who think that she is his mother. Swinton is called upon to play this scene in such a way that we the audience can see the wheels turning in her head as she improvises to deal with this new development, while also making it believable that the kidnappers can't see through her facade. It's a very delicate undertaking and she pulls it off beautifully, showing us layer upon layer but making it seem utterly natural.
On the face of it, Julia is an evil character. She is so unfathomably selfish and greedy that even when she's trying to save the kid from the other kidnappers, she's still working an angle, trying to figure out how she can save him without forfeiting the money. At the same time, however, Swinton makes us believe that in her own twisted, ridiculous way she's come to care about someone other than herself. For all the brutality on display in this performance there is also a surprising amount of tenderness and though the film doesn't compromise the character (or itself) with any false sentimentality at the end, it does allow Julia to be more than a two-dimensional villain. Watching the film, you can't help but think that no other actor could have played the role, Swinton's mark on the character is that indelible.
Foreign language performances always have a difficult time gaining recognition in English speaking countries. Every once in a while a performance is able to transcend the language barrier but more often than not a great performance comes and goes without ever being embraced. Anamaria Marinca’s performance in 4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days (a film which itself failed to reap the recognition it so richly deserved) falls into the latter category, receiving notices at a couple of film festivals and being rewarded by the London Film Critics but going unnoticed anywhere else. Perhaps if the film hadn’t come out in the same year as La Vie En Rose, Marinca might have had better success but with critics and awarding groups already in love with Marion Cotillard’s performance as Edith Piaf, Marinca ended up being pushed aside (because, of course, you can’t recognize two foreign language performances, especially when you can recognize the normally brilliant Cate Blanchett for an over the top turn in Elizabeth: The Golden Age instead). As Otilia, Marinca carries 4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days on her shoulders. Though it is Otilia’s friend Gabriela who is ostensibly the subject of the story, which concerns her attempt to get an illegal abortion, it is Otilia who emerges as the dominant and driving force of the narrative. She is a character who takes charge, commanding the situation and guiding it to the desired conclusion against several obstacles, including Gabriela herself. The decisions that Gabriela has made – not least of which is choosing the seedy Bebe, who demands sexual favours in addition to cash, to perform the procedure – seem geared towards putting both herself and Otilia in the worst possible situation. Otilia is forced to improvise in several instances, scrambling to keep things together while her friend seems content to sit back and simply let things happen.
Gabriela is a fascinating character in her own right, one whose motivations are never entirely clear and one who is remarkably passive given how personal the circumstances of the story are to her, but Otilia is the character to whom the film continually finds itself drawn. She might be doing nothing more than listening but Marinca captivates even in stillness. When Otilia needs to leave Gabriela’s side following Bebe’s work, the film follows her, joining her boyfriend’s family at the most uncomfortable dinner party ever. Again she is the picture of stillness while things happen around her and again she is the one on whom the camera inevitably focuses. As an audience we experience these situations through her; she is our point of identification and the implicit bond between character and audience is acknowledged in the film's final shot when Otilia breaks the fourth wall as if to ask us if we can believe what's just happened.
What Marinca accomplishes with this role is nothing short of amazing. There is not a single false moment, no gesture that feel anything less than authentic. She is totally at home in the character of Otilia and gives what is easily one of the best cinematic performances of the last 10 years. 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days is a film worth recommending for many reasons but Marinca's performance has got to be at the top of the list.
The more I see of Fredric March’s work, the more convinced I become that he’s one of the best actors ever to grace the screen. In an era when even the best actors tended to play strict “types,” March played a diverse array of characters across many genres. Watch Inherit The Wind, The Best Years of Our Lives and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde back-to-back-to-back and you’ll find yourself shocked that the same actors appears in all three. He disappears so completely into his characters that you never really know what to expect from him.
In Inherit The Wind he plays one of his best characters and renders one of his best performances, but went unrecognized for his work. The nominees for Best Actor that year were his costar, Spencer Tracy, Trevor Howard in Sons and Lovers, Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer, and the eventual winner, Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry. If it were up to me, I'd move Howard to the Supporting Actor category and make room for March, who should have at least been nominated, even though he did already have two Best Actor Oscars under his belt at that point. In the film March plays Matthew Harrison Brady, the conservative antagonist to Spencer Tracy’s heroic civil liberties fighter Henry Drummond. Brady represents the close minded forces hindering social progress, the stubborn old order trying to keep the culture anchored in place. There is never any question, from the film’s point of view, that he’s the villain and it would be easy to play him in a black-and-white way, as stubborn, backwards, and stupid. Certainly he is stubborn, but March plays him with enough nuance and humanity that he never seems backwards or stupid, nor does he seem heartless. He becomes instead a tragic figure, a man who has the world in his hands one moment and nothing in the next, and his sad end is one of the more resonant aspects of the film.
