I don't understand the world we live in. One minute it's in awe and devastating recognition of acting giants like Denzel and Robert Deniro and the committed talents of someone like a Jim Carrey and the next it's telling me that Chris Evans is Robert De Niro and that Channing Tatum is a brilliant comedic talent.
King Richard Doesn't Trust Us.
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Movie stars can present a very interesting conundrum. Their special ability to bring presence in a film that materializes in such a very specific, magnetic, and near magical way can not only draw people to your film on their behalf, but in the right light and casting they can elevate and bring transcendence to the work..OR they can capsize a film, disallow you from being able to suspended belief, or over emphasize the lesser aspects of your script. While I don’t think Will Smith as Richard Williams capsizes Reinaldo Marcus Green's “King Richard”, (In many ways the script is in alliance with this aspect of Will ) he is definitely the latter of these two possibilities rather than the former. There is a sense of the same artifice that has made him one of the world’s most likeable actors here on display in this Oscar bait as Richard Williams the father and coach of two of America's most brilliant, successful, and talented athletes ever. There has always been a dichotomy to Will's good-nature, it makes him loveable but keeps us at a distance, and it allows us to trust him when he clearly doesn't ’t trust us with his true vulnerability on the line. So he gives just enough to satisfy but never enough to hurt him and thusly we are rarely hurt by him on screen in that oh so good way that great actors can on screen. That lack of trust seeps it’s way into the story King Richard seems to want to tell, and though it’s hard to tell how much of it is Will and how much is the movie, its clear neither are fully on board with trusting us to hear and see the very worst right along with the very best of Richard.
Watching the film it's pretty clear what King Richard wants to say about Richard Williams. The movie wants to present a flawed man who had a resourceful and willful desire to see his daughters reach places that he himself and others he saw around him never saw. You get the sense that the film would like to present a balance of Richard's ego and harmful self aggrandizing versus the social economic inhibitors and buffers black people face just trying to be anything in an unjust world. In a nuanced way this this film would have been a film I would have loved to death, something of an ode to black fathers and a critique, and in fits and spurts you get pieces of that type of film. The beginning of the film features a sort of montage of Richard's various meetings with various white Tennis coaches that turn him down in various white ways. The scenes properly demonstrate these buffers be they economic or racial, and they play well against Richard's insightful, driven, but also overbearing personality. Later on in the film when there is an argument between Richard and his wife ( played quite wonderfully by Aunjanue Ellis ) about his stubbornness and his unilateral decision making , we really get a taste of where and when his will meets walls that make him a very tough man to live with and morbidly insensitive, but these moments also end up showing the film's scriptural weaknesses every bit as much as they show its strengths, especially as it pertains to Will Smith. Maybe the greatest moment of conflict in the movie comes a full hour and 39 minutes into the film, which is problematic in and of itself but pushing that to the side- we see Richard get into a second confrontation with his wife over yet another unilateral decision made by Richard over whether or not his daughter will attend a tournament. Now it’s important to state that the first time he does this Richard is warned by his wife that he can never again make another decision like this without first consulting her and without really listening to what it is his girls actually want or there will be consequences….and yet he does it again and script wise, there is no real consequence or push back that comes from this, simply more talking. This is in fact realistic and it happens in many marriages and close knit relationships, but this doesn't come in a way that allows or conjures examination about Brandi and her position, how trapped she might feel, or maybe even erased by a man who continues to be wilfully obtuse about his own need for martyrdom and to be the singular figure and role player in these girls lives. Will Smith's compounds this issue because he himself has built such a career off being likable he simply does not pull off in any meaningful way these traits beyond the most basic ask of the writing. I don't even think it's that hes not trying, it’s just that the idea of being able to go to that place where you yourself become ugly to the audience or nasty, mean, vile , or any of the sort is foreign to him.. he doesn't understand the concept. Don't let the words I used fool you into believing that I think that Richard needed to be vile or necessarily nasty I'm just bringing them up as varying possibilities for that I know that Will can't do. For this film I think mean spirited, rude, obnoxious, cold, thoughtless, and condescending, as it pertains to the script depiction of Richard come to mind, but only through the piecing together of exposition and context. Will himself doesn’t give himself over to very much of this. For context and comparison let's take a look at another scene which I think exemplifies even the slightest level of that want or ability to make oneself appear unlikable, I’ll use this scene from Michael Mann's “Heat”. Where DeNiro first meets Amy Brenneman…
What Deniro captures here is a steadfast myopic dedication to one's own protection, Which he is willing to embody because of his philosophical approach as an actor, and subsequently the fact that DeNiro has spent the greater part of his career playing characters that float between the dynamic of being extremely charismatic and extremely deviant and or unlikable. Will Smith too is playing a character dedicated to a steadfast and myopic protection, except for this time it is not only himself but it is also for his daughters and their career. The difference is neither the story, nor the the camera, nor Will Smith are willing to dive all the way into that space in the way that DeNiro and Mann are willing to. Will Smith has made a career of careful curation and meticulous formulation. He has trained every part of him to respond to things in a way that most effectively increases his likeabilty and thus his box office. There is a scene that takes place just before the major conflict scene between Richard and his wife, Where we see that particular argument is initiated by an original conflict between Richard and the girl's new coach Rick Macci played by Jon Bernthal. Richard announces that he is taking the girls out of practice and junior tournament competition, and Director Reinaldo Marcus Green never let’s the camera sit on Will's face for any length of time but it is especially ignored or distanced when he has something nasty or mean-spirited to say. Green shoots from the side when Will all but calls Jenifer Capriati a crackhead. When Will's Richard goes on about how it’s his plan that has guided all this to Macci asserting his dominance -Green goes over the shoulder, and when Richard becomes sarcastic and demeaning about his wife’s role in crafting their Daughters skillset , again he is slightly over Wills shoulder. Now obviously you want to capture the other perosn’s reaction, or in the case of the latter maintain the POV of the character who is speaking (Ellis), but there are ways to do this without losing the impact of what Will is doing that have alot to do with changing some poor blocking for the needs of the scene. Even still the choice is understandable as when the camera is focused on Will he is unable to deliver the proper tonality in his face needed for the emotion within the context of these scenes. When his wife brings up Richard's past its one very clear example of a certain hollowness in Will's skillset, and in he and the movies will to trust us. In any space or context dredging up this past would be something that would probably set someone off. Not necessarily in any way that demonstrates or alludes to violence but just something that would deeply knock them off balance, but Will is always on balance and there is none of what should be registering on his face there even though his words and the things he retorts back to his wife are clearly indicative of the kind of underlying hurt and anger that should appear on Wills face. What this does is take away the full power, impact, and resonance of this particular scene unless you are paying sole attention to the words. So that a scene that should have the impact of Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in Fences where a husband and a wife are clearly confronting past sins and hurt that they have not been communicative to each other about - Instead feels more like a it's a simple disagreement about the direction in which to drive. ..
Extra marital affairs in the case of “Fences” and abandoned children in the case of “King Richard” are not light work, or subjects, these are the kinds of discussions and retorts that would most certainly inspire great disappointment, anger, frustration, hurt and more. Those emotions then as a consequence would inspire and create power through impact - that is what we saw out of the seminal and now classic Denzel/Viola scene in “Fences”. I don't know that anyone believes that fences is one of the greatest films of this era or even that there are that many people who love it in its entirety, but people KNOW that scene and its impact has carried well beyond maybe even the popularity of that film. Where was that scene here? All the trials, from within and without the family, and yet no scene really carries, and with so much time spent with the camera on Will, that’s an indictment. Will is a talented actor who like Tom Cruise has a sitting veneer that when explored could produce fascinating results, ( See Interview, Collateral, Born on the Fourth, Magnolia, Eyes Wide and the beginning of Edge of Tomorrow ) but while Cruise has explored this quite a few times in his filmography, Will hasn’t really explored it since “Six Degreees of Separation” and it shows here because all this belies what is most important to the storytellers involved, especially it's actor. Will Smith as a celebrity now spends abundant amount of times acting like a social media influencer. He scurries about in circles telling the same stories through different funnels about moving beyond obstacles and dismissing real impediments as trifles that can be resolved by nothing more than willpower and fairy dust. This is a movie in service of that kind of story that wants to continually and always be moving towards aspiration and inspiration, and away from anything that may temporarily stop the velocity and progression of that feeling. Even when the direction and script and Will himself desire to push for something greater its as if his own face betrays him, when he says “What you want a thank you” his face doesn’t give the power necessary to push that sentiment that sense of betrayal and anger into the realm of something as mean and discouraging as it needs to be.. Hes still half smiling and it’s not that devilishly slimy smile folks like Denzel and Willem Dafoe have mastered its just a weird stalemate between what he wants to do and what he's trained himself all too well to do over the years…
It doesn't do much for story that wants to be much more nuanced about the egotism and audacity of a black man who wants the best both for himself and his daughters and the hardships of doing that in an extremely white world or space. King Richard, like so many movies today, does not trust us the audience with the ability to handle impactful and crushing turns in the story, it doesn't trust us to be able to handle impactful and crushing turns in a character whom we like. So that unlike 1995's “Jerry Maguire” where we see even a positive decision like Jerry deciding to back Rod Tidwell and take him around a convention in order to boost his contract, - King Richard won't let us see its version of that turn and smack to Jerry in the face from a racist father who viewed that as a shunning. In the case of Will Smith as Richard it won't allow us to see as 1994's “Jason's lyric” did Bokeem Woodbine - the idea that he or even Forrest Whitaker's “Mad Dog” could be both very sweet men and very terrifying men at the same time. This lacking hobbles and impedes any true resonance, and in respect to Richard's personality in story- it fails as we actually never see a consequence to his egotism to his stubbornness or someplace where we would see he wasn't right to make this decision. Script wise almost every single decision he seems to make in this movie goes in his favor so how are we to ever really impactfully see what and how his stubbornness hurts those around him when even they don't really provide any consequence to his behavior. This lack of trust breaks a bond between audience and art. It’s art that ensconces itself from our disappointment in a way that keeps it safe by disallowing us to tie ourselves to that more closely in a way that might allow us to become angered or incensed at the work, especially that part of the audience that is actually apart of its story in the Williams family. Sure we end up liking, maybe even loving it on some superficial level, but ultimately it leaves us at a distance, that same distance that has always been kept between us and its star Will Smith. It doesn't invite us in for any real discovery about Richard Williams or about Will Smith and that is still sad in this time because we don't need biopics that provide such sterile and curated depictions of our heroes in order to protect them or find their power anymore than Richard needed to provide such a sterile, heavily curated environment for his kids to protect them or find their power. What we are left with is a movie that mines nothing except visual confirmation of things we already know, brings no deep emotional discovery or excavation and like its star ends as extremely likable, but mot much else, and also like its star I wager even that will change with time.
Dean Stockwell: The Gate.
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When I was young I didnt have much of a grip on reality. I didn't care for it much either, what was there just didnt interest me much. I believed very much in worlds that bordered ours, and in heavens and hells, and dimensions, and that imagination found several confirmations and vessels in various forms. There were bent trees over large fields whose brush touched the ground as the roots knelt in it. There were my pencils and pens which drew on paper and in the air, secret doors like in CS Lewis's definitive childrens Chronicles -to these alternate universes, and then there were actors whom I fixated on as obvious occupants from these various worlds who acted as gateways. One such actor was Dean Stockwell whom I first discovered in David Lynch's fever dream adaptation of Frank Herbert's essential Science fiction text “Dune”. I didnt care or even know about the movie as a box office failure or whether it hot the text right, I saw it and Stockwell in it as further visual proof of the otherworldly, and fully grown I still think so.
I've seen David Lynch's lynch's “Blue Velvet” probably 4 times, it's possible it's 5 over my life, but like most of lynch's films save for Dune, I could not tell you still what that movie is about and whenever I recall it it comes to me more so as a collection of scenes and images than it does a coherent idea or feeling about the film. Of course one of those images or scenes is iconic and burned into I think most peoples memories. It's the “Roy Orbison” scene in which Dean Stockwell occupies a certain space a certain time that feels disconnected even for Lynch from the rest of the film which felt like a hostage movie on LSD. In a TCM interview avaiable on YouTube, Stockwell tells the story of how his work on Francis Ford Coppola's “Tucker: The Man and His Dream" came to to be. He tells of Coppola giving him 3 pages with 3 varying iterations with varying intensity of the short scene in which he would play fellow dreamer Howard Hughes. Coppola then allowed him something most directors don’t, he told him that he could put together these pages in any way he wished and he said that he basically didn't see him ( Coppola ) again for 3 weeks or so and wrote it himself and in exactly the way he wanted. It plays like a dream, and he plays as if he is already a ghost of himself come to visit Tucker. He speaks in a drawl soaked in Texas and distance, a deliberateness that borders on being android like. Maybe he hails from another world, place, time, dimension, whatever you want to call it, but once again it feels both foreign and at home. Back in the interview Stockwell called Coppola “dreamy” as a director almost immediately followed by naming Lynch as the same. By “same” he means he was again allowed to create his own character through invention with very little to no intervention. In a PIECE on Stockwell's role as “Ben" by the unassailably brilliant Sheila O Malley, she writes : “The script said NOTHING about him. Lynch knew that whatever Stockwell came up with, in terms of inventing Ben, was going to be great – he just trusted him with the character (a rare thing. Most writers and directors OVER explain characters because they’re nervous that the pesky little actors are going to be ruin everything with their interpretation).Stockwell went to work. He created that guy’s look on his own – the makeup, the clothes, the energy … He hasn’t made too many mistakes in his career. He hasn’t over-reached, or missed the mark too much in his 100 plus films, which is quite a record. Who has seen Blue Velvet and doesn’t remember Ben? Not possible. Also – doesn’t it seem as though Ben HAD to have been written that way? The whole character seems completely inevitable … and perfect. Of course he wears makeup, of course he dresses like that, of course he stands around in large groups with his eyes closed – communing with candy-colored clowns in the ether of his brain. But no: none of it was set out in the script. Stockwell MADE that guy. I think that is so hysterical, so wonderful. It must have been such fun.” She was right and Stockwell confirms. I saw blue velvet for the 1st time when I was 19 I concluded that his character was an alien and I see nothing haven't watched a few more times to change my mind, but This was always the space that Stockwell occupied for me it was coded within his acting as it spoke to me. For me Stockwell was kind of born to play with somebody like Lynch because as an actor he always made choices that seemed foreign to any idea of space and time, but not so far that he also never knew how to find some way back to the path, whatever path of whomever was directing him - back to the world in which this character needed to occupy. A prime example exists in the lead up to the Orbison Karaoke, Stockwell stands being a gracious but equally weird host to the very outlandish Frank Booth. While Hopper goes off doing his very best Hopper, each one of the surrounding actors giving different beats he kind of just disappears. Theres this strange minute where he closes his eyes and he keeps them closed as if he just teleported himself somewhere else. It occurs at around the 2:50 second mark here and ends at around 3:15.
