JPL

After watching Luc Moullet's A Girl is a Gun last night, I started mulling over this question: exactly what kind of an actor is Jean-Pierre Léaud? I have someone's comment (was it a critic's, from one of my acting teachers, a film prof's?) to the effect that he isn't an actor stuck in my head. If I squint, I can see what that means - he's not a chameleon, he's not overtly theatrical, and he doesn't play off a star persona à la Belmondo - but obviously he's doing something: Billy le Kid is a different character than Tom in Last Tango in Paris who in turn is a different character than Alexandre in La maman et la putain.

Maybe it's because I'm still under the influence of the Moullet, but I want to say that what Léaud is doing is closer to what Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati do than it is to what Belmondo or Michel Piccoli do.

Movie Chat: Next

Next

Next would make a great double bill with Deja Vu with the theme of Time Travel Thrillers That Were Better Than I Expected (but I'm Still Glad I Waited to See Them on DVD).

Or you could double bill it with Ghost Rider under the theme Star as Auteur. Or should that be Starteur? Anyway, Nicolas Cage seems to be making movies about guys who are flashy showmen onstage and withdrawn and alienated weirdos off. They just need the love of a beautiful woman to convince them they need to interact with the world.

I think Cage is pretty good in these roles, although maybe "good" is the wrong word since what he's doing is a little bizarre and we might question the validity of the entire project (i.e., working out personal issues through big budget action star vehicles). Still - he ends up giving these movies, well, not depth, but at least some genuine humanity amid all the neat CGI effects and explosions.

But the best part of Next is (slight spoiler) that just when you're worried that they're going to keep the thing going for another twenty minutes, they wrap it up. Nothing pushes a big action movie from Mediocre over the line into Pretty Decent like a 90 minute running time.

Movie Chat: No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men

Here's the puzzle:

How to talk about a movie that, for its first 100 minutes is excellent, but whose last 20 minutes almost don't play at all (even though they do make perfect sense conceptually and thematically)?

Especially since, as much as I liked the movie - and I liked it quite a bit: it's alongside 28 Weeks Later, The Host, and Death Proof as my favorite movies of the year - I'm much more interested in writing about what I didn't like about it, partly because the good stuff is so good that I think it's a real shame that the movie as a whole doesn't quite deliver.

About the good stuff: though the story is nothing new - guy finds money from a drug deal gone wrong, tries to keep it for himself, gets into trouble as a consequence - the storytelling is so fully-realized, with so many "just right" details that moment-to-moment the movie is breathtaking. There are two perfectly executed suspense sequences - one involving the guy getting chased by a dog and the other involving a cat-and-mouse game in a hotel that turns into a running gunfight through the streets of a run down Texas town - and two sustained, spot-on main performances - from Tommy Lee Jones ('natch) and Josh Brolin*.

The major problem is that after the Men's Adventure Movie plot comes to an end, there are still several more scenes that serve to wrap up Cormac McCarthy's thematic concerns. The scenes are well-done, (with one exception) well-acted, and, in some ways, they feel a lot more like what we're used to from the Coen Brothers (think the "philosophical" dialogue scenes from Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing, or The Man Who Wasn't There), but compared to everything that came before, they're flat. And there's too many of them: I got the same sense I had at the end of the movie version of Return of the King - one ending would be enough, we don't need three or four. Of course, Return earns those endings (in a way) because they're meant to cap off 8+ hours of epic moviemaking. With this movie, though, they weigh everything down by making too many of the movie's themes explicit.

(It isn't often that I'll see a movie and know exactly what I would cut out, but here it's: Javier Bardem's scene with Stephen Root, Tommy Lee Jones's conversation with the El Paso sheriff played by Rodger Boyce, and Bardem's scene with Kelly MacDonald and it's aftermath - see below.)

My other problem with the movie: Javier Bardem's performance, while technically accomplished, got old pretty quickly.

Compared to the easy naturalism of Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones, Bardem is doing elaborate, cartoony schtick. It's the lead performance most like those from other Coen Brothers flicks. This wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't as much of it, because each of his dialogue scenes is making the same point - that he's a psychopathic freak on his own wavelength - in the same way - Bardem's off-kilter, spaced-out intensity.