Brady starts the film strong, welcomed into town with a parade, already crowned the conquering hero in the battle between God and science. He passionately defends the Creation theory, preaching to the choir and holding court while Drummond dodges slings and arrows. Brady is sure of himself but not arrogant and in the scenes between him and Drummond there is a palpable sense of respect, of two men who disagree with each other’s politics but don’t take it too personally. March and Tracy play off each other incredibly well throughout the film, each equal to every challenge that the other throws up. Watching these two great actors playing these two strong, distinct characters is one of the film’s great pleasures.
Where March truly excels is at the film’s turning point, when Brady begins to unravel and finds himself unceremoniously knocked from his pedestal. In an instant he goes from being revered to being loathed, all because he has the audacity to be human and fallible. For my money there are few scenes that are sadder or more memorable than that in which Brady attempts to sermonize to the people who have already turned against him and they resolutely ignore him. The same people who once hung on his words now refuse to so much acknowledge his presence and his voice grows increasingly desperate as he practically begs to be heard. No character in the film is more vulnerable, more openly frail, than Brady is in this moment and March’s handling of the scene is expert. It is in this scene that we realize that the villain isn’t Brady after all, but knee-jerk reactionaries and fair-weather believers. Brady is not a bad man, even if you do disagree with his ideas and politics; he’s a man, plain and simple, with good traits and bad and March conveys this simply and effectively in a performance of great power.
I really can’t articulate just how much I love this performance. In a lesser film with this character portrayed by a lesser actor, Brady is a character you wouldn’t think twice about. He’d be a monolithic representation of prejudice, a straw opponent against whom the film could take cheap, easy shots to advance its point of view. When an actor gives a character like this dimension and a filmmaker reserves some of his sympathy for him, then cheap shots are impossible. As he does so often, Tracy carries this film on his noble shoulders, but March is key to the story’s ultimate success. The final moments, when Drummond symbolically demonstrates that science and religion ought to be able to coexist peacefully, would ring absolutely false if March couldn’t make Brady a redeemable and understandable character. As good as everything else about the movie is, it simply would not work without March.
Hollywood loves to pat itself on the back for being groundbreaking and ahead of the curve but more often than not it fails to acknowledge the real game changers. Case in point: Andy Serkis' performance as Gollum/Smeagol in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Sure, the effects that helped bring the character to life were much lauded, but the performance itself - written off, perhaps, as mere voice work - was ignored. The effects are amazing, but they don't create the performance/character, they supplement Serkis' work. The audience doesn't respond to Gollum merely because of the technology, but because of the vibrancy and nuance that Serkis brings to him.
The supporting actors recognized by the Oscars in 2002 were Chris Cooper, the eventual winner for Adaptation; Ed Harris for The Hours, Paul Newman for Road to Perdition, John C. Reilly for Chicago, and Christopher Walken for Catch Me If You Can. Fine actors all, but if it were up to me Harris would be swaped out in favor of Serkis. Gollum is a character with a dual nature and a dual purpose to the story. He is at once a menacing figure who threatens to derail Frodo's efforts to destroy the ring and a figure worthy of pity who has been so corrupted by the greed the ring inspires that he has been turned into a monster. He is at once Gollum, the calculating villain driven to repossess his precious, and Smeagol, the hobbit who doesn't want to do bad but is weak in the face of his alter ego. In one scene - one of my favourites of the whole trilogy - these two halves of the character battle it out, engaging in an intense back and forth that sees the good side finally refusing to submit to the bad. Serkis so expertly conveys the personalities of these two opposing forces that you forget that you're watching one character, not two. The effects that capture the facial expressions and physical movements of Serkis are of course important in this endeavor, but it's still Serkis' performance, his energy, that is coming through to bring Gollum and Smeagol to life.