Where did he go I wonder? Was he like younger me in commune, and attuned with places that we're outside this particular rental space we call reality? Could he conjure them up at a moments notice? What did he find there? A time limit? The way he comes back is like a stop watch, it’s not just Hopper’s words it’s a suddenness that implies a condition, and that implied to me an alien-ness. Whatever it was, whatever he found is inconsequential to the film, but vitally important to the character of Ben and his place in it . It also displays another important facet of of Stockwell's career and to his own particular magic and that is his peculiar understanding of the importance of a closed and opened eye. Sheila notices it too. I latched onto it instantly as a kid watching what is still one of my ga favorite movies and sequels, Beverly Hills Cop II. Most actors understand the importance of an open line but the widening of the or the closing of especially of a especially as something that I've never seen deployed and quite the way that Stockwell does it. Only one actor I could think of right off top understands this in anyway like Stockwell, though to completely different effects and purpose and that is Samuel L Jackson. In the Blue Velvet scene you'll notice Stockwell likes to widen his eyes upon certain words for effect, or close them on another's and almost a glare like state that underlines his characters mental state, but also his sense of the dramatic. You then watch Beverly Hills Cop II, which is completely different movie and you seem the same thing, despite the fact that you couldn't find two more vastly different characters with vastly different motivations, it totally works. As deployed in several completely different ways distinctive from each other it feels vital to the ideation of Charles Kane.
When he delivers the line “Adrianos was perfect” he opens his eyes, and then closes them not fully, but into a glare in one fluid motion. It suggests a sort of confusion, and an indignance in concert with his enunciation, it evokes ego, but carefulness. Not but a few moments later as Jurgen Prochnow insults him he does it again, but this time it indicates a slight tinge of hurt, propelled forth by his pride, which bades him to listen further rather than immediately go on the defensive. When he does it again at around 1:34 it’s pure delight in his own work. He just knows it was great work, and that pride extends beyond the context of character. Stockwell always came off as an actor who took immense pride in his work and that is not to suggest he was proud of every single one that he did, but that in the actual doing he took a certain pride and it's at least one of the reasons why in his entire career which is a very long, extending from his childhood to the 00's especially as he starts to formulate as an adult I don't find a bit of work that I don't enjoy from him. But more importantly what connected me personally to Stockwell was the distance he maintained from this sort of homogenized idea of not only performance but humanity that provided this consistent and persistent sense of other worldliness. It's at home and and it belongs to everyone of his most memorable characters whether on TV as Al Calavicci in “Quantum Leap”or in a film like Tucker this sense of the fantastic, of pure fantasy. His eyes would act as the window to another world, his mouth as an anchor to this one and he was always able to in any number of roles transport us, transcend us, but never without emotion never without structure and never without power. Stockwell in that same TCM interview talks of the loss in a certain aspect of his childhood in the movies, one that he wouldn't wish upon his own children and I've always had the feeling that when something like that happens it's not really that it is lost, but that it is stunted and then continued along a slower trajectory. In that context it's no wonder the Dean appeals to me on a bone-deep level, me a person who now deels not fully separate, but veiled away from that weirdness I was so in touch with, so in love with when I was a child but I let go of in order to safely fit within the world around me. That same alien alien-ness that is so much apart of who I am, that I only find whenever I'm on stage, or behind a camera when and where I’m given freedom to imagine once again the infinite possibilities of my own humanity. That's what a Stockwell performance is to me, A doorway, an opening, a link to a distant place, but right within your home.
On Crying.
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Tom Cruise breaks down in Paul Thomas Anderson's “magnolia”
Brilliant filmmaker and Twitter mind Kyle Alex Brett (@kyalbr on Twitter) and filmmaking genius Abbas Kiarostami are and were ( In Kiarostami's case) the kind of people that stir in other people what they believe they’ve forgotten. You may have noted it, you’ve definitely seen or observed what it is they display in their one-of-a-kind focus, but it’s not until you see it from their own uniquely esoteric angle that you recognize all that you observed but forgotten, simply because they can see it real time in moment, and recognize and relay as much almost as if they’ve frozen the thing in time to observe and analyze, to feel…such is their focus, their gift. It’s an example of one of the foundational aspects of great directors to me to find the universality in the esoteric. This time it this connection was excavated by a small Twitter thread from Kyle where he elaborated amd theorized about our emotive connection to film after reading a passage from Kiarostami's book. The particular passage's subject; editing, kyle’s focus; crying as a primal urge. Kiarostami's and subsequently Kyle's words got me to thinking about crying, and then to some extent about Men crying. About its power, about when, about why, and about whom. In Kiarostami's book “Lessons with Kiarostami”. The passage read “I keep what I think is good and I throw away everything else. Sometimes the best thing is to remove a shot, even one you have worked hard on, because it turns out to be foreign to everything around it. I might discard a moment when an actors performance is too powerful, or a particularly interesting improvised line or interaction between two character emerges. These are the kinds of things that can distract an audience and overwhelm a film.” Skipping forward he goes on to say “The most effective tear doesn't run down the cheek it glistens in the eye”. In its entirety its a powerful statement not only in its simplicity, but in how it speaks to Kiarostami's style and exemplifies how in the most classical sense of the word Kiarostami is an autuer. There are very few filmmakers whose films are quite singularly their own as Kiarostami, very few who in this very collaborative field of work can say their fingerprint is so acutely successful, not so much for dollars and cents as for nailing down the most detailed minutae of the human experience. I then got to thinking about whether or not for me it is more moving to watch people hold back tears, or let them go. That got me to thinking about whom, and that got me to thinking about the “why's", my answer - typical of my median nature was “it depends”, and then it was also that that “depends” has alot to do with socialization, and I suspect I’m not alone. It’s definitely nobody's secret that men are conditioned far than women to repress emotions, especially crying, and even then 0ne would have to take in and assume cultural differences. Me being an African American makes my experience of what effects me different than what effects Kiarostami, even while there are universal aspects that undoubtedly connect and effect all of us. In that spirit I find what makes men cry, and even moreso men crying 9n screen particularly interesting because in my mind it’s is so rare, far too rare indeed to think of men in real life or thusly film as somewhat of a representation of aspects of human life- giving themselves over to and allowing themselves the sort of catharsis that comes from actually crying rather than the usual which is the form of repression that Kyle would allude to later in his thread, and that to some extent represents itself in Kiarostami's words.
When I thought about all the films I could recall where men do some version of crying, even looking up others so I could find more and recall the emotions- the most effective ones had a range of depictions and looks, and rightfully so because the key words in what Kiarostami says are “turns out to be foreign to everything around it". For instance in the seminal scene from “Get Out” when Daniel Kaluuya's Chris Washington is first introduced to Missy Armitage's (Catherine Keener) “Therapy” it would've been absolutely distracting to have him ugly cry, rather than well up, but tears do roll down his cheek even as he tries to hold them back, but as Kiarostami alludes to the power begins at the glistening of the eye. It alludes to the power of this story and the hold it has on Chris. He could very well have cried and cried hard, but that would displace the power and that would be release and release is not about relinquishing power, it’s about letting go to redistribute it somewhere else.. namely back into self rather than the people or things which hold power over us. But there is also the fact that despite his efforts the the tear comes rolling down the cheek anyway, that is powerlessness. The memory of his mother holds power over Chris, and Keener's Missy understands this and being who she is uses it to hold power over him as well. To have him let go would then not only be distracting, but wrong for the scene.
Where it gets interesting is when you change the dynamics around anyone scene regardless of gender. Now, the first thing that popped in my head reading the quote was the power of watching Tom Hanks absolutely lose it over a damn volleyball in “Castaway”. On its face it sounds silly and like the last thing one would expect any man to cry over, but it is the conditions that lead up to it that make it at home with itself as the only and best representation of that primal urge, and it is one of the most timeless scenes in movie history. The loss of “Wilson” would absolutely have been dimmed by merely having Hanks merely well up rather than go full on ugly cry - but I digress… I decided to go elsewhere and revisit a scene I hadn’t seen in forever because the movie (Good Will Hunting ) was a movie I watched way too much when I was younger, and I had some feeling of unnerving dread that if I watched it again it would not age well… I watched the scene on YouTube for research and well, I need to re-watch this movie. While I don’t know about how the rest of the movie will ultimately come off, the “It’s not your fault” scene was intensely effective, and every bit as powerful and arresting as when I first saw it. Re-watching the scene with none of the erected context that led to it, I somehow still ended up legit crying…not a lump in the throat, not a welling up the eyes, a pure unadulterated holding my hand over my mouth ugly cry…
The dynamics of the scene are about the dynamics of interpersonal relationships between men, fathers and sons and friends. It calls forth my own memories of my relationship with my father, even while I did not endure that type of abuse, the artiface of the conditions do not matter simply the emotional underpinnings. The scene is almost a functioning call and response that forces us to look at the space we hold for each other to be each other, to be our most authentic selves. What Robin does for Matt, what Sean does for Will, and the movie for us is provide catharsis by way of a subjective experience that connects objectively. The dynamics of what makes us cry and subsequently (being that we are all built on such unique and yet similar foundations) what might qualify as the most brilliant and useful technique in getting us and let’s face it especially men - to break our generally well guarded fortresses of composure and facade is endlessly fascinating to me, and of course it would be Kiarostami, whose career put human emotion under a cinematic microscope, who would offer such an audaciously concise formulation on the most powerful form of said emotion while still allowing for a complexity of the factors put together to create it, all while outlining a simplicity to his own processes. Mine own most powerful moments align with those stated in Dolf Zillman's “Excitation Transfer Theory”. In it Zillman goes on to provide the pathway to the emotive connective tissue between us and the movies that bring out such strong and intense feelings in us. He explains what sets us up; “At one time or another, everybody seems to have experienced the extraordinary intensity of frustration after rousing efforts, of joy upon the sudden resolution of nagging annoyances, of gaiety after unfounded apprehensions, or for that matter, of sexual pleasures in making up after acute conflict.” What knocks us down; “Excitation in response to particular stimuli…is bound to enter into subsequent experiences…Moreover, depending on the strength of the initial excitatory reaction and the time, separation of emotions elicited at later times, residual excitation may intensify experiences further down the line.” and why it sticks with us after; “Emotions evoked in actuality by personal success or failure are usually allowed to run their course. A person, after achieving an important goal, may be ecstatic for minutes and jubilant for hours. Alternatively, a grievous experience may foster despair or sadness that similarly persists for comparatively long periods of time”.
Anna Karina's tearing up at the sight of Renée Jeanne Falconetti's performance as Joan of Arc in Carl Dreyer's is both a perfect example of the exact power Kiarostami alludes to, and a fascinating Russian Nesting Doll of the factors that exist to create our relationship to emotive catharsis and release through movie going. Does Karina see herself in Joan? Probably not, does she recognize in the aesthetics of Joan’s pain a certain appeal to her own, maybe? Whatever the reason Anna's own release as a response to stimuli that stimulated her own subjective experience, is so near objectively powerful that it itself became as recognizable and powerful a moment as the film it pays homage to and the particular scene that she was watching. The experience so relatable watching it becomes an experience itself. Nonetheless the factors around it that lead up to it , our own collective recognition, be it conscious or not that’s the killer knockdown, that’s the “Love TKO”. Much like a TKO it’s the build up that matters, the set ups, the small build-up of hits to the body, and wear on the mind that setup the knockout. Whether it’s an aggressively ugly cry or a suspended tear in the corner of the eye, it is what the storytelling has set up before that matters most. It’s the “everything around it" that Kiarostami spoke to. When I watch “Castaway” it’s the everything around Hanks endearing relationship with an inanimate object that became the embodiment of Hanks journey, and a security blanket for his feelings of intense isolation and loneliness that created a directline of passage for which the tears could fall down. The sight of watching all that float away when we do not yet know if he's even going to make it, finds it own subjective nesting place in the cradles of our own recognition of feelings of abandonment, loss, loneliness, and fear. The cry itself is in my opinion not so much a choice as it is itself an almost involuntary and intrusive response. The director is after all an audience member as well, and the actor and director are actively, simultaneously conjuring, responding and creating the stimuli by which they will both respond to in a way that I believe provided them with their own sense of catharsis and release consciously or not. The result is Hanks breaking completely down, and Zemeckis recognizing the moment itself as a proper realization of the created moment by way of his response to it, his own version of “Kiarostami's “what he thinks is good” turns out to be a pretty universal experience of good, hell..GREAT.