Bardem is a little like John Turturro in The Big Lebowski, but the big differences are that (a) Jesus is only on screen for a few minutes and (b) the joke at least has a punchline.

Bardem's Chigurh is as one-note of a performance as Robert Patrick's in Terminator 2, but James Cameron is smart enough to have the T-1000 keep his mouth shut. Chigurh, like the T-1000, is supposed to be a kind of a force of nature and he seems more like a plot device - the relentless killing machine - than an actual character. Not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you realize that it's not very interesting to try to get inside the head of a plot device.

Watching Bardem, I started comparing him (unfavorably) to Tom Noonan in Manhunter: Bardem's performance is intense, but it also has big quotation marks around it - he's doing a quirky take on "Movie Psycho" - while Tom Noonan's is intense but also terrifyingly, believably alien - it's creepy and disturbing in a way that we don't usually see in thrillers. The horror comes from the total, straight-faced commitment Tom Noonan brings to that character's twisted belief system.

*After Brolin's performance here and in Planet Terror, I have to wonder if he's always been this good or it's more like after working so long in so many second rate roles in second rate productions he's finally gotten to the point where these kinds of note-perfect genre turns just come naturally to him.

Five Ways of Looking at Acting in the Movies

One: Motivation

When I see a performance in a movie, I want the actor to get across why their character is doing what they are doing.

I am all for ambiguity: human beings often have lots of competing, overlapping, and even contradictory reasons for doing something, so I especially appreciate it when an actor can get mixed motivations across all at once.

If the character's motivation has to stay hidden (as with Julianne Moore's performance in Neil Jordan's version of The End of the Affair), then (a) I want it to make sense in retrospect once the mystery is solved and (b) I want to be able to speculate meaningfully about the pre-solution parts of the performance.

Two: Expression

When I see a performance in a movie, I want the actor to expose the emotional state of their character.

Maybe expose is the wrong word, but I'm wary of getting too poetic or too sappy. I'm thinking here of something like Jennifer Connelly's performance in Dark Water: she doesn't build her character like the supporting actors do in that movie, she's not especially convincing (nor is she especially unconvincing) as a young working, single mom. But she opens up to the camera and radiates vulnerability.

Of course, I don't like having to use a word like "radiates" to talk about this - too poetic again. More specifically, she has an expressive face and she's comfortable enough in front of the camera to let it pick up all its subtle shifts.

Three: Achievement

When I see a performance in a movie, I want the actor to impress me with their skills.

We are talking about performance after all, and showing off what you can do is a big part of that.

Skills is a big category, though. It can be actory skills - Kevin Spacey's inventive line readings in The Usual Suspects or L.A. Confidential, Daniel Day-Lewis's physical work in My Left Foot - or it can be showier, song-and-dance-style skills - Jackie Chan's highly choreographed stunts and fights in Project A, Steve Martin's physical comedy in All of Me.

Four: Specifics

When I see a performance in a movie, I want the actor to create a character (or at least a moment) I might recognize from life.

I want to be convinced. Like with Ricky Gervais as David Brent in The Office: he obnoxious like people I know in real life are obnoxious, not charmingly obnoxious like a lot of TV characters.

Five: Swept Away

When I see a performance in a movie, I want to be charmed.

Moviemaking isn't necessarily that much fun. Work is work and while I don't have any extra sympathy for actors (who are, after all, probably getting paid to do what they love), I do recognize that the process can be just as much a pain in the ass as many other jobs.

But when I go to the movies, I don't want to have to think about any of that. So, when I'm watching Will Smith in Enemy of the State, I don't want to start thinking about what a drag it must be to have to run around one of these big budget action monstrosities: I just want to admire his poise and sense of humor.

Keanu

This is a slightly edited e-mail back-and-forth with my friend Nick:

Me to Nick:

A few weeks ago when my wife was up in VT with her family, she called me and was like: "You think Keanu Reeves is a good actor, right?" And I was like: "Yes, of course, why." Then she was like: "I'm going to put you on speaker so you can explain why he's a good actor to my [younger] brother." But he had only seen THE MATRIX and the first Bill and Ted movie, and he didn't think Reeves was very good in THE MATRIX, so it was basically an impossible task.