By the end of The Two Towers Gollum is not just a technological marvel, but a compelling character as well. In his twisted, emaciated frame we see the consequences of greed, the possible future for Frodo unless he can stay strong and on course. We see the shadow of what he once was, the whisper of humanity that still exists within him, fighting against the power the ring has over him and we care. We want his better nature to succeed, even though we know deep down that it will be impossible. When he's playing off of Frodo and Sam, being alternately helpful and malicious (and hilarious: "Stupid fat hobbit!"), it seems so natural that you don't even think about the fact that you can't see the actor behind the character. You don't look at Gollum and think, "wow that's some great CGI;" the performance is so engaging and engrossing that you can forget that he isn't as real as Elijah Wood and Sean Astin standing next to him.
It will probably take a long time for performances like Serkis' to really be embraced and properly recognized, though with the recent success of Avatar these kinds of performances will probably become more common in the years to come. I think that there's an understandable resistance to it on the part of actors, who likely see it as a threat to their livelihood, and it's so easy to just dismiss these performances as having been created by the effects people that you can take the actor behind the character for granted. Serkis, however, does some extraordinary work in The Two Towers and his Gollum will likely be the high water mark for this kind of performance for many years to come.
David Carradine's performance in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 was one of my favourite supporting turns of 2004 and I figured he'd get an Oscar nod for sure. I mean, aside from the fact that the performance is great, he also had that Tarantino career revival magic that worked for John Travolta in Pulp Fiction and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown (though, unbelievably, that same magic failed for Pam Grier in that same film). Alas, it was not to be and the nominees that year were Alan Alda for The Aviator, Jamie Foxx for Collateral, Thomas Haden Church for Sideways, Clive Owen for Closer, and the eventual winner Morgan Freeman for Million Dollar Baby. For me, the solution to slipping Carradine in is easy: remove Foxx, who was also nominated that year (and won) for Ray and whose performance in Collateral was anything but supporting. It seems obvious, but of course Foxx had a massive amount of hype to propel him into a nomination. In Kill Bill, Carradine has a tough job. He has to make Bill scary and intense - a job he started in Vol. 1 as little more than a disembodied voice - but he also has to make the man human enough that we believe in his relationship with The Bride. From the start of the film Tarantino has Carradine walking that fine line, affectionately (though cautiously) reuniting with The Bride and then sitting back and letting the underlying tension between them explode in the form of an assassination attempt. Later he tells her that he acted impulsively out of hurt ("overreacted," he says) and in a surprisingly short number of scenes, Carradine has managed to give Bill enough shading that we can believe that he believes that he cares for her so much that he just had to destroy her. It's messed up, but what relationship in Kill Bill isn't?
In flashbacks we see Bill and The Bride in happier times (though, not for long, as he's about to drop her off for an arduous training experience), their relationship light and playful. She is obviously enamoured with him and dazzled by his knowledge and he seems protective and caring. It's still pretty creepy because his affection seems so paternal, but it shows another side to the relationship and the characters. A conversation with his brother, Budd, and scenes with his daughter B.B. have much the same effect, showing Bill as a human being rather than a shadowy, unstoppable force of evil. His existence is not defined solely by his desire to torture The Bride, but by a history that has left him unable to disengage love from hate or to solve any problem except through violence. When B.B. asks if he shot The Bride because he didn't know what would happen to her, he says, "What I didn't know, when I shot mommy, is what would happen to me... I was very sad. And that was when I learned that some things, once you do, they can never be undone." He's a man who would cut off his nose to spite his face simply because he knows no other way.
But make no mistake that Bill is a changed man who has learned the error of his ways. He's still perfectly willing to finish the job with The Bride and he's not willing to give her an inch for the sake of making amends. If she's going to make good on her promise to kill him, she'll have to earn it and he'll come at her with everything he has. What I love about the clip above - aside from the Tarantino crafted monologue - is Carradine's calmly sinister manner. He's cool and in control and maybe enjoying it just a little bit as he shuffles through all of the emotions she inspires in him. It's clear that he sees himself less as her destroyer than her savior - he made her the person she was always meant to be and she repaid him through rejection and betrayal. Their relationship is so complicated because Bill isn't a cartoon villain with a one track mind and no connection to human feeling; he feels everything intensely and takes everything personally.