The socialization of Men to view crying as directly associated with femininity and femininity itself as an state of inferior otherness rather than a natural aspect of our complex and complete humanity leaves men at an interesting interaction of the conversation because any peek into an acting class will demonstrate how much more difficult it seems to be for men to cry on cue, and to properly crest and create within themselves the conditions that will allow them to act in such a way that it feels authentic. That sits parallel to the male audience member who may find repulsion at the sight of the the breakdown of the social barriers that protect them from the social rot of such a gross display of femininity. But the body and mind respond nonetheless, because the body and mind- even the socialized mind -subconsciously recognize what we may choose to repress. That being the case I ask myself how much of Kiarostami's feelings on the superiority of that particular type of display of emotion have to do with his own unique cultural socialization? Even while also being aware many a woman might also find this to be the superior form of emotional display on screen. The Conversation in my head could go on and on deeper and deeper, but ultimately what works on screen, what surpasses the realm of the superficial emotion, and steps beyond the border of profound emotional content as it regards one of the most fascinating and singular aspects of humanity - the ability to cry is endlessly complex and I feel exactly as Kiarostami feels in regards to getting there as an actor, as a director, and as an audience member keep and hold onto what is good and throw away everything else.
Yaphet Kotto: Don't Act, Just Be.
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I once remember watching a Turner Classic Movies dedication to Katharine Hepburn in which Anthony Hopkins said that while working on the set of “The Lion in Winter” the great gave him a wonderful piece of advice, she told him “Don't act, read the lines, just be, just speak the lines”. It's a very specific piece of advice for a very specific type of actor of which Katherine Hepburn was, Anthony Hopkins is, and now Yaphet Kotto was. Yaphet Kotto enjoyed one of the greatest careers I think anybody so clearly held back by the industry has ever enjoyed. He got a bevy of unique and varied roles which allowed Kotto to flex his acting muscles in different ways, whether it be using his full 6ft 3 frame, his elegant way of movement, or his effortless way of speaking, and many times all three. Its the speaking part though that is my favorite part or talking point in regards to discussing Yaphet Kotto, because it plays so much into how Kotto's legacy engraved itself into our collective consciousness. Kotto like Hepburn, Hopkins, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, was an extension of that fold of actor where all the lines or the words find their meaning in the throat of the actor. The “heady actor” divines the meaning in the words, the “transformative actor” twists, bends and conforms the words to their will, the “straight shooter” just aims and fires, let’s the words find their target….and yes I made all those terms up. It has been spoken about many times, but far too many people have a disdain for actors who speak plainly, who in essence as Hepburn said don’t” act.” If it's not John Wayne it's Hepburn, or its Bruce Willis, Sam Jackson, or the Rock, but what's missed is in the case of all of these actors (and of course in varying degrees) there is an extreme degree of difficulty in just being. Number one, it must be said that from the moment an actor arrives on stage, or in front of the camera - there is almost instantaneously this need to be someone other than oneself. You realize we're here, that we are watching you, and all of a sudden every fiber of your being is telling you we can see right through you, we can hear you not being an actor and you need to emphasize more, or maybe that last word needs more accompanying face because yours , well that’s just plain silly. People are watching everywhere and all of a sudden all of the lessons that the world has taught you in that you yourself are not enough - arrive fully formed at your doorstep, and a great deal larger than yourself usually. These feelings of immense doubt and self deprecation growl and swipe at you, and you stand there and do what comes natural to do which is to defend yourself, and in comes all these elaborate techniques and ways to hide yourself, make yourself better, to make yourself appear larger, and before you know it you’re acting, just not…well. The most difficult questions for the actor are based in and around building at least a very good edifice of comfort in oneself to the point where you stop looking to be larger than, smaller than, more important than, and you just trust that you already these things. Now as for number the small aspect, this is made all that much more difficult when you add the politics of being black and let me be frank “Ugly” and then the politics of being black and “ugly” in Hollywood in the era in which Yaphet Kotto was to break into Hollywood. I don't use the word ugly lightly, and most definitely not objectively, but I do use it plainly, because it is what many people including black people themselves would call someone who looks like Kotto were he not an actor. The politics and the indoctrination of anti blackness, that hatred for blackness especially overt and explicit blackness in and around the body in America, are well documented. Yet somewhere in his childhood growing up maybe possibly watching the very white idols of a former generation - the Montgomery Clifts, the Marlon Brando's, the Gary Cooper's this child and then man had the audacity to want to join them on screen. Where does such boldness come from? To stand and affirm oneself, to push so boldly against what remains unseen, to place ones strengths and weaknesses bare in front of so many? .. only God knows, but it's extremely affecting when you watch it, and alluring in that Kotto found something beyond the superficial aspects of our underlying desires to be or be with those we watch on screen, he and others liked him forced us to reckon with our attraction to what we disdain, what we are told to dislike. In “Bone”(1972) he plays just this ..the avatar of americas deep obsession with, its fascination and love of all things black and its hatred. He is there to pull on and from what may or may not have ever existed. A white man insist that he sees a rat, his wife does not see a rat, when the camera pans to the pool where the rat supposedly is WE don't see a rat, but when Bone arrives literally out of nowhere he sticks his hand in the water and pulls from the blackness just that a rat. Kotto plays this as a secret only hes in on, even though the white man swore he had seen it too, it’s as if he knows it’s not there but that he can conjure it. There's a quiet sureness to his gaze which he holds that exists squarely in that special place between threat and sensuality. Bone knows, and because he too is a conjured idea of the white man’s fear and hia wifes lust ans this is all in movie, but its lifeless until Kotto erects it. That was his appeal to lean on, to pull us in, to mesmerize us with, and in so doing helped open our eyes to the possibilities for masculinity and desire if only we were so inclined. Whether in “Bone” or “Live and Let Die" he found a “constantly evolving before your eyes” concoction of raw power, sexuality, grace, and confidence that rent asunder many of the standing expectations of a man, a black man such as himself, and its extremely audacious and extremely effective much like his Bond Villian Mister Big…yeah that’s Yaphet ..Mister Big…
I was scrolling my Twitter timeline the other day and I fell on an interesting tweet where someone speaking about Anne Hathaway said “She always understands the assignment”. Once I got off thinking about whether or not it was true, I started to think about that particular usage of words, and how much I really liked it.. “always understands the assignment” - It's a vital integral aspect to acting. Amongst the great separators between the greats and the So So's. There are quite a few actors who I believe are quite good at what they do on paper, they have all the goods, but consistently they misunderstand the assignment, that is - what the role needs with the role calls for, and their interpretation of the role. Many times I've seen performers who are actually not that good become so good in a role that they become somewhat overrated as an actor - as it pertains to their skill level or the skill level involved with the work - simply because they were so good at understanding assignment! Thats the power of that factor. Think recently of Adam Sandler in “Uncut Gems”. In my opinion it's not so much that the man is so great in this role as far as the actual attributes important to acting, it's that he understands the assignment so well, so deeply, thqt it organically melded to everything he already had in him and it functions on a level akin to symbiosis. It's what many refer to as being born for a role in that there just weren't that many people who could cater to that role in the way Adam Sandler could and that's not to take away from him because part of that is that he had an imagination. He saw it so clearly, understood it so clearly and there are a lot of other actors who some might deem more intelligent, better actors who I think would absolutely fumble this because they'd overanalyze it, think it to death, or just dont have what Sandler has that kinetic, nervous energy alwaya coiled rans ready to bute has really been apart of hia entire brand for years, its very specifically his and only his and anything less might’ve ruined it, - With Yaphet though this specific attribute was not a one or two ( If you consider Punch Drunk Love another) time happening, it was his career. I've seen a lot of his films “Live and Let Die” “Alien” “Brubaker” “Across 110th Street” and lesser seen ones like “Bone” and “Friday Foster”. I've never seen one role, one word where it seems the Yaphet Kotto did not understand the assignment. Ridley Scott's Sci-fi horror classic “Alien” is the most ready made example of this, I think it’s why his role in it resonated with so many. There's a quality to the character Parker I think is built into the script. Class wise most of the crew is ambiguous at best, they could come from a wide range of backgrounds but it's Parker, Lambert, ( an under discussed Veronica Cartwright) and his partner in crime “Brett” (Harry Dean Stanton) that come closest to basically putting out a large neon sign that says blue collar.. working class. No one seems to get it more than Yaphet, its what separates him, not only understanding his class, but his blackness, but not forcing it, just letting it breathe it’s own life into the role. Perhaps coming directly off of Paul Scrader's magnificent “Blue Collar” just one year earlier he brought some of what he had there straight into the set here. The artifice is there - in the details; the bandana around the head the open shirt, the lack of any respect for decorum, that's the superficial calls to class, which many times in our collective minds has to do with our indoctrinations around certain behaviors mainly a sort of coded rigidity versus in openness and freeness, on the “Nostromo” you can almost rank their class and rank by just how open their shirts are . The blackness though is deeper, or maybe less noticeable I mean, but still very clear to the initiated, its in the way he checks folks, the seriousness about his money. Its in the fear he shows, how it registers in his body, it could be anybody but it reads as definitely black that's not just represented in the words that he mouths, but the way that he mouths them, and the body language that accompanies it. Its comforting to watch blackness flourish in a mostly white film without being embellished upon. I'm reminded of another role that I love and which a black man is surrounded by white people where his blackness is affirmed while never being overtly expressed to in a way that seems mawkish or exploitive ..Ernie Hudson as Winston Zeddmore in 1984's “Ghostbusters”. In both these roles there is a relaxed authenticity to how these men interact with and stand apart from the world in which they are involved, they understand how the world sees them in this place, they may even nod to it, but never overtly condescending to us the audience or to themselves, they simply let it be …
The politics surrounding the body in regards to Hollywood is important, especially when speaking to or about careers. Hollywood was never completely a safe comfortable space for atypical looks, bodies, minds, for anyone but especially not anyone who wasn’t white and cis male, but if ever a time came as close to being somewhat relaxed in the physiology and ideology as to who and who couldn't be a leading man or matinee idol in the realm of looks it seemed the 70s was that. It was it’s own kind of incubator for counterculture of which cinema of course didnt escape. The strong-jawed Lancaster's, Grant's , Pecks, and Mitchum's had aged out, and different types of men were taking their place with differing types of sex appeal and masculinity. It was now Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Jon Voight, Robert Duvall. These men werent the apex of male bodies, many of them had strange faces, broad and lean, with asymmetrical properties. They could be balding, or fat, or lanky and awkward, they had the everyman quality of a Stewart or Joseph Cotton rather than the reverential beauty of a James Dean, Clift, or Roc Hudson, but as is always the case whatever happens to the white male in this society is not merely or easily transferred over to black men, so while the ideas around what constitutes beauty and masculinity was broadening as it pertained to white males, for black men, and any other group not cis white males it led to a large void if represented at all. The “Blaxploitation” movies provided a lot of would-be suitors for black straight appearing ( because who knows) cis men in Billy Dee Williams, Calvin Lockhart, Richard Roundtree, Glynn Turman, Fred Williams, and of course Yaphet, but Hollywood seemed much more hesitant and apprehensive to crowning any one of these men as a new leading man, and so that void pretty much remained until Denzel Washington arrives nearly a decade later. It says quite a lot for Yaphet that out of all of these men that it's Yaphet, blacker than all of them, somewhat portly, and atypical even while in truth being beautiful man- who arguably had the best career. To watch Kotto was always to watch a sort of mini revolution in my mind, infinitesimal, maybe subatomic, but it was nonetheless a revolution. Every Kotto appearance was a small act of defiance against the standard, the ideal, there were very few actors like him then, and there are still fewer now who look like him now in looks or abilities. I don't know anything about Kotto in firmness, I don't like to make large grand statements about representation or what seeing a black man who looks like Kotto on screen does for all black people, but it implies a lot about HIS survival skills, about HIS abilities, and to some extent about HIS confidence. Kotto was a bit of a conundrum like so many black actors, (especially from his time) in that it is only after they pass you find that all these people knew of them, that they were beloved and their work was deeply appreciated because for so long they live unspoken of. You go to Kotto's Wikipedia and it's almost farcical how small it is. You try to look up information online it's not much there. Homicide life on the street ends its run in 00’ and for 21 years this man has one credit to his name. Did he retire on his own volition? Did he just feel like he had nothing more to say, did Hollywood decide that for him? We don't know because it seemed very few people cared enough to want to ask Mister Kotto, yet on the day he dies, with no political affiliation to speak of or to, only small mentions of a legacy in civil rights work, no celebrity gossip, no books or memoirs no lifetime achievement awards or various ceremonies celebrating his career, there is an outpouring much larger than the man's actual career really would speak to, and you would be a fool to belive this outpouring disingenuous. You can feel it in the size of the words used around his name, and the frequency. That…THAT to me is his legacy.. that he just let things be, that he just existed and yet despite or maybe because of that the respect for him is larger than most actors could hope for being given the same variables and forces working against for them as Kotto. Whether it was his life, or the words that he spoke in film, he just seemed to let them speak for themselves, rather than trying to force some meaning upon either his life or the words, and in that right there is his power to rest in.
ON ACTING.
