The Movie Club

Acting’s Up

There aren’t enough acting awards in the world to recognize the kind of work being done nowadays, mostly in independent movies but occasionally in the mega-budget arena. (Think of how much colder The Fellowship of the Ring would feel without Ian McKellan.) Credit the writers and the directors, too: Most of them know more about the psychology of acting than they used to. Credit the editors who know how to enhance them and protect them. (All actors need protection.) Credit TV series like The Sopranos and The WestWing for showing us acting miracles in every episode. Actors watch them and see what’s possible and want to be that good.

What’s lacking? As always, recognition of great work being done in broad comedy. Sigourney Weaver is just titanically silly and spirited in Heartbreakers—a world-class farceuse—but no one mentions her at year-end. (And I was struck in talking to Gene Hackman how little confidence he had in his work in the same movie. Yeah, he pushed the envelope, but he hit the most marvelous notes.) Two of the most grounded, soulful performances of the year are by Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal. I loved Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, but she takes many more chances here, and she won’t get an Oscar—just grief from liberals and organizations that claim to speak for the overweight. She and Hackman are great in The Royal Tenenbaums, too: They do a kind of stylized acting (fast-paced, with a lot of poetic shorthand) that has some built-in irony but is full of emotional truth. One could say the same of Thora! Thora! Thora! in GhostWorld and Denzel Washington in Training Day (a performance that derives its stature from the fact that the character is trying to give a bravura, psych-out performance), and Ben Kingsley as a Cockney bogeyman out-Pintering Pinter and out-Mameting Mamet in Sexy Beast. Billy Bob Thornton had a lot of emotional layers in the ironic context of The Man Who Wasn’t There—but I haven’t decided how I feel about his work in Monster’sBall. He’s a little clammy and slow-motion and controlled now for my taste; I liked him better when he rushed himself in One False Move.

It was a year of artful risks. In Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Tailor of Panama two arch leading men, Hugh Grant and Pierce Brosnan, dared to do their pretty-boy acts in a more sinister context—and triumphed. Jack Nicholson stripped off some layers of irony in The Pledge and gave his simplest, purest performance since The Border in 1980. Nicole Kidman has become very skillful at using that squeezed brittleness of hers to make you feel her longing. She is very fine in The Others.

A few male heartthrobs have sauntered onto the scene this year. George Clooney shows off his movie-star ease in Ocean’s 11, and Hugh Jackman has a couple of moments in very forgettable films. Vin Diesel emerged as an improbable romantic figure in The Fast and the Furious; many actors would kill for that deep but bone-dry voice of his.

GosfordPark is just a banquet of great acting—where to begin? With Maggie Smith’s mixture of superiority and inner panic? With Helen Mirren’s furiously internalized energy? With Clive Owen’s powerful stillness? Emily Watson’s prim but so sexy self-possession? And so it goes, all the way down the line.

And then there’s Sissy Spacek in In the Bedroom. It’s what actors would call “mask work.” Watch the unreal tightness of the mask—and the unreal capaciousness of those blue eyes—in the scene in which a friend chatters blithely about her grandchildren: “No chance of us dyin’ off.”

Thank you to the gods of acting.

David