Before Carradine was cast, the role of Bill was apparently offered to both Warren Beatty and Kevin Costner. It's hard to imagine either of those actors in the part (though I have an easier time picturing Beatty than Costner), so completely does Carradine fit. He plays the part like he's wearing a well tailored suit, guiding the character naturally through the plot and leaving an indelible mark. It's an excellent and memorable performance. Too bad Oscar politics got in the way of it being recognized.
I love Joan Allen. I have no idea what's happened to her career (Death Race???), but I think she's a consistently great actress, adept at both comedy and drama. To prove my point, I present as exhibit A her performance in Pleasantville, in which she runs the gamut of emotions and creates a compelling character out of what could easily have been a mere caricature. Hers was, hands down, one of the best performances of 1998, but AMPAS thought differently and instead nominated: Brenda Blethyn (Little Voice), Kathy Bates (Primary Colors), Judi Dench (Shakespeare In Love), Rachel Griffiths (Hilary and Jackie), and Lynn Redgrave (Gods and Monsters). Dench would go on to win the Oscar and she's the actress I'd swap out for Allen (though I say that having never seen Little Voice and therefore being unfamiliar with Blethyn's performance), but then I've never been a big fan of "make up" Oscars. Allen's Betty Parker begins the film as a solid caricature of a 1950s TV mom, her character literally a character in an old family sitcom. She's a wholesome presence who would never think a bad thing about anyone, capable of only ever so gently scolding someone for whatever minor misdeed will be the catalyst for that week's important life lesson. She cooks, she cleans, she neither does nor says anything that would allow her to evolve beyond two dimensions.
Slowly, as change begins to sweep across the cozy, innocent town of Pleasantville, so too does a change take place in Betty. As she physically begins to morph from black and white to color, Allen infuses her with more depth - the color spreads through her and she gradually awakens to her humanity, her autonomy, her sense of self. She becomes, essentially, a person with desires and thoughts of her own that complicate the perfect, strictly crafted world of Pleasantville. This leads her to an ending that is ambiguous but not necessarily unhappy.
Allen displays a delicate mixture of emotions as Betty struggles to comprehend and accept what is happening to her. She conveys the confusion and fear of her metamorphosis as well as the excitement about the possibilities these changes may bring, often doing so with little more than a flicker across her face or a slight inflection of her voice. Scene after scene shows her growing more confident with the person that she's becoming and the newfound power that she is asserting.
Of all the characters in the film, Betty's arc is the most profound, touching not only on issues of women's liberation but also on issues of racial inequality. It is primarily through her that the film explores civil rights, the most resonant of its themes, and Allen is more than capable of carrying that burden. Hers is a terrific performance as a character that is absolutely vital to the film's success. No wonder it was so easy to overlook.
Poor Joel McCrea. A solid, dependable actor who never relied on affect and was so seamlessly good that you never caught him "acting." He's the kind of actor who was taken for granted for decades, until finally towards the end of his life he started getting awards in honor of his career achievements, though the AMPAS still missed out on him. In 1941 he played perhaps his best part as movie director John Sullivan in a film which is itself one of the great comedies ever made and also went unrecognized by awarding bodies at the time. What McCrea does in Sullivan's Travels is deceptively simple. John Sullivan is essentially a nice guy who tries to do good, playing out a riches to rags to riches story - nothing to that, right? On closer analysis, however, the role is actually pretty tricky. Sullivan is a golden boy, a director whose films are hits with seemingly little effort. He produces frivolous little entertainments, but what he wants to do is make a film about the human condition, about suffering and poverty - things about which he knows nothing. He'll learn about those things by dressing like a drifter and walking the mean streets, learning first hand what life is like for people at the bottom of the social pyramid. The idea of a person of privilege telling the world what life is like for the common people rings faintly of pretension, as Sullivan's butler points out, saying, "I have never been sympathetic to the caricaturing of the poor and needy... The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous." Sullivan has a romantic idea of noble poverty, but McCrea doesn't allow him to seem like a fool or even a profiteer. His interest in the poor is genuine, even if his methods are somewhat suspect.