Poor Keanu! So misunderstood.

Nick back to me:

Keanu is a good actor for three reasons:

1) He understands the relationship between his character and "stock spectacle/high concept", and thus is always an effective foil for whatever the director is throwing at him.

2) Connected to #1, Keanu, "The Hero" is always ready to inject a sense of humility/frustration/embarrassment into his action characters. He doesn't play "Superhuman" like 80s action stars, even when his character is pretty much "super human".

3) He's willing to try new things with varying degrees of success. He does great deadpan in I LOVE YOU TO DEATH.

I think, overall, he's a less gimmicky actor than Brad Pitt, but Pitt has somehow managed to gain a lot of goodwill by taking "bro" roles, like in OCEANS WHATEVER, MR AND MRS SMITH and, to some extent, FIGHT CLUB. I think Pitt's a more self-conscious actor, but that sometimes he can make that work (TRUE ROMANCE, parts of FIGHT CLUB).

Keanu, if not for his hunky frame, could probably have had a lot of success in the territory Joseph Gordon Levitt now occupies. He possesses a sort of dreamy stoicism that a lot of people equate to stupidity. I think it has more to do with being on a different frequency.

Me again:

I think he gets criticism because a lot of his biggest parts aren't very showy: Neo, for example, is meant to be a pretty reserved character. People equate "reserved" with "doing nothing". They miss out all the little things he does as an actor (your point #2). Like: the scene in THE MATRIX where he decides he needs to back into the Matrix after Morpheus - even though he doesn't really believe he's "the one" - is pretty fucking moving, but Reeves keeps everything really small. (Would you really want to see Robert Downey Jr. as Neo???) I can't think of any role where he "oversells" anything.

But I think he's also good when he's a little more "showy": like in THE GIFT or BILL AND TED or MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO. He has a pretty decent range for an actor of his time and place. People seem to forget these performances (or never saw them in the first place) when they're dissing him.

I think Pitt is pretty good when he's just being funny and charming, but, for the most part, he doesn't bring too much to the table. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing - it works for the OCEANS movies and I thought some of the stuff he did in SMITH was pretty clever - but he's at his best when he gets out of the way, whereas Keanu (IMO) makes a positive, creative contribution to the roles he takes on.

Compare, for example, Pitt's stoner in TRUE ROMANCE, which is a pretty funny little comic turn, but basically a doodle (you can't imagine him extending it to feature length), with Keanu in A SCANNER DARKLY, where he really evokes the whole "walking wounded"-ness of far-gone stoners.

Good point about JGL, too. Reeves in RIVER'S EDGE is a lot like JGL is in his roles right now.

So, yeah - these are the kinds of conversations I actually have with people...

Movie Chat: The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia

The movie looks so good in terms of design and it hits just the right mood and tone for this kind of neo-noir that I wish I could have enjoyed it more a la Michael Blowhard and the guys at The House Next Door.

I'm a big supporter and admirer of Brian De Palma, but I don't think the script or the original James Ellroy novel are really to blame here. In the past De Palma has done more with less, but he doesn't put anything on the screen here that hooked me and reeled me in, so I was left admiring the movie's production values without ever being engaged by it.

Unlike Snake Eyes or Raising Cain (which are definitely "minor" De Palma), it doesn't have charismatic and engaging lead performances or any filmmaking-muscle-flexing set pieces that make movies buff like me drool.

Unlike Femme Fatale, it isn't a "through-composed", arty, neo-noir-ish exercise.

And unlike The Fury, The Untouchables, or Mission to Mars, De Palma isn't able to get into the pulpy material and give it conceptual coherence and emotional heft.

My diagnosis: De Palma falls short of making another one of those pulp opera experiences because he misdirects his actors. Josh Harnett, Aaron Eckhart, and Scarlett Johansson look like they fit in their roles, but their performances are all pretty fuzzy. Hilary Swank is pretty entertaining as the femme fatale, but the other leads just don't seem very game.