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I have been acting for now 14 years of my life. I've been to various conservatories and repertories and colleges, been destroyed by it and uplifted by it, but I've loved it and I’ve been mesmerized by it even longer, since I was a little boy watching classic movies with my father that featured Humphrey Bogart, George Saunders, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, or the 80s movies with Schwarzenegger, Keanu. My favorite actor growing up Denzel Washington. I knew then this was my favorite aspect of filmmaking, though I was to scared too even think about wanting to be an actor. Learning the craft though has definitively changed my perspective. It was Sanford Meisner's “On Acting" that first dramatically changed how I view, watch, and entertain actors, and on that journey, that sense of discovery, in that time spent being interested and curious about the work I noticed a divide between me and many of my compatriots and peers in criticism- most especially as it pertains to actors. The great and invaluable writer Angelica Jade Bastien has many times tweeted and spoke to the egregious nature of opinions on actors, the problem of which lies not in liking certain actors or disagreeing about performances, but in the constitution of the ideals behind it. The superficial nature of what warrants praise or condemnation for actors coming from those who watch tell us a lot about how little time many of the folk speaking spend making themselves knowledgeable about the craft. How much they depend purely upon their own perspective as an objective arbiter of truth in the work leads me to believe they feel acting is almost completely subjective. The way this continues to show up extends well beyond just critics and into the industry itself. To be honest most directors I hear talking on the subject clearly dont understand what actors do, they just know what they want, and if and when that meets with an unconscious bias around actors, or with the weird tangled ego of actors, the tensions in the relationship of these communal groups end up as yet another example of how people that share similarities can be disdainful of each other. The likes minds like the aforementioned Angelica Jade Bastien, or Dan Callahan & Sheila O'Malley, Matthew Zoller-Seitz and Danny Bowes are as far and few in-between, as the likes of a De Sica, Chaplin, Scorcese, Tarantino, or Eastwood in conducting precise understanding of acting even if they themselves do not study not practice. They do however pay close attention to what the actors do on screen in particular to produce an emotion, and they are keen at sensing bull**** and inauthenticity. They are the oddities on the subject, the rest are far too given to putting mustard on performances that overly rely on histrionics, or falling in love with a performance that relies too heavily on quietness or stillness when sometimes you need to go big, or coming down too hard and confusing stylized grandiosity with “hamming it up”. Acknowledging that history as a gauge or rather a bar is vital to discussing actors and their performances, having that bar, based on a philosophical and educated understanding of the craft rather than what amounts to mysticism allows you not to stumble into the celebration of mediocrity, having that bar, that standard allows you to get specific about what it is you’re seeing, and where exactly it lands on a spectrum rather than a this or that binary. One cannot simply just look at a performance in a vacuum without consideration of what the top tier level of that work looks like, might look like, several ways it could be performed. Without considering whether it's wth words powering it, or the actor, or both. Any and every performance involves several levels of technique, then they erase it or throw it away, you have to trust that it's there and let it go. and I don't know that I can name them all, I don't know that I could articulate them all, but I will endeavor to explain some here based on what I believe was important and vital to Denzel's performance as Malcolm X. And I'll start with presence, and take it even a step further and go power. To play a transcendent figure you yourself must be transcendent. It is what Stella Adler spoke of when she lamented ; “In our theater the actors often don't raise themselves to the level of the characters, they bring the great characters down to their level. I'm afraid we live in the world that celebrates smallness.” By the time he was cast as Malcolm X Denzel had already displayed a level of talent and grandiosity that called out to the masses in a very similar way to Malcolm X. You watch Glory and you see it, you felt it in him yelling “Tear it Up!” , in his antagonistic behavior towards Andre Braugher and the other characters, and of course in one of the most recognizable and memorable moments in movies, his single tear. He drew and draws your attention right through Morgan Freeman, and despite the fact that the star of the movie is Matthew Broderick. Stella Adler continues: “There was a time when to play Oedipus you had to be an important actor. Until 30 or 40 years ago to play any major role whether it was Hamlet or Willy Loman, you had to have size. Write this down: you have to develop size”. This is something fairly new to on screen actors like Thatcher or Kingsley, but something they can develop by continuing their work and taking work that ask them to take it to Spinal Taps very infamous “11”. As acting teacher Marilyn Fox once told me “You have to be willing and allowed as an actor to take it too far and then there understand that there is no such thing as too far because” she said “It is beyond those boundaries that you find the performance”. Let’s be VERY clear, Thatcher and Adir-Kingsley are extremely talented, and they are both clearly well trained. They had an elite level of understanding of what and who their characters were and their responsibility to them, but they do not yet have that elite level of magnetism of presence and of size, so they depended totally up on training and skill and understanding of the role, a role that is essentially about one of the most charismatic and large figures in American history. Even if you want to make them more vulnerable, make them more approachable, humanize them in a certain way, you cannot afford to lose that grandiosity. Denzel as Malcolm did all of those things, and he was HUGE. Riz Ahmed in “The Sound of Metal, has that magnetism. Ahmed has what I call a natural standing belief, and by standing belief I mean just standing there you believe anything Riz Ahmed has to say . There's a natural built-in sincerity to him that comes out in his acting so that no matter what he's trying to sell you- as long as he understands it, and as long as that understanding is somewhat built into the work - he’s very hard to ignore or disbelieve as a character . He is a vulnerable actor, and he is a great listener, and maybe most importantly he is willing or seems willing to unlearn. In a recent interview with Matthew Zoller-Seitz, Matt asked about Riz Ahmed's walk, Riz immediately went into talking about the forms of non-verbal communication, “So once you come to SURRENDER to the script and to the technical process of preparation you do find that your body is telling you in a different way". “Acting is in the doing” Sanford Meisner ( maybe my favorite of the acting teachers besides Hagen) once said, and Riz is a doer, if I had to pick an actor that was next after Lindo from what I’ve seen this year itd be Ahmed. If I had any advice for Mr. Ahmed it would be go bigger. This doesn't mean I want the man to play in a Scarface film, (though in actuality that might be very interesting) but it does mean I want to see him try on his particular strengths in a suit that calls attention to them in a way that gives him this very size to match his self awareness, and deep earnesty. I'm saying it would be cool interesting to watch him in a Michael Corleone type role. Al Pacino found alot of his size ( and this is long before he started to rely on a few histrionics himself) in that role - in his stillness, proving it’s not all about big things, but the character has to be big, every actor needs a “Hamlet“, a “Virginia Woolf" For Pacino it was Corleone. His size, it's there when he closes the door on Diane Keaton's “Kay", and it’s there when he burns a hole into her with his eyes just before he violently slaps her. Ahmed has this kind of quiet size at the very end of “The Sound of Metal” but to pardon and unintentional play of words- that film and that role are far too muted inherently and purposely to be the kind of role that I’m talking about. If there's anything killing this era of acting, its the style that is being preferred, this fetishization of small subtle acting. I want to be clear - this too can be very powerful and in many cases it's necessary, but when you look back into the wide pantheon of performances that whether a cinephile or not people dont stop talking about, the ones celebrated over and over and over again, I guarantee you, you think about 99% of them and one word you must associate with it is Big. Whether you thought of it or not, it's there. Size isn't just about yelling or exaggeration and the effect it has on the audience, (which I think sometimes gets too much credit becomes a easy way into getting or being celebrated) ultimately at its core it is about purpose and goes back to Greek Theater where these actors had to play to audiences in large amphitheaters. Many of them wore special shoes in order to enlarge themselves, large masks, that they might be better seen, and they spread their bodies and their voices out in very exaggerated motions, and their form of speaking became very exaggerated as well and their delivery very deliberate. When Whoopi Goldberg smiles in The Color Purple it’s a smile that can be seen from a distance. Large, grand, beautiful, her own little rebellion in the onscreen fishbowl. Jimmy Stewart throws his lanky gaunt and lithe frame across the room in a fit and bout of fiery indignation in Mr Smith goes to Washington ans then he collapses and its a seismic as the rest of the performance, its a grand overture a final swing for the fences, THATS what you should always feel when watching a performance. Watch Nicholson in A Few Good Men, or the Last Detail, doesn't matter thw role might be detailed and subtle, but Nicholson is gonna bring it to you with a hammer, go back a ways and everything about Gloria Swanson or Toshiro Mifune is large, impactful in either Sunset Blvd or Rashomon. Jack In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice, (it's quiet but she still a large) Mae West, Al Pacino,Bette Davis, Robert De Niro, James Earl Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, Angela Bassett, Marcello Mastroianni, Paul Richter, pick any one of these names pick their best role, you'll find something about it that has scope, a sense of gravitas, and most definitely a sense of size. I can bet on Delroy, because performances like this dont come around but so many times in any given time PERIOD. If Yuen, (who I have not seen yet in Minari) Boseman, Ahmed, and Lindo are the best male performances of the year ( they are) and if they are in the same category in the Oscars ( that should be debatable) some of the things that I feel have corrupted and muddied the waters of the decision-making of those who are discussing these performances is worthwhile as a discussion not necessarily for the subjective battle between these actors but for the actor, and for all actors. Acting and or actors as a subject or as people have been discussed terribly. Performance reduced down to it’s most gawdy and banal quality-likeability, personality, these things do matter but thr cache of celebrity has entered the sphere and convoluted any real idea of what actors actually do, what it is, ctaft is rarely discussed and a number of adjectives lonk together to describe the complete and total dominance of the subjective as if there are no defintive waya to look at performances. For quite some time -and I think the advent of social media has really brought to bare in ways that one might not been able to have perceived before - the lack of curiosity about the craft, the lack of care for the work, and the lack of understanding of what it is you’re watching and at times it borders on atrocious. This piece is a labor of love, and respect, because as a movie goer, and as an actor this is important to me, this is special to me.
THE MAGIC ACT
One of the problems of the discourse that continues around actors is that there are very few people who in any real way understand what it is actors have to do. That is most people speak about actor performances in a way that is in the most classical sense of the word - selfish, self centered. It has so much more to do with how “I feel” about your performance, and less to do with the work involved in your performance, or the craft involved in your performance. It makes for the kind of takes that don’t draw the line between things rhe writing is doing and things the actor is bringing. So that we may like an actor like Tom Hardy and see a character that is pretty well defined by what he does, watch Hardy repeat and lean on his skills but also-ran tendencies and not critique that in his role in “The Revenant” which was really a continued repeat of the character he formed in movies like “Lawless” and nowhere near as revelatory or profound in what he found in his more interesting roles like “The Drop” or “Bronson”. More of that mumbling, lack of enunciation and his patent thousand yard stare, and so a slilled actor gives a somewhat distilled version of better work that mixed in with a great character, but unlike Sandler in Uncut Gems its not a discoverybof a new depth, its superficial. Roles like that become known partially because the focus becomes how the performance made “me” feel almost in total, and in that realm acting is completely subjective and thus any and every disagreement can be oversimplified as subjective, but there are as many ways to objectively grade acting as there are any other portion of the craft of filmmaking. The Last Dragon may be your favorite movie of all time, but most people who love that film ( Its ME, I’m most people) would hesitate to call it one of the greatest of all time without a sense of intentional irony or absurdity. This is because people have a sense of the history of filmmaking. They read and study even when they're not directors about the discipline. They go to Q& A's and lean on the words of directors and watch films especiallly to learn the quality of good filmmaking. It gets at and by process of elimination it implies almost directly the underlying problem and difference in how we view acting and especially I think American acting. I think it's at least worth noting culturally that European countries like France, Sweden, and of course England patronize and support the Arts and especially acting schools as a state function. Culturally they see it as a vital aspect of society. I think it's also worth noting that the Brits actually give out Knighthood to their actors! This is not to say that we should mimic this behavior, (personally I feel it’s a bit much) but it does tell us how important they see the art of that specific field. Here in America we've always had a conflicted relationship with actors. On the one hand we have at various occasions in our time bordered on deifying them. We hang on their every word, give them certain cultural and political abilities that they in fact might not and probably don't possess. We magnify their importance as overall people, but this is only when they become celebrities. The working actor does not enjoy this kind of a stage. A actor for the community is a joke, wasting his her or their life, and does not earn or command an iota of respect not even as a job holder. To this day acting as a career field is looked down upon as frivolous and flighty, the kind of pursuit not based in any real work, and that exists because of the divide between working as an amateur and a professional actor. Getting even the smallest paying job as an actor is difficult, because it’s not simply a job here, it’s not work. You are either on TV or on Broadway or your'e impractical and you're a bum Jules. I say that half in jest, using the quote from the diner dialogue in Pulp Fiction, but in many ways it's not that far off. All of this directly contributes to the mystification in an already murky institution, and in some areas the reduction of acting as a pursuit of craft, rather than of capital, which shows itself in all kinds of ways from the aforementioned lack of respect for the job to the erasure of the varying layers a performance. You don't have to be Jeff Bezos in order to be respected as the owner of a business - owning a small bar that does well in the town of the community would be well enough. Craft wise if a singer were to go on nothing but runs that feel exhaustive and overly performative most people can call that out but when an actor does a very similar thing many times in the public eye they're rewarded for it. The Divide between the amateur and professional shows itself in ways that present in the industry as a veteran professional actor being given far more adulation for poor or mid performances than they deserve. Denzel Washington most recently gave what I thought was a particularly lazy if not confused performance in “The Little Things” and still there were people saying that he was doing exceptional work there. If anybody else were acting like Denzel was acting in that movie they would get dragged from here to the amalfi coast and drowned, but its Denzel, and that is part of the problem. How little people know about what acting in a way makes it resemble magic. As a matter of fact many times what actors do is referred to as magic, whether talking about a sort of consequence of the effect, or their abilities. Many times it can be endearing, but I think it's dangerous in this respect; acting is not magic, it is a craft that actually depends upon knowledge, not ignorance for its effect. A craft of coming as close to truth as possible, as my acting coach once told me “acting is what you do out there, here you're here to give truth”. Acting is not (as commonly thought) about creating illusions, and unlike magic I don't think there should be so much of a mystery behind what actors do. Sure some actors believe in keeping some sort of mystery between their lives and their work but the work itself shouldn't be mysterious. Magicians depend upon the mystery of their work if you know what goes on in the act it is immediately ruined, but that's not the case with acting in fact I would argue the more we know about what actors do and what they have to do then the better the act becomes.