The film underscores how ludicrous Sullivan's mission is - his ratty clothes come straight out of the studio's costume department and a crew in a motorhome follows him on his journey of discovery - but McCrea's easy charm and sincerity keeps Sullivan from being the butt of the joke. Sullivan is the story's straight man and McCrea graciously allows everyone around him - the movie executives, his servants (Eric Blore and Robert Greig in top form), and Veronica Lake as his love interest - to get most of the best lines, which he dutifully sets them up for. McCrea underplays, mildly bemused through most of the film, letting us know that he recognizes the joke just as well as the rest of us do. His everyman quality comes in handy here, allowing us to easily identify with him.
Eventually circumstances give Sullivan the opportunity to experience real hardship - though by this time he has amnesia and can't appreciate the experience he's gaining for the sake of his art. McCrea moves easily from comedy into drama without allowing Sullivan to become too heavy and then shifts the character back into comedy without ever missing a beat. The lesson he learns - the "there's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that's all some people have?" - is hard earned and deeply felt on his part. His films may be frivolous but they're also important, serving to bring some happiness into lives that might otherwise be devoid of it. The realization couldn't happen to a nicer guy, but as they say nice guys finish last. An adage that Joel McCrea proves all too well.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Diane Selwyn. An actress who hasn't made it, who has been used and abused by the woman she loves, Diane has been beaten down by life and her bitterness has nearly eaten her from the inside out. While Betty represents the Hollywood dream, Diane is the harsh, brutal reality. As her ex-lover becomes the focus of her anger over her unfulfilled dreams, Diane becomes increasingly unhinged until, in the end, she can no longer outrun her own madness.
The two characters are so distinct and expertly played that it's difficult to accept that both are played by the same actress. As Betty, Watts has a bounce in her step and a sunny, can-do attitude; as Diane she slumps and sulks, though there are brief moments when a little bit of hope is allowed to pass briefly over her face, only to be crushed again in the next moment. This set of performances requires a lot, but Watts doesn't disappoint for even a second and carries the film with these two absolutely engrossing performances.
Now, granted, Watts didn't go entirely unnoticed. She won the Chicago Film Critics award for Best Actress, the National Board of Review's award for Breakthrough Performance and, bizarrely, the Las Vegas and San Diego Film Critcs awards for Supporting Actress; and her career took off in part thanks to the buzz Mulholland Drive generated but, seriously, she was robbed. I've seen this movie many times and I never cease to be impressed with what Watts accomplishes in it.
“Not all women are raving bloody lesbians, you know.” “That is a misfortune I am perfectly aware of!”
This happens to be one of my favourite exchanges in film. It also happens to come from one of my favourite films, which just so happens to feature one of my favourite performances in film. Coming out in 1968 and tackling subject matter that was far (far) from mainstream, I suppose it’s more surprising that it got any awards attention at all (a nomination for Beryl Reid as Best Actress from the Golden Globes) than that it was widely ignored by both the film industry and audiences, who shied away from the massive controversy it provoked. But despite the film's controversial aspects, the power of Beryl Reid's performance can't be denied. In this movie, she is utterly fearless. To call Reid’s performance in The Killing of Sister George “good” would be one of the greatest understatements you could make. “Real” would be more appropriate, “seamless” even – there isn’t a moment when you can see the space between actor and character. This is a complex, layered and lived-in performance that makes June “Sister George” Buckridge very human rather than the caricature she could easily have become. George is an actress fighting a losing battle against the reality of aging in show business. She’s also a closeted lesbian, a not so closeted alcoholic, and prone to remarkable mood swings. Her sadomasochistic relationship with her much younger girlfriend is absolutely fascinating and the story allows for it to be explored from multiple angles so that rather than seeming abusive, it’s clearly a relationship of give and take in which both have some need that is being fulfilled.
Through the course of the film, Reid switches easily between comedy and drama, making snappy asides, throwing tantrums, and occasionally displaying a raw vulnerability that makes it impossible to hate her regardless of her often hurtful and selfish behaviour. It’s hard to pinpoint Reid’s best scene in the film – the scene where George and Childie get ready to out to a club is wonderfully light, their first scene together in wonderfully tense, George’s first meeting with arch enemy Mercy Croft is a marvellous display of anxieties continuously floating up to the surface, and the final scene is totally devastating – but my favourite is a scene when George tells Childie about how she used to observe her before they’d officially met. Her speech is wistful and just a touch desperate – she knows that Childie is beginning to slip away from her and she wants nothing more than to hold on to what they have because Childie is the only person who has ever really understood her in any meaningful way. In this one scene Reid takes George through a series of emotions from longing to anger to regret to loneliness and never misses a beat, never lets the transitions feel false.