I think Mia Kirshner, who appears in only three scenes, gives the performance of the movie: her aspiring actress character is, herself, trying to show off the ability to move from artifice to "genuine" emotion and back again and Kirshner turns this into a perfect little po-mo portrait of the artist as a would-be starlet. It's on a smaller scale, but it reminded me of what Naomi Watts does in Mulholand Drive. Kirshner pops out of the movie: she creates a fully-realized character in the middle of a cast of fuzzy copies of characters from past noirs.

Kirshner is definitely helped by how her role was conceived: she's the only actor in the movie given the lines and the space to create a realistic, detailed character - everyone else is forced into trying to do a type.

I've liked Josh Harnett in other movies, but when he's supposed to be larger-than-life or kind of mythic (as he is here and in Sin City), I just don't buy him. He's too nice and too dull and he doesn't have the kind of showy, technical, actory skills that can juice up roles like these. He can be better than fine when he's playing average nice guys (in Hollywood Homicide, where he's funny and gives his character a natural, believable quirkiness), but he seems out of place when he's not playing a standard juvenile lead.

Harnett is another one of these "pretty boys" who have replaced actual leading men in Hollywood movies, so it may not be surprising that De Palma can't get him to work in this part which requires an actual leading man.

I wonder if part of the problem is that De Palma was aiming for something partway between the European-style genre doodling of Femme Fatale and the highly-charged genre opera of his big-budget Hollywood entertainments (The Untouchables and Mission to Mars, say). The movie isn't playful enough to work as the former and isn't emotionally engaging enough to work as the latter.

From the Archives: Performance Anxieties

For a while now, I’ve wanted to write a post about why most of the conventional wisdom about what makes good acting - especially in movies - is wrong.

Many smart people spend a good deal of time thinking and writing about movies, but hardly anyone pays much attention to the acting. Whether writing popular movie reviews or academic film criticism, most writers will spend a great deal of time dealing with the specifics of a movie’s plot, theme, script, and technique, but they’ll describe the acting only in superficial generalities (i.e., “Tom Hanks was very believable” or “Keanu Reeves was wooden” or “Russell Crowe got to the heart of the character,” etc.).

I’m tempted to explain this by saying that writing about the specifics of a performance is simply harder than writing about the specifics of a screenplay. However, I don’t think that this is precisely true, that is, I think it is harder for most writers to write about acting, but not because of any inherent difference in difficulty. Rather, writers, being writers, find it easier to treat movies as a piece of writing. They find it easier to write about the literary qualities that movies shares with other kinds of writing (plot, theme, dialogue, etc.) than it is to write about those qualities that movies share with interpretative/performing arts.

I’d argue that only a writer could have come up with something like the auteur theory, because only a writer would look at a movie as the realization of a single person’s vision. A casual moviegoer would more likely, and more rightly, see a movie as the result of collaboration between the actors and some unseen technicians.

To offer some completely anecdotal evidence: not once in my career as a cinema studies grad student did I encounter (1) a piece of writing about acting or (2) someone who was working on a piece of writing about acting or (3) someone who was interested in writing about acting. I did come across a lot of people writing about star personae, but those writers weren’t interested in acting per se but rather how a star’s image affected the reading of a movie.

However, it isn’t only writers, critics, and academics who have a blind spot when it comes to acting. Most people seem to judge performances not based on the acting but on what I like to call the ahc-ting. In one of my favorite blog posts, Michael Blowhard decries what he calls “writin’”, that is writing, which word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence, calls attention to its own importance and literary greatness. Following Michael, I’d like to use the word “ahc-ting” to describe the kind of acting where ever line reading and gesture is meant to call attention to the meaning and importance of the performance. Ahc-ting doesn’t necessarily require scenery chewing or going over-the-top. It can and often does, but some of the most egregious ahc-ting is very subtle. Unfortunately, it seems that most people now judge good acting by the standards of ahc-ting. Ahc-ting is supposed to impress people, and much of it is impressive. However, even when I’ve been impressed, I haven’t much liked it. Here are a few suggestions that might help save us all from ahc-ting:

Actors should not show how hard they are working.