BE CURIOUS
This YouTube video of Michael Caine teaching a class specifically on movie acting is an absolute gem and it's one of a few, if not maybe the only thing of its kind available on the internet, and that specifically speaks to, answers, reveals what goes into our understanding of acting, because understand movie acting is (in a number of ways that I can't afford to go into here) decidedly and explicitly different from stage acting (although I do HIGHLY recommend being on the stage at some point during a career). Around 15 minutes into the video he goes on to talk about the difference between movie stardom and movie acting but recommends knowing and understanding what movie stardom is and how it can work for you in movie acting. This is the kind of information a writer of a recent opinion piece on Angelina Jolie could have used before writing a devastatingly bad take on Angelina's career. Too many times in our current era actors celebrity is directly linked to the way that people see, and read their work. This writer was unable to separate how she saw Angelina's celebrity from how she saw Angelina's ability to act, which has for some time now been significantly better than much of the media has been willing to admit. You get the distinct feeling sometimes that to some it can feel as if one person has too much, and to give them yet another thing, to add yet another thing onto their list of abilities or accomplishments just feels like an admission of your own lacking. In other cases we make the mistake of being angry disgusted, repulsed, by the cultivated, curated celebrity of the person (Think Tom Cruise's cringy inauthenticity in his real life) and we let it affect our ability to look at their work objectively, he's a helluva an actor who deserves more respect. Hell, sometimes our viewing, our perception of an actor's celebrity or the being-in-the-public eye portion of their work starts to affect the acting portion of their own work. Johnny Depp and Gary Oldman are two whose troubles behind the scenes (and it's just a theory) have affected in Depp's case and are starting to affect in Oldman's their art. I think for some time in the American coverage and understanding of acting - stargazing has dulled our senses and our perception of acting. We spend much too much time glaring at their brilliance paying attention only to those who burn the brightest within a Hollywood construction of stardom. When if you really want to know what the craft of acting is about its those who are deemed the “Character actors” that maybe have the most to say, that maybe most reliably portray to us what the work is.. the honest work free from the shackles of what Michael Caine discusses here or the base saturated sort of curation that goes on behind trying to make a career. Some of what the all-time great movie stars, (and I mean not just the stars, but the ones who could actually act their asses off man) - some of the most important aspects of what they have/had you can't teach. You can't learn that megawatt, god given you’re born with it “something”, but you can learn how to be such a megawatt born with it version of yourself may you shine just like them. For example, for the most of us, you may not ever be as cool is Paul Newman (just ain't happening I don't know what to tell you) but you can be just as affecting and memorable as a Paul Newman if you just watch and learn from what George Kennedy is doing in “Cool Hand Luke” because thas exactly what he did. John Cazale, Ruth Gordon, Angela Lansbury, Loretta Devine, Debbie Morgan, Joseph Cotton, Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton, Bill Cobbs, Andre Braugher have a lot more to say in the craft, about the work of an actor than many of the superstars we put so much time and attention into. In essence the superstar, the movie star is a construct, and much of what they do is larger example of what Michael Caine advises against in his scene direction when he tells the young man “You were doing that for an audience, you have to do it as if you’re doing it for a friend” The great great stars do or did some of both, but stardom always asks of you, tries to nudge you into some manner of inauthenticity, it’s one reason why so many struggle with it. Acting cannot be about playing for an audience, it can't be about placating an audience and when we write about it I don't think it should be strictly about the audience. There's something disconnected and off about careers spent grading and discussing actors ability to perform with very few questions asked over their history to build a foundational idea of what it is actors are looking to do and looking to accomplish over a wide variety of roles and characters overtime that would aid in an understanding of why actor A or B is falling short. I think we understand because so many people have been so curious in the past about what it is directors do a lot more. It's all those questions, and all those essays, in all those books, and all those interviews strictly talking about directing, about auteur theory, and style over substance that interacts with our own developed tastes that has led us to understand and have a basis for when we decide “this doesn't appeal to me”, “this does appeal to me”. When talking about actors that seems to run purely off of a very subjective sense of feeling and ultimately entitlement that lacks a foundational education. In any case all of this, whether actor or critic- points to two obvious tragedies; a lack of interest in self interrogation and a lack of interest in the work. The latter is my concern. There is a profound lack of interest - or curiosity rather -in what actors do in their process. A valid question to ask is if we don't even know what it was an actor's intention or goals were, or what kinds of intentions are typical to the asks of a given role over a period of time because that has rarely been asked - then how can we really say we know for sure whether actors performances are good or not? What Caine teaches the student about camera acting and the different asks of the stage and the camera, and why the performance becomes gradually better as he warms to the idea that Caine presents is amazing to watch and should pique curiosity about the many other ways actors find ways into character or work, how they arrive at what they do. Too many times when an actor goes on interview or press run the questions lean towards their private lives and praise of the work, but not curiosity about how they came to create the work, or an oral history of the craftsman portion of creation of the work. No one seems to care that much about what actors are doing besides how it makes them feel. The amount and kinds of BTS ( behind the scenes) videos and content about what a director is doing, how special effects are created or recently the boom in curiosity about cinematography as compared to behind the scenes content around actors backs up my assertion. The misconception that Heath Ledger's death was in some way related to his performance in The Dark Knight backs up my assertion. The long-standing demand for memoirs on actors that have very little to do with how they worked each one of the roles that made them the legends, the troubles of finding and making a connection with what kind if actor they want to be with what kind Hollywood sees them as, the fact that there's a video of Christian Bale screaming his head off about below-the-line technician getting in his sight line but very little about why that was important to him backs up my assertion. The far and wide crevice between the mention of autuer theory and who created the framework for direction and those who created the framework for acting the Stella Adler's, the Lee Strasbergs, the Uta Hagan's, and the Sanford Meisner's backs up my assertion.
COLLABORATION BETTERS ELABORATION
A distinctive and cultural bias that moves towards reductionism, sloppy silly ideas like an A-list, and the nepotistic and political nature of Hollywood has caused us to miss out on so many astounding careers. Even character actors like Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, who made it sometimes struggle as Hollywood tries to force them into the role of being superstars. Too often in Hollywood functioning in its role as hand to capitalism - roles are based on what the audience wants or what it perceives the audience wants, or both, rather than building up on the skill set the actor clearly is showing a proclivity towards. Character actors are forced into being secondary and tertiary characters when they are actually well worth being leads. I promise you Katherine Hahn could hold your whole movie, and Don Cheadle outshined even the great Denzel in Carl Frankins noir classic “Devil in a Blue Dress” only to be misused and reduced to being Robert Downey's Roadie…literally. This kind of built-in bias not only harms careers like that of let's say Taylor Kitsch who definitely if any actor is a character actor, but it leaves a gash in our understanding of the collaborative nature of acting. In many ways I look at the way actors are treated by the public as similar to the way that Quarterbacks in American football are treated by the public, ( in this specific aspect of treatment not in role) put simply in some cases they are given far too much credit and in others they're given too little. In both cases this extends from the ways in which the collaborative nature of the discipline and the teamwork involved are ignored in a way that picks and chooses when to be conscious of it. In American football a quarterback is nothing without his offensive line. It matters a great deal what kind of receivers he has to throw to, and of course the NFL running back is integral to the ability of the quarterback to be able to do his work. Everyone knows it, but it tends to tell on bias who they choose to be aware of it for. As actors we aren't much different, directors, editor's and especially writers are vital to our process. Many times we are givien sole credit for our performances when they are the result of this very precious and precarious collaborative process. Just as well many times the performance is blamed solely on us when the direction, editing, or the depth and layers of the writing are ignored. I saw that many critics found Gary oldman's performance in “Mank” to be severely lacking, but rarely did I see a direct connection made between it and the material, I saw no pieces that informed anyone as to hoe if thrnidea of who Mank is is Fincher and his Dads vision, that Oldman bares the brunt of the balme for what came out? What was it about his craft, hia work, that didn't work, his age is such a superficial aspect, it’s not that it doesn't matter its that theres no way thats the most important aspect of what doesn't work, and id it is, thats too small a piece of the pie to even speak on Oldman. This is not to say that Oldman deserved no blame or isn't accountable for the way that performance turned out, but that as a collaborative process at least partially, the lacking in his performance is connected to the people around him just as much as if it were great, the greatness of the performance would be directly tied to those people around him. In the NFL it can be noted (if one wants to pay attention to it) that when the defenders arent defending and the offensive line isn't holding and the receivers aren't catching and the running game can't seem to get off the ground, then the quarterback is left to his own devices, and you may start seeing him forcing instead of letting the game come to him and this can lead to interceptions and fumbles and what is known in the game as Happy Feet. In acting the same thing can happen with actors, when a directors vision isnt clear, or is off, when writers write material that is lacking in places to explore or is incredibly inconsistent about character. When the editor is misreading and misinterpreting what is needed, even what is good, the actor may be left to their own devices and even with the greats this is not a good thing. On the other hand actors can still end up doing this even when all those things are there. Misinterpretation of the source material is one of the most common causes. A lack of interest in the layered, complex nature of human nature can also lead to this. Stella Adler always talked about life experience as being inextricable from good acting, not only in the sense of having no clue about the experience your portraying to pull from, but him the ways that can lead to you characterizing the part through a variety of superficial stimuli or gestures, meant to age you up, or suggest trauma you have no understanding of. - but in the way a lack of experience tends to reduce people down to the most basic motivations. It's very hard for actors who see the world in very limited terms to explore the ways in which a character is acting without relying on obvious stereotypes. In the world judgment can be a necessary component to being able to read people to being able to interact and deal properly with other people. I mean hell, it's evolutionary. If we didn't learn that spots on a four-legged animal means danger, maybe we’re the story of the Leopards digestive tract instead of an apex species. In acting though, quick judgement is a very dangerous component. Actors simply can't afford the luxury of judging, or reducing the characters they're playing to villains like we do many folks in real life ( and righteously many times I might add) the lack of empathy that many exhibit towards people who f*** up or act egregiously in politics and in various other aspects of life is a death to an actor. This is one of the reasons why I think actors don't necessarily make the best political commentators. In some occasions I think it's okay to admit that our judgment is a little bit skewed, leans a little bit too much towards empathy - though there are other occasions where I think those who live outside that fraternity could use a little bit of that particular quality. Knowing this I think it’d be a lot more interesting and we'd learn a lot more as critics and as an audience from some of the bad performances we've seen or some of the performances that fall short in our minds - if we were to ask to interview actors specifically for this reason. What's behind Jared Leto and Rami Malek doing some of the things they were doing in “The little things”, what were their ideas? What was asked of Gary Oldman in “Mank” and how does he see or interpret the character of Herman Mankiewicz, especially concerning their age difference, did he have any concerns? And while we are asking these actors we should be asking ourselves what is it specifically about this I don't care for? How would this scene be better made? What scene like this one contextually makes for better understanding of the text, better insight, and feels more connected, than the one I’m seeing, and how could that be replicated without asking that the actor simply mimick something that lives and exist in a different world under different rules in a different play or film. Bias is the enemy of the actor, but it is the enemy of the critic every bit as much. There needs to be an extraction of this idea at the root of much discourse around acting that what I like or what I feel strongest about is synonymous with what is best. A deconstruction of the centering of celebrities, and leads, and the marring of what actual Movie Stars are, as the only ones worth doing big spreads on. I want critics who interview a Shelley Duvall to ask not about what went on between she and Jack Nicholson, or how she got along with Stanley Kubrick, but I want them to ask her about the work. I want them to go film by film and talk to her about her processes for each one of those films. I want questions like “what was the role she was most terrified of”? “The role that she felt as though she never quite nailed, didn't understand, and why she felt as though she didn't understand the role. Did she maintain acting coaches on a retainer for all of her roles or did after a certain point she feel as though she could go on her own, and which roles did she do by herself and which roles did she do with the aid of an acting coach, and what did they offer, and what stuck with her? What are her fundamental ideas about acting, “Five Rules by Shelley Duvall for actors”. This is what I feel we need more of. Full spread interviews like these for Clifton Collins Jr and Charles S. Dutton, CCH Pounder, Lil Taylor S. Epatha Merkerson and beyond.