Although I think that both the film and the performance are criminally underrated, I can understand how it is that they ended up so far off the radar. The film was rated X when it was first released due in large part to a sex scene which seems tame by current standards, particularly given the ubiquity of same sex love scenes between women in films today. That scene, along with the sadomasochistic element of the central relationship, as well the fact that some scenes were shot inside an actual lesbian bar (which means, gasp that there are actual lesbians and not just actresses playing lesbians in the movie) pretty much guaranteed that the film wouldn’t be embraced by most audiences. Luckily, it’s also good enough that it was bound to become a cult classic and Reid is the major reason for that success.
I wouldn’t normally advocate this, but given how difficult it can be to track down a copy of this particular film, I’ll point out for those interested that it appears to be available in its entirety via Youtube at the moment. I dare you to watch it and tell me that Reid's performance isn't a great one that managed to slip through the cracks.
"Unsung" might not actually be the most appropriate word, given that Gene Hackman's work in The Royal Tenenbaums garnered a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, as well as a Chicago Film Critics Award and National Society of Film Critics Award, but the performance should have received much more attention. I mean, no SAG nomination (not even for ensemble? Damn, that's an oversight), no Oscar nod? Given the performances that were nominated that year, it's difficult to find a way to justify Hackman's exclusion. Russel Crowe in A Beautiful Mind and Tom Wilkinson in In The Bedroom I'll give you, and sight unseen I'm even willing to concede Denzel Washington in Training Day. But Sean Penn going "full on" in I Am Sam or Will Smith doing a glorified impersonation in Ali? I mean... come on. That's just not right. Hackman’s omission can probably be attributed – at least in part – to the fact that the Academy generally doesn’t have much respect for comedy. To inspire tears is divine, to inspire laughter is crass, or at least that’s the general idea. But there’s more to Hackman’s work as the eponymous Royal Tenenbaum than simply having a way with the words written by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson. On the face of it, Royal is a sociopath – he’s self-centered, has no sense of responsibility or guilt, no moral compass, and punishment does nothing to change his overall behaviour. In Hackman’s hands Royal is still a sociopath, but he’s not without heart and, by the end of the film, you do believe that he has found a way to connect meaningfully with the people in his life.
The key, I think, is that Hackman makes Royal charmingly charmless. The heart of the story is a con that Royal is trying to pull on his family, but I don’t think you could ever correctly identity him as a “con artist” because he’s so inept at reading people and so entirely lacking in the ability to tell people what they want to hear and win them over to his side. There is a sincerity to the way that he approaches things that is completely detrimental to his purposes because it serves as a constant reminder to his family of why they haven’t had anything to do with him in years… and yet, he doesn’t see that at all. He thinks he’s going to win them over by saying things like, “I’ve missed the hell out of you, my darlings,” or (my personal favourite), “I’m very sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman;” or by doing things like teaching his grandsons how to shoplift and dodge through moving traffic (for fun, not necessity), and by taking them to dogfights. He has absolutely no conception of how normal human being interact with each other or why his wife and children (save for younger son Richie, who seems prepared to accept him no matter what) would make him do so much work to get back in their lives when he has consistently shown that there is no one he cares for nearly as much as he cares for himself.
Through the course of the film, the character evolves but only somewhat. “I’ve always been considered an asshole for about as long as I can remember. That’s just my style,” he explains, as if he could be a nice guy if he tried, which I don’t think is necessarily true. The point is that he finally gets it and while his “style” might not change, at least he’s started to understand how it can be off-putting to those around him. Earlier, when Eli Cash states that he always wanted to be a Tenenbaum and Royal responds with “Me too,” it conveys two things. First, that there’s a degree of self-loathing running through Royal and a belief that he’s really not good enough to be a member of his family (and this implied belief is about as close as he ever gets to really complimenting any of them). Second – and this is all in the delivery – that there’s nothing he can do, or could ever have done, about it, as if it’s a desirable but impossible dream.
Hackman is a great actor and there is not a single moment of his performance in this film where he is not totally alive in the role. He brings dimension and nuance to a character that could simply be an asshole and nothing more, and looks like he's having the time of his life while doing so.