Every performance requires a certain amount of effort. Some require a great deal. However, I never really enjoy a performance when an actor doesn’t let me forget how much effort it’s taking.

Method actors — even very good ones — will often start showing-off their homework when they have nothing else to do. John Cassavetes’s movies are filled with very good actors who, because they’re not given any specific direction and they’re not trying to play specific characters, end up flailing around, wrestling with their inner demons for no greater purpose than to show the audience how much effort they’re putting into the whole affair.

Movie stars will often make this mistake. For example, Tom Cruise is always taking roles — Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July or Fank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia — where he has to strain and sweat and strut, in order to show that he’s a “real” ahc-tor, and not just a pretty face.

Meryl Streep does this, albeit with more class and skill than most. Streep’s performances are all very technically accomplished, but there’s usually not much more your can say about them. It’s not so much a case of her showing off how hard she’s working, but of having nothing to show the audience except the preparation she’s taken: she approaches a role as if it were an exercise in an acting class. I usually don’t mind watching Streep because, unlike Tom Cruise, for example, she is talented and she does know a lot about the nuts and bolts of acting. However, most of Streep’s performances aren’t that enjoyable.

99% of the time actors should just be themselves.

For some actors, mimicry can be a very effective technique (see Sir Laurence Olivier and Daniel Day-Lewis), but mimicry itself isn’t acting. However, many people seem to believe that mimicry is at the heart of acting: that actors must try to “be” someone else and that acting is a kind of self-transformation. This is an unfortunate delusion. Acting is about playing a part, which is accomplished not by a combination of physical and emotional contortions, but by saying and doing and pretending to want the same things a character is supposed to say and do and want.

In general, actors should avoid mimicry for two major reasons:

1) Most actors simply aren’t good at it. There’s nothing less compelling than someone expending a lot of effort trying to “transform” themselves into someone else when it is painfully obvious that no such transformation is possible. I like Russell Crowe in movies like L.A. Confidential and Master and Commander, but his attempt to portray John Nash in A Beautiful Mind is completely preposterous. Crowe’s performance consists entirely of flexing his fingers, stuttering, and giving off an “uncomfortable” vibe.

2) Even actors who are technically proficient mimics have a tendency to turn mimicry into a stunt. Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Rain Man is a perfect example. Hoffman does an excellent job of impersonating an autistic person, but the performance would have been just as effective if it were 5 minutes long. Jim Carrey nails the Andy Kaufman routines in Man on the Moon, but, again, so what?

The least enjoyable kind of mimicry occurs when the impersonation itself is the entire point of the performance. In these cases the audience is meant to look at the characters and say “I can’t believe that’s really so-and-so.” Once that’s been said, really, there’s usually nothing more to say about these kinds of performances. A recent example is Charlize Theron’s performance in Monster. Though Theron is a competent actor, the big draw of watching Monster wasn’t her performance, per se, but that you couldn’t believe it was her under all that make-up.

There are few things I find more annoying than listening to someone criticize an actor because he (or she) always plays himself (or herself). As far as I am concerned “playing yourself” is neither good nor bad. What matters is how interesting and enjoyable the performance is, not its novelty. Moreover, it makes sense to cast actors in roles that fit them. In other words, it makes sense to cast actors within their range, and we shouldn’t care how great an actor’s range is if he (or she) is always good within it.

The “playing himself” criticism is also bogus because many actors manage to play many different characters, while always “playing themselves.” James Stewart, for example, is perfectly believable as an uptight, oversensitive urban clerk (The Shop Around the Corner), a small town man at the end of his rope (It’s a Wonderful Life), an aw-shucks farm boy in the big city (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), an ornery cattle driving outlaw (The Far Country), and an obsessive whack-job (Vertigo, but also, with more subtlety, The Man Who Knew Too Much). Yet, though all these characters are certainly different, in each performance Stewart is just as certainly “himself.” Or, rather, Stewart manages to play a wide variety of characters by emphasizing different aspects of his "self" as appropriate.