My point in all this is not to condescend to anyone, it is to recommend a reframing of the way in which we talk about actors because I believe it is absolutely necessary. Because I believe our obsession with celebrity has tainted and marred our ability to perceive conceptualize who actors are, what they're doing, and grade the work. I read once somewhere that Fred Williamson said there are too many actors who don't deserve to work who are working and too many who do deserve to work who aren't, and as critics I think it's worth it to acknowledge the role we play in heloing to prop that. Too many times I've heard some version of an ideology that says that grading performances is purely subjective and that is the problem. It's not that there isn't portions of the craft (and especially watching it) that absolutely are subjective, it’s that that kind of attitude is not should not be so lazily sat upon when we talk about someone's ability or inability. It's that when we talked about someone's to sing or someone's ability to play an instrument, or weld, we don't leave it as that, and that if we truly respected acting we’d know and act like it is not that much different. Arthur Lessac was adamant that acting is the use of your body, your voice, your mind as an instrument. The better you know about the way that that instrument functions, about the collaborative process of timing and execution, even as a critic- the better you're able to grade the difference between someone who has talent but over perceives it/ uses it, someone who doesn't, someone who does, what is effective and what is not, and more importantly why. Better understanding of the separation between celebrity and acting will get less takes that suggest that Angelina Jolie or that Jared Leto are simply not good actors or talentless, and more what they might be better served using, or why it is we don't like them in certain roles, or how it is they're being deployed. It would lead to more effective interrogation of great actors who turn in work that is actually half done, that feeds and lives purely off of the transcendency of their own talent, and tendencies for a reliance on their own over bearing sense of the actor self, wherein we might call both Joaquin Phoenix's performance in “The Joker” and Denzel Washington's in “The Little Things” dare I say it… bad. More curiosity from those not initiated in the form itself would lead to a lot better of a foundation , a lot more sturdy, solid and less subjective framework of the discourse around acting and actors. No, you're never going to get rid of people's feelings that some people don't do it for them, but I can tell you that the Beatles have never done it for me without saying they weren't great musicians. We need to afford actors that same level understanding, and interrogate our conflicting relationship with the craft. Stop associating it with that that lies almost purely outside the realm of objectivity and start acting as if there are definitive factors that play into good performers. This foundational reframing I believe will lead to a lot better conversations and discourse around performances, so that someone like Delroy Lindo who gave a performance that reaches out beyond decades, eras, generations, and other variables to stand alone as a uniquely definitive piece of classic American acting on a level that touches upon being a supernova will not fall behind in institutional discourse or conversations around the best actors are acting nor in informal conversation or discourse around the best actors or acting this year. We can't afford to push that aside, to reduce that kind of performance and we damn sure can't forget it, because it matters not only in giving actors like Delroy Lindo his proper due, but in giving future actors something to aspire to, to understanding what the craft actually involves so that they too may seek to arrive at that level of craft and talent. I am not among those who believe that there is some inherent superiority of British actors. There are a number of factors that play into that particular form of bias, I dont have the time to get into here, but I do believe there is something to be said about how that foolishness is directly connected to American culture around acting and the way it has devolved into something that is craven and crass and simplistic and almost completely utilitarian, if not for our obsession with beauty. It would do us good to remember that on several occasions when Hollywood has been stuck in a rut of producing unoriginal monotonous properties built around thier capitalistic fever before it has been foreign countries whether France, Italy, Japan, Korea, Iran, or Senegal that had to kick our ass to remind us of what this film s*** is all about. I think of that particular problem or aspect of that particular problem as it pertains to British and American actors as related. What do you say when on a widespread level you are coaching young actors in workshops to focus on developing a social media following to try and get work. When so many hard-working and deserving actors lose good jobs to those who are merely creating another revenue stream from another discipline such as music. When someone such as Common who I am sorry could not act his way out of a paper bag - ends up with what can be defined as a career. When people write thinly veiled hit pieces saying that Angelina Jolie is not completely deserving of her status as a great actor, that at the base of it all she's just beautiful and I guess that's okay is your thesis. When something as silly as the genre you're working in could keep you from getting your proper due for the work you've put in which is phenomenal, ( yes I'm talking about Toni Collette and Lupita Nyong'o and the wide and vast litany of mostly female actors who are ignored in the horror genre for performances that are out of this world) when so many questions in and around the craft are about things that have nothing to do with the craft. When being an actor is still even now a joke of a living. When there is a Royal Academy as a state funded school for actors there, but no State performing of Arts function here. When places that were never supported by the state in any way in the first place, or in very small ways like the Actors Studio and the Beverly Hills Playhouse are deteriorating, cracking, and still other ones almost already gone and when those places are almost only to be found in and by coastal areas and even then truthfully and only two major places Los Angeles and New York. When thousands of years into a very ancient craft, hundreds of years into the form of it that takes place on film-we still have done very little to understand it - well then maybe that's worth taking a look at as possibly a reason as to why so many people use silly logic to go out and draft British actors to take American jobs, because of course they would, this industry and most around conceptualize and characterize the work so poorly it only makes sense they would look to somewhere else where their own blind ineptitude couldn’t convolute their perception save to exaggerate the abilities of foreign bodies. I don't want a bunch of self-important pontificators walking around with pipes in their mouths explaining to everybody the seriousness of acting. I just want us to be more empathetic and understanding to what is actually involved in the work, and do the work of separating all of the things that the various incarnations of oppressive studio systems and the various inner workings and minutiae of trying to be a professional in Hollywood have done to hurt the actual work, and to reduce our ability to interpret it, to read it, to judge it.
Cary Grant: Never Go Full Drunk.
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Cary Grant’s performance of the act of being drunk is A1 stuff. He acutely understands the delicate balance of recreating for an audience a feeling that is both familiar and unfamiliar because it is nor only rooted in emotion, but in actual physical impairment, we know the feeling, but we can’t connect to it because this is not emotion, which is a response, but a provoked response, it may be deep seated but it can be reached and voluntarily initiated. Physical impairment is not really as much a response as it is a lack of one, and when it is ( the case of drugs) it’s the bodies involuntary response. In most cases this is exactly why we shouldn’t have able bodied actors playing disabled roles as it not only has the sting of normative audacity, but it flies in the face of what it is actors do. Put more simply, another good reason physical impairment should not be played is because it inherently requires you to “act” in the most derogatory meaning of the word. Put even more simply in the slightly adjusted words of Robert Downeys actor from “Tropic Thunder” “Never go full Drunk”. There is very little truth in these performances for that very reason, but I digress….Grant understands the idea that the trick with drunkenness a different kind of impairment is to try very hard not to appear drunk, but also understands how it relates and applies itself to his character Roger Thornhill. Alchohol affects people differently , its important to understand who you are sober can be in relation to who you are drunk, but it is also an exaggeration of who you are not necessarily the one you want to count on. Grant decides to slow down Thornhill’s attention while speeding up his focus, because sober Thornhill’s focus is sharp and lingers, but in this state his attention is allowed to roam and be on the go. Cary’s dance background is also put to good use in maintaining his balance while being off balance which gives the perception of drunkenness. Watch how he is kind of spun into the direction of the phone from the bench, this is clearly like a dance , but it’s also part of an effort to be so sure about where he is going. .
Now compare that to this scene from Adam Sandler’s hit movie Billy Madison….
Again while being drunk, often the importance to each person of appearing to be okay causes a hyper focus on some aesthetics, Sandler instead tries to play up the act of being drunk itself. These are comedic instincts, and though I like Sandler it’s one of the reasons I’m not as big as others on his forays into dramatic roles, hebstill has trouble differentiating how the “asks” are different for each discipline and even in his latest works like Uncut Gems it makes itself known. Anywho in Roger Thornhill’s case Grant decided it was his appearance, and his speech he wanted to focus on, because again he is still who he is, but he's now overly attentive to proving it. The easy choice, the one most actors go for immediately -would've been to slur the words, Grant’s choice is to put an emphasis on everything he says over-enunciating a lot of his vowels, and backing the intent up with unnecessary gestures that are clearly aimed at something but never find their way there, which is a much more authentic idea of drunkenness. The act of being strident about where you’re headed when you really have no clue is a much more interesting approach than simply playing up his character’s obnoxiousness (Sandler). I just want to point out how great this is because so many things even great actors do are not appreciated. This is the work.
Grant’s performance works precisely because it is realistic and it is hilarious and it’s hilarious because its realistic. Choices matter, and there are plenty of great ones made by a great one here. It’s the beginning of the film and it continues to tell us to inform us about whst’s important to Thornhill even when hes impaired, he will be further impaired in various ways during this film but this is what he holds onto, and this is what an actor holds onto to find a role. Detail matters in performance, nothing is to small to be played right, and creatively, and you’d be hard pressed to do better than take a lesson on the art of appearing drunk from quite possibly the greatest movie star in history.
Form and Function: How the casting and the actors served the function of 12 Years A Slave.
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A third watch of Steve McQueen's essential Oscar winner "12 Years A Slave" proves my initial feeling upon seeing it..That it was a monumental achievement. Awe inspiring and humbling in its precision and its cinematic language. The subject matter itself should humble anyone tackling it, but prior to 12 years, (and to some extent after) I don’t know that that humility has been felt or present in many films on the subject matter. Foregoing the self assured faux moral exactitude of previous efforts on the subject, it seems like a benevolent understanding of the importance of being in service to not only the work, but the story- is ever present in McQueen's film. 12 Years moves beyond the painstaking processes of the cinematic to the spiritual, and yet does this by way of attention to the painstaking processes of the cinematic, and this goes doubly for the facet of the movie that I know and love as a familiar - Acting. What I'm seeking to pierce and dive into more specifically is how much of the casting (Truly exceptional work by Francine Maisler) and the way the actors employ their particular skills ends up deepening, lending weight to, and underlining a central, but sub textual theme of just how institution goes beyond any individual, and inversely institutions continue and thrive precisely because of individual behavior. How the film illustrates that there is no kind of white person above slavery, no “kind” slaver, and how cowardice, capitalism and fear held a stranglehold over all. It does the same for the slaves, acknowledging humanely how easy betrayal comes in a system that is in and of itself a betrayal of humanity. Compassionately but with a steely eye portraying just how one moment of self survival or self care could impact a life of one or many. I've never seen a movie so thoroughly, so vastly reach out onto the nebulous black void of slavery and pull back something that gives a meaningful semblance of just how exhaustive, traumatic, and complex the institution was while informing the ways in which its arms still extend into our current ideology, construction , and function. Deploying a litany of actors in such interesting ways very very near devoid of ego and bias towards outside factors like financing or nepotism.
Scoot McNairy and Taran Killiam “Brown and Hamiliton"
The first two demons we meet in McQueen's slavery inferno are at first sight harmless. They present themselves not as the duplicitous actors in an unforgivable transaction they are, but as the embodiment of opportunity. This is an example of the tendrils of routines refined and sometimes developed during slavery. New forms of restriction, reduction, and harm, are often presented as opportunities, from “broken windows” to ebonics to neoliberalism. To properly nail down the constitution, make up, and disposition of these “actors”, you want actors that bring exactly what Mcnairy and especially Killiam bring. Killiam, has a tenderness about the face that comes mostly from him seeming to have retained baby fat , but his eyes bare a quality of mischief easily tapped into, and something more sinister if deployed with more skill. There is a natural softness to him that he handily employs in service of the narrative. In a underrated scene emblematic of and comparable to white liberalism, he strokes the face of Solomon Northup - our soon to be beleaguered protagonist with a wipe after purposely getting him drunk and drugging him for the purpose of selling him off into trauma and degradation. Hamilton's conscious is clearly riddled with guilt, and shame, but his best offering is merely a few kind words, not an actual reversal of his behavior followed by contrition. It’s not only the only thing he can muster, it’s the only thing he will. Killiam and McNairy are not asked to stretch beyond their skills, ( the latter of whom I think has considerable range to excavate) merely to stand in what we naturally see in each. Mcnairy for his part has always shared an uncanny ability to conjure up balmy sleaze in a way that mirrors much of what Ben Mendelsohn does - save that its more straightforward and also a bit more compassionate. These two represent the cowardice, beleaguered morality, and baby face of an evil empire of individual avarice, thus also serving as placeholders for the ills of capitalism -and in that the evil of a racist system itself is emphasized not over, but with the individual. In case we doubt this particular point, the ending shot of the result of their treachery is a pan upwards from Solomon’s cell, past the sturdy bricks that hold him prisoner, to the top of the building where the White House can be seen just but maybe a few miles away as Solomon cries out for help… The individuals are backed by the apparatus.
Michael K Williams “Robert"
By the time “12 Years A Slave” was released actor Michael K. Williams had already solidified himself as an actor heavy with his iconic role as Omar in the definitive TV show of its era “The Wire”, and was now well on his way to a Hollywood favorite. Here though he is employed not as a 4 to 5th billed character actor, but in such a manner that if you blinked you might’ve missed him, a day player one might say. Having an actor of his repute show up and be clearly recognized only to dispatched so rapidly with surgical indifference surprises the audience in a way similar to Janet Leigh being murdered in the early portion of “Psycho”. Both to varying degrees provide voyueristic horror and a reinforcement of the tenuous nature of life itself under murderous, psychotic, and dehumanizing forces, but one (Psycho) emphasizes the lone psychotic individual, 12 Years emphasizes individuals as well as a psychotic system of oppression. In this system being explored and reenacted before our eyes our “Michael K Williams” is not celebrated, he is not here to remind us of how good the movie we are watching is, or of its prestige, he is merely a function. We meet “Robert” (Michael K Williams) on a slave ship churning across the river. He is introduced just as a conversation between another enslaved man “Clemens” (Chris Chalk) and Solomon about the proper philosophical approach to their predicament is being held. Clemens advice and approach regarding survival amounts to “shut up and keep your head down”, and no sooner than he finishes his sentence, Robert appears head down, with a contraption that gags his mouth. A slaver whose face is never shown comes down only foot in frame, his hands come into screen releasing the contraption with a further warning…“keep your mouth shut”. Robert looks up at the slaver, then at the Clemens and Solomon and the very next scene is Robert passionately exclaiming “I Say We Fight!” It is potent and gifted that potency through William’s elegant skill for emotional sincerity, repressed anger and vehemence. Williams had a possessive hold over roles like Chalky White in Boardwalk Empire where this seething but quiet rage was put to similar use in scenes where he would exclaim “I ain’t building no bookcase”. The bookcase scene in Boardwalk showed a similar character serving a different purpose. Chalky is as belligerent, and rebellious as Robert in 12 years, but he is now also a agent in the wheel of capitalism, as well as a victim of racism. The black capitalist in Chalky might cast aspersions on the likes of a Robert. Implied in the messaging of that very Bookcase scene is “I ain’t my ancestors", but here is Chalky's ancestor saying he wasn’t either, but the wages were so often death, and over time death can act as a a greaser for revisionist history. These subtle representations of various out growths of slave mentality from the “Coonery” (which in this case I prefer traumatic conditioning) in Clemens, to the colorism represented in a light skin woman unchained serving water to Adepero Oduye's “Eliza” and her children condescendingly telling her to “Cheer up and don’t be so cast down”. Each representative in and of themselves could warrant a piece of their own, such is the nature of the exhaustively precise and yet STILL incomplete portrait of slavery McQueen paints to as a means to connect the various functions. Returning to Robert, the character tries to conjure up a plan to commit mutiny with an impassioned plea alluding to the degradation and horrors that lie ahead in Solomon's future.. Nothing comes of it, the boat churns on and the next scene is yet another slaver creeping downstairs with the sole intention to rape Eliza. Robert commits his last act of rebellion to put his hands on the slaver. Was it to plea with him? To harm him? To ask him for something? Most likely one of the former two but we never know, for a knife from the slaver is plunged into him so fast we barely have time to recognize what has happened, until it is revealed. Solomon awakens shocked at what has taken place, and Clemons who has been awake “but in full praxis of his head down theory, also jumps to aid. Eliza stands by clearly in shock and most likely additionally traumatized, watching this man die trying to protect her, which for what we know does not even work (it stands to reason that this fiend continued on his original intent). The whole scene is a microcosm of the ripple effect. One act of discriminatory violence, and the way the horror, confirms, conditions, and harms those that witnessed it, including us the audience. The next we see Michael K Williams he is in a body bag being tossed over like laundry by those who witnessed his death, and he is no more. Status, reputation, station, in the cinematic context of this film, makes no more difference than his humanity in the context of slavery, and the film underscores that through the main character of Solomon and by way of characters like “Robert” being played by an actor like Michael K Williams. Both are reminders that the radical nature of this film lays not in its meaning or messaging, (which we know by knowledge and blood) but in its execution and exploration of both.
Paul Giamatti “Freeman”
Paul Giamatti is one of the most versatile actors of this or any other era. Able to alternate between deploying degrees of inviting approachability or repulsive menace in different (Sideways, Duplicity) and sometimes the same roles (The Illusionist). Here McQueen encourages the combination, and it expresses mostly the capitalist POV while not for a moment ignoring the anti blackness and racism involved in the character of these men. Giamatti's Freeman is a slaver/auctioneer, a very explicit profiteer in the market of black bodies, and as Giamatti's effortless congeniality serves the capitalistic endeavor, his menace serves the racist. The tone is set from jump. Freeman appears in front of the newly named Platt ( Solomon), Eliza and others calling out their names for record, in this opening introduction he feels much like a cordial teacher in front of a class, (but therein also lies the paternalistic nature of racism) yet not but a few moments later when Solomon (who does not yet know they have changed his name to Platt) tells him his name is Solomon, the menace makes itself known. These two faces do not alternate, they are both there in Giamatti in the same way one might mix red and blue and get purple. They are there as he slaps Solomon and calls for “These niggers to be brought to my cart” intertwining and giving the application of the word a sort of straightforward nonchalance that is appalling in its own right. This nonchalance is the purpose of this particular chapter, this portion of slavery. McQueen moves the camera in this very same manner of straight to the pointedness. It moves as if it were from a patron's pov following Giamatti's “Freeman” around as he shows off “the merchandise". The camera is not preaching or sermonizing, or even telling , its just there to see, and we see in plainness very real, a very civil, and very vile behavior. Now back fully into the weaponized cordial pleasantness common to a salesman, Giamatti, giving no actorly sense of the sentimentality or burden of truth, parades around these people with a sensible matter-of-factness that grows increasingly and almost to a crescendo of gross joviality until it is interrupted by a slave named Eliza's ( Adepero Oduye) pleas to keep her and her family together. Here we are also introduced to Benedict Cumberbatch, but I’ll get to him later. Freeman hits, slaps, pats and yells at these men and women as if they were..well livestock, and it is all intentional as is backed by an interview with Giamatti in “The Collider” speaking about McQueen..
“He was amazing! He is a really, really interesting guy. The way it was shot, he is a very interesting dude. This movie could easily be freaky. His whole take on it is to kind of take any kind of modern sensibility off of it and just create a world in which its completely normal that people get chained up and beaten and sold to each other. He wanted to create a sense in which its totally normal, so he’s not commenting on it, at all.”
When asked about his sentimentality, by Cumberbatch's Ford, Freeman answers “it extends the length of a coin”. The intertwining of capitalism and racism, their synergistic relationship now expressed in laymans terms through John Ridley's script, McQueen's eye, and embodied in Paul Giamatti's ability to flexibly play at being agreeable while being pathetic and putrid. This circle of hell now complete and explained he moves on.
Paul Dano and Benedict Cumberbatch “Tibeats and Ford"
Paul Dano has not only a small role in 12 years but also one of the more recognizable archetypes in both Slavery and “Race” films made from white perspectives and/or for white audience. The overt racist, the man meant to conveniently symbolize and summarize racism. Benedict Cumberbatch as slave owner Ford, is much like the inverse of Danos archetype, the character meant to remind white folk of their inherent good, their disdain and “redemptive”sorrow at the whole enterprise, so they're nowhere near as interesting alone as what McQueen has them form together, a good cop bad/cop act that looks to be separate but is actually co-dependent and cooperative. Tibeats announces himself as Fords head carpenter, but he acts quite a bit like a overseer himself, and most of what he does seems to be backed up by and co-signed by Fords actual overseer, which by proxy means its co-signed by Ford himself. It should be understood that’s the objective of good cop bad cop, to cover up the cooperative nature of your oppressors. To shock the supposed perpetrator into fealty and compliance by bombarding them with an emotional 1-2 punch. A presentation of what seems like extremes in choice to herd and corral them into a false sense of security so that they may become useful to the system. It’s also worth noting that cops are descended from slavery, and that our introduction to Tibeats includes him gleefully singing a song about “Pattyrollers” ( Slave Patrols) catching negroes, so again we see a direct connection and correlation between functions, strategies, attitudes, and archetypes that live on today even in our police, in our state, in our election. 12 years tells the story of Solomon markedly different then the book, which is more a straightforward telling that misses some of the greater ironies and intricacies of the order of things. McQueen and crew want us to notice that Solomon himself is blinded and in some ways has blinded himself to what America is, and what he is. The former occurs in a flashback where he remembers the way a white man took special note of him in a store where another black man is retrieved harshly and peturbedly by his owner, the latter occurs later at the very Mr Fords plantation, where Solomon does not and refuses to see the connection between Tibeats and Ford. In order to reinforce the “act" of good and bad, which seemed to fool even the real Solomon Northup in the book, its important to get two actors that demonstrate themselves the extremes needed, and in Cumberbatch and Dano you could find no wider apart duo. What each actor does, what they're known for, is extremely far apart. Cumberbatch is a lead, who can character act on occasion, Dano a pure character actor. Dano's previous roles include a role in Denis Villeneuve's “Prisoners” as the “Person of interest” in a series of child abductions, and as the enemy of Daniel Plainview “Eli Sunday” in Paul Thomas Anderson's modern classic “There Will Be Blood”. There is an unorthodox quality to Dano's work born of both training but also a willingness to rebel against it. Much of Dano's work consist of playing meek, and withdrawn characters with ferocious underbellies of cruelty and rage lurking underneath. Dano like Kiliam also has a baby faced quality that makes him appear boy- like, innocent, and a relaxed, almost slack quality around his shoulders that makes him appear low, and lowly. His voice constantly breaks (which adds to his boyishness) whether he’s screaming in There Will Be Blood, sobbing in Prisoners or singing in 12 years a Slave, all of this serves the portrait of Tibeats as an icky, petrified child who wants so desperately to be a big strong adult. There’s a sliminess there in Danos Big Baby Huey act that makes you want to hit Dano, and it aids in allowing the audience to see how Solomon could end up snapping and beating the tar out of him, in the same way it helped us understand what made Daniel Plainview despise him, and aided in our complicitness in maybe mentally supporting if only but a little Hugh Jackman’s actions in Prisoners. It’s a Trumpian sensibility, that makes him easy to hate set in direct opposition to (Biden like) Cumberbatch. It covers the synergistic relationship between he and Ford, whom fair tempered though he may be is still a slaver. He abuses, then Cumberbatch comes in with kindness, He sings the A selection the Ford comes in with the sermon. Cumberbatch is a rigidly trained actor it’s what helps and hurts him. Here it helps. Arguably Cumberbatch's best weapon is his voice, and the way he deploys it nearly yells classical training. It has a beautiful, engrossing, and forced quality that fits Fords demeanor perfectly selling his cultured, and curated sense of benevolence and authority. It is especially effective during Fords Bible readings, ( which McQueen never allows to be read alone they are always intertwined with either Eliza's suffering, or Tibeats dreadful singing of the dreadful song “Run nigger run". Cumberbatch's qualities serve well to illustrate and illuminate a very specific kind of authority, the paternalistic racist father figure, and the falsehood behind it, one which another character in the film brings to plain sight.
Adepero Oduye “Eliza”
12 Years could be looked at as two different things, and Eliza's role becomes clearer in the one than the other. If a sobering, unflinching, intentional education on slavery, then shes just a token of representation of suffering that either works or doesn't work. If a story of the journey of one man through not slavery, but the fable of his existence as a black person in the hell of American slavery as an institution, (be it south or north) Eliza is a a prop character with depth, whom through her journey we are reminded ( then he is reminded) that this is indeed hell. Its still a weakness of the script for 12 years that its women feel underserved, but in Eliza's case there is still something vital to be mined from her experience. For it is Eliza who most tells not just by way of words but through her entire history in the movie on the fable and folly of Solomon’s approach and on the cruelty of Master Ford and thereby on anyone involved in the whole foul business. From the way he's willing to separate her for his needs, (which he views as a kindness) to the way he allows her to be gotten rid of merely because she mourned her children “too much” for the tender ears of his privileged wife, Fords benevolent cruelty is laid bare. If you focus too much on Solomons “I will surivive!” rant you will miss the heavenly glory of Eliza’s retort which serves as the most poignant representation of not only the humble of approach of the makers of this film in that moment, but of the enterprise of oppression, and of its effects on those whom it harms.
There are two sections to Eliza's portion or role in this film, and both are colored by way of Adepero's acting and her youth. Just but two years earlier Adepero played a 17 year old in Dee Rees endearing portrait of a coming of age lesbian in “Pariah". In that story she is on the path to embracing, here she has embraced, who she is and what she means to the institution, and it is of no aid to her, or her sadness. This is the first section, embracing her grief, her despair, and looking firmly into the hypocrisy of the whole enterprise. It is important, because Solomon is under the false impression that he can strategize his way out of this, that he can figure, that there is some way to know his way through it, and Eliza having now arrived where he will just now begin to see, knows better, for reasons better explained by a black woman, black women have always been able to stare straight into a thing and see it for exactly for what it is, be it anything from their children to a predicament, save maybe their romantic situation very few things escape their intuitive glare. For all that this movie doesn’t give them, that much is made plain through Eliza, Alfre Woodard's Mistress Shaw, Patsey, and even the knowing eyes of the elderly black woman who sings the spirituals. Solomon and Eliza are two trains passing in the night who would be headed for the same destination were it not for chance and Solonon not being born into it. There lies a privilege in Solomon, hes not keen on seeing, and for that matter, Eliza's presence reminds Ford, Solomon, and even us the audience of it and its uncomfortability. Her misery is a discomfort, her truth is a discomfort, and her fate is a discomfort to all involved. How many times are we, must we be reminded that black women's pain is an inconvenience to us, an affront even to black men. This begins the second section, pay attention to how Solomon acts both as she cries, but even as she reads him for exactly whom he is. Two of the best bits of acting in this film are to be found in this scene and given by Adepero. The enunciation and body language that accompanies the word “luxuriate” is something I can't easily forget it's like those portions of a great song that you always anticipate and wait for. This is followed by Adepero's delivery of the line “So you settle into your role as “Platt”. It lacks judgment but it's nonetheless a powerful strike for its statement and assessment of what Platt has done. I love it when actors bring Things to words statements phrases that ultimately back up what the script means to imply or something that they will later say so that when Eliza then says (and I paraphrase) I don't judge you Solomon I've done things myself it now has been reinforced we know it to be true because ultimately it's there in her words and in the way they are delivered just before. Adepero's authenticity is vital because this is an important aspect to the discussion that's going on here and again a kind of commentary that while allowing points to be seen does not necessarily feel the need to vocalize them in a way that preaches to the audience. For myself I hear Eliza's words and it reaches across time to speak to me of the issue of humility in community action. Eliza does not stand in judgment because she knows she herself has committed acts that no one including she herself would be proud of for the sake of survival, she understands this instinct coming from Solomon but she rightfully puts him in his place and lets him know what exactly it is he's doing and what she views as the folly of what he is doing. This is something I see in today's discourse, constantly missing the idea that those who commit certain acts for the sake of their survival are victims in and of themselves and a sort of connective tissue between the “I" and the “them” and I'm talking only between people who are mostly likely in in the same “house". Solomon and Eliza though different are mostly in the same “house" but not so vastly different that Eliza can stand in judgement of him anymore than he can her. Though Solomon has privileges that he holds over Eliza it is not as if he is free, and Eliza herself is a sober reminder of that. The True Villain of all villains here is the institution and then directly under that the actors who directly incompetently, implicitly, and explicitly, and in any number of ways help aid the system. Those who were victimized by and have varying types of reactions to the institution and the oppression are still victims, they may also become agents, but even as a house nigger you are a victim. So why Eliza stands firm and tall in her defense of her morning and in the truth of her view this hell, she does not stand in judgement of Solomon and his desire to be free by the way that he knows how, she just points out plainly and righteously it will not incur the desired effect. I'm reminded of Audre Lorde speaking on the way her impotence under oppression made her hate it in others before she caught herself. It is powerful and beautifully plain acting making a beautifully plain point. The point being Ford is an actor in all of this and he is no more free events wheel desires and blame than we are and as a matter of fact pure fact he is actor in evil, where we are merely just fallible because of it.