Rather than thinking of good actors as people who can convincingly “be someone else,” I’d argue that good actors are people who can convincingly find themselves in the roles they play.

It’s just a method.

Now, I don’t want to dump on method acting alone. My beef is with any kind of “one-true-way” kind of acting criticism. For example, my reply to Olivier’s anti-method quip to Dustin Hoffman, who was going a little overboard in his method-y preparations for Marathon Man — “Why don’t you try acting?” — would be to suggest that what Hoffman was doing was part of the acting process, it just wasn’t the same process Olivier had been taught. (As the proof of the pudding is in the eating, it is perhaps useful to point out that neither man’s preparations did them much good in Marathon Man: Olivier comes across as a constipated B-movie Nazi and Hoffman is a passive, uninteresting slug. The movie would have been better with Christopher Lee and Richard Dreyfuss, but that might have thwarted John Schlesinger’s plan of making a thoroughly miserable film.)

Unfortunately, when most people think of “good acting” they are thinking of only one or two things: a serious Method performance (Sean Penn in Mystic River) and/or a serious British Classical performance (Sir Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs). These two styles use different techniques, but they share the same goal: naturalistic performance. Truth be told, both styles do a pretty good job of achieving naturalism on a regular basis, but that still leaves the question of whether “naturalism” itself should be the goal of a performance.

Of course, I don’t think it should be. Nowadays, audiences and critics tend to look down on overt theatricality, which is a real shame, as many of the greatest actors of the first half of the 20th Century gave theatrical-style performances: Orson Welles, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart (in The Treasure of the Sierra Madres, for example), James Cagney, Ida Lupino, etc. Gary Oldman is one of the few genuine hams who gets any respect from contemporary critics.

Almost everything is forgivable if (a) the actor is having fun and (b) the audience is having fun.

A lot of people complain about actors who “chew the scenery.” Now, this can be a legitimate complaint, but a lot of the time, I find over-the-top hamming extremely enjoyable. However, this is dependent on tone and context. For example, I got a real kick out of Al Pacino’s shenanigans in The Devil’s Advocate, where he gets so angry he catches on fire but couldn’t stand them in Scent of a Woman, when we’re meant to take them seriously. Likewise, I thought that Sir Anthony Hopkins was a hoot in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but that his scenery chewing in The Silence of the Lambs was preposterous. His Hannibal Lecter was far too actor-y to fit into a movie that is trying to be a realistic psychological thriller. (Compare Hopkins’s performance in Lambs to Brian Cox’s understated, but much creepier, take on Lecter in Manhunter).

And I could go on and on…

I guess I’ll stop here for now, but I could certainly add a few more, like: line reading isn’t everything (too many people overlook the physical side of a performance), beautiful people can be fine actors (and they shouldn’t need to make themselves ugly to prove it), range isn’t everything (the Christopher Walken Rule)…

Though this post was basically an excuse to air some pet peeves, I hope that it will inspire you to question the conventional wisdom about good acting and be more willing to stand up for performances that you actually find enjoyable—not just the ones you’re supposed to find impressive.

5x5 Favorites: Clint and Friends Edition

My 5 Favorite Clint Eastwood Peformances

1. A Perfect World
2. Unforgiven
3. Coogan's Bluff
4. The Bridges of Madison County
5. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

My 5 Favorite Clint Eastwood-Directed Movies

1. A Perfect World
2. Unforgiven
3. The Outlaw Josey Wales
4. High Plains Drifter
5. White Hunter Black Heart

My 5 Favorite Don Siegel Movies

1. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
2. Charley Varrick
3. Coogan's Bluff
4. The Killers
5. Madigan


My 5 Favorite Sergio Leone Movies

1. Once Upon a Time in the West
2. Once Upon a Time in America
3. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
4. A Fistful of Dollars
5. A Fistful of Dynamite

5 Directors Clint Should Have Worked With (or Should Work With Now in the Case of 4 and 5)

1. Sam Peckinpah
2. Francois Truffaut
3. Howard Hawks
4. Johnny To
5. Steven Soderbergh