Lupita Nyong'o “Patsey”
The most difficult scene in this film for me is not Patsey's whipping, and or her rape though those too are difficult. It is not Solomon's near hanging either, though that also is difficult, it is to eliminate all other competitors none of the physical acts of violence displayed or portrayed throughout the movie.. it is Patsey begging Solomon to end her life. Lupita Nyong'o adds such a spiritual weight to the plea it is almost too much for me to bear. It’s such a unrelentingly tragic scene I tear up at the thought of it. I am angered by it too. It’s Lupita's sanguin smile as she thinks the thought before she reveals it to us and the Solomon when uttering the words “I have a request”. Its the bodily shift, and the embers of hope and desperation now fully ablaze in her eyes as she says “There is God Here!”. It’s the way her hand hovers over his back, as she watches the flame of hope extinguish. I won’t go too deep into Patsey because I feel her pain is so uniquely her own and black women’s there are definitely parts of it I genuinely dom’t understand. I also feel she is the one portion of he film where Ridley and McQueen missed the mark. She feels dimensionally cheated, and the meat of her soul is left solely upon the shoulders of Lupita to outline to us what is not there in story. Whereas Eliza suffers like all in the film but has an arc, it feels like Patsey merely suffers, but again it is Lupita who provides a quiet soulful and heart breaking sense of poetic melancholia to the role without romanticizing it. In fact it is Lupitas work that most assuredly brings to light the cruelty of fetishization, and the oppression of love from someone who doesn’t even view you as an equal, or consider you in the equation at all. The tragedy of Patsey is the combined tragedy of a silencing of the full experiences of black women throughout years of this heinous endeavor, and of Lupita’s Godly work in a role where there is none.
Michael Fassbender, Sarah Paulson Mr and Mrs “Epps"
“Do not set yourself up against Patsey, my dear. Cos I will rid myself of you well before I do away with her.” It is a fiery quote and one that encapsulates the power dynamics of the relationship between white women and white men in this country for some time. When Bill Burr went on his brutally truthful rant about white women inserting and centering themselves after playing such a significant role in said oppression I thought immediately of Sarah Paulson's Mrs Epps, a cruel cantankerous, self pitying woman who laid her frustrations at the feet of a black woman because she was intimidated by her, and jealous of her husband's desire, and also because she could. Paulson has that quality so many of the greats have, where the same quality that makes them affable, can be inverted to appear nasty, menacing, repulsive, a la Harrison Ford, (the aforementioned Giamatti) or Bette Davis ( Though not as skillfully and flexibly as Davis). Paulson carries a polite stiffness well. Especially noted in her work in much of Ryan Murphy's shows, and here all she needed to do was turn off the polite. If you watch Mrs Epps she doesn’t move much in any action and her movements are always precise and without flourish. This aids and upholds the believability of the backstory her husband gives us that she does not come from money. This is practiced. As a woman whose station itself is precarious you would think she would identify and relate to those who also lack agency and power but so many times this is not the case, instead as practice she clings to what little power she has, and views Patsey as an imminent threat to it. It’s not a reach to suppose that if Epps knows of what has transpired across the way with the “lothatrio” on the Shaw Plantation and fears Shaw beguiling Patsey, than his wife would (knowing of what happened on the Shaw Plantation with Mistress Shaw) fear the exact same. White women it seems have always both known the tenuous nature of their stature in a white male dominated hegemonic society and enjoyed the fruits of it, but it leaves them often times in perpetual limbo, and Paulson works as an avatar for this precisely because she has that ability for both repulsion and affability as an actor. Now in the case of her movie husband, Mr Epps Fassbender’s work is in my opinion the central acting force of the film. As Epps Michael Fassbender conjures something so ugly, so hideous, it’s jarring. It defies being called villainy, it’s far too human for that, and yet it doesn't defy being called evil. Fassbender is so spot on in his depiction, so wild eyed and authentic in it, I think it has caused a hesitation by the audience to look directly into the black abyss of humanity he created and critique or praise the performance. Epps is a small man who quite literally leans on others to give himself height and strength, so its understandable, he is also vile and a serial rapist so its understandable that there is a moral question that raises itself out of the root of the importance of storytelling as well as the consequence. What is the value of praising such a performance? The consequence? What if Fassbender had won the Oscar, after an avalanche of praise for playing to the absolute hilt one of the worst human beings this side of Hitler. It’s a question with no easy answers, so I will try and talk about Fassbender's work with as much rigidity and frankness as is possible without being effusive. Fassbender has always had a piercing stare…Shame, the 300, Fish Tank, in various ways he made use of this in all of these films, but here is where the stare being Eddie Brock, found its sentient symbiote in the character of Epps and became literal venom. Where Fassbender finds Epps is in his unadorned trivialities, his nude bitterness, and his matter of factly belief in the institution. He does not give his words the fervor of hate, he gives them the fervor of a believer, and yet not a “True” believer. The most pertinent example being in his conversation with Brad Pitt's “Samuel Bass”. Epps argument is not dressed in elegant actor fire, in fact some words barely make it out they're so understated. When Bass calls Epps slaves laborers, he scoffs, but though it comes with the proper amount of bewilderment, his “what the hell?” is so plainly delivered it almost feels under his breath. He responds “They ain’t hired help, they're my property” and Bass responds “You say that with pride”, he responds back “I say it as fact"..He is right, Fassbender delivers the line exactly as if it were fact, and like many believers his supposition and disposition rest upon a foundation of constant and consistent reinforcement. In one way or another to cause Epps any form of disbelief in the purity of the system that props him up is a threat. It makes Patsey a threat because he is in love with her, Solomon a threat because he is much smarter than he, and Bass a threat because he is outright questioning the institution as a white man and subsequently Epps righteousness.. and what does Epps have if he doesn’t have his rationalizations of his cruelties? Thing is though Fassbender doesn’t play Epps for depth, he plays him for simplicity, and finds Epps complexity through it. He stares at Platt holding him close, the proximity a thinly veiled threat, but also the bodily admission of something underneath, (admiration, kinship, maybe even some form of desire) and the stare directly into Solomon is one one would give a map, trying to divine from it its secrets. He accepts Epps explanation for the accusation he was writing a letter, less because it seems the truth, which is much too complex for him to ascertain, and more because he is happy with Epps capitulation to his superiority. Had the movie chose to follow Epps outward beyond the Epps home, it would be easy to see him as one kept just outside the circle of elite who know well what and who he is, but find him useful a simpleton propped up by numbingly violent, and hypocritical institution as machine for capital. A tool happy in his work and also confused by it. His “moods”, his drinking being propelled by it. Fassbender's performance is compelling, and pure, there is little to no “acting” in it, and it is by far his best work to me, and by far the most difficult to celebrate, but in him and through him we see the mechanical touch of the empire in a way that shines away from morality plays that were so common in the telling of this bleak history, and into something that took the immorality as evident without need of extra service, and instead chose to focus on the viscera, and the inner workings of this body. Let us find our emotion through it, and in that approach it deployed each and every one of its actors as tools to represent it machinery to tune it, and tighten it, and allow it to run to its conclusion.
12 Years as told in the hands of McQueen, Ridley and the other storytellers is a not just an epic telling of one man’s horrific experiences through the various hells of slavery, it’s an attempt at trying to do justice to the various gears, nuts, bolts and the ideological deformity of the institution that served as the foundation of a world super power by way of acknowledging the inaccessibility of the whole, and focusing on the parts. Solomon ‘s story as a story to be told for the awe and approval of the audience, is eschewed for his story being told as a way into individuals performing and reacting as a collective in their roles in service of an idea regardless of its merits or harm. In other words its good in the way that best fits the limits and the strengths of this medium we call film. Each person is specific in his or her work, and casting wise each is perfectly employed in that usage. Its amongst the greatest cast in cinematic history, not just in talent but again in, the way that they each and every one so perfectly imperfect, so authentic, and the way the work they’ve done before made them ready for the work they would do here. From the highest to the lowest, from Ejiofor to Alfre Woodard, to Garrett Dillahunt ( Armsby, the white overseer turned slave) great or small, marquee or character, they are given roles large or small according to what the film needed exactly, and they find their mark with a precision unseen in very many films. The films sole miss is its casting of Brad Pitt as Bass, who brings too much actorly imposed confidence, and righteousness to a role, that would've much better been served and played with more apprehension and less modernity. The approach of McQueen's work is worth questioning, so too the film in some manners, it goes in a certain context as the tension with praising Epps goes, should such beauty, skill, and craft be used in such a way, for such a subject? In the same way ( though not necessarily the same degree ) I find some significant hesitation in my desire to praise Fassbender's work, I find that hesitation in celebrating the craft. This Laurren Michele Jackson piece was foundational in helping articulate my own tensions. It’s an astoundingly intelligent ( as in I feel the borders of my intelligence in reading it ) well written and conceptualized breakdown of the power, significance, and maybe most importantly flaws of this film, which spoke to me of, and illuminated for me what lies behind tension of a film I consider an absolute favorite, that I don’t particularly like yelling about. What I’m left with after this watch is an appreciation for the genius behind casting and its vital importance when we discuss the great acting ensembles and performances, a great respect for all the actors involved, for the craftspeople involved, especially Francine Maisler, for the tapestry, and for the ways in which in the words of another Fassbender character “David” from “Prometheus” big things have humble beginnings.
Sean Connery was The Man and The Myth.
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Very few actors had what Sean Connery had in the way he had. Very few could get away with it. Connery like another one of my favorite actors George Sanders should probably be thankful he was born in the era he was, where the anonymity of celebrity, and the mystery of their inner lives allowed them to miss almost completely any compelling challenges to their actual personhood. It was a type of peace actors today could not enjoy, and in cases like Connery should not. Connery was the type of man that lived in the rarified air of the myth. One of those figures that like John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood seemed to actually be the men they portrayed on screen. Wayne was the Cowboy, Eastwood the quintessential “Tough guy", Connery's particular myth was the Warrior Scholar. The well studied, well travelled man of action. Resolute in action, sturdy, analytical, and quick on his feet. He was best suited for so many warrior scholar roles because he exuded exactly those qualities. Warrior scholars hold a very mythological place in our society because in many ways they are myths. A realistic example of them in life is extremely rare. They have a dichotomy of approaches that rarely congeal. Upon further interrogation they rarely stand up to the idea of them in our heads. The analytical and action oriented being who measurebly enacts not necessarily with balance but with prudence when the time for either should be is mostly the consequence of storytelling. The archetype has endeared itself to us through masters of story and legend by way of representing two of the qualities we admire most in people especially in our men, wisdom, and strength. So that when as Dr. Henry Jones Connery decisively crowns his own son across the head mistakenly, and then expresses regret for what he has ( also mistakenly) believed was a prized artifact we all go “wow…what a man” even if not in any way that is spoken. …
But again it’s fair to ask does the Warrior Scholar truly exist in the way we see them? These men who always know instinctively when to act and when to analyze in a way that appeals to the most upstanding virtues in ourselves. Apparently not. Connery was accused of abuse in her memoir by ex-wife Diane Cilento both mentally and physically, and in all those years where was the analysis of situation then? Where was society's, especially other men? Later when asked about his distasteful comments about abuse he doubled down and didn't back off one bit. His explanation is horrific, and lacks analysis of even the most banal sort. It’s the kind born of the audacity of not only an individual, but an age. Make no mistake thinking this entrenched is always backed up by a body of thought, and yet when we are honest with ourselves we find some of that “body" in us. Our society not only allowed, but celebrated Connery as he would appeal to this sentiment many times over his career as Bond, and if not directly, implicitly in films that range from the Lion in Winter to The Anderson Tapes ( One of my faves) and then even more as he grew older in The Highlander and The Untouchables. It’s not just about physical violence it’s the mindset that seems to not even desire to question the harm. There’s no empathy, because there is no analysis, no analysis because that’s hesitation, that’s pause. Connery could look the scholar, feel it, but he didnt really understand it, it was a concept to him. In the latter of the last two films I mentioned ( The Untouchables) Connery is in rare form. As Malone, he is a street scholar, a man that understands the guttural heart beat of a cruel city. A man that knows the streets, and understands the mentality of the gangster while fully being dedicated to the law, the type that would sooner laugh at a scholar, a thinker, because he is a doer. This is not only fool-hardy, its copaganda, but its myth and Connery understands the power of it, and we believe Connery exactly because he’s so damn sure he’s right he assures us. Elliott Ness (or at least Costner’s and DePalmas idealized version of this actually very mediocre person ) is all innocence and uncertainty, but Connery's Malone is all worldliness and confidence. He knows he’s right even when hes wrong. Hes seen it all, done it all, so what’s the point of thinking about it, ACTION! “You’ve got to take action SON! Stop thinking about what’s right and worrying about your precious morality and ACT!” That’s the sum of what hes saying here. Connery fills it and almost all his roles with this mythical confidence, this complete lack of doubt in his words this power, this virility, and truth, not objective truth mind you, because that’s not what he's going for, hell it doesn't matter that this is complete bullshit, Connery gives it the ring of truth by being true to the man, the myth that is Malone, there is no contemplation in Connery and there is none in Malone as to why he is, he just is…Connery was nominated for his first and only Oscar …
The truth is most of Connerys best roles occupied this exact space, a space made all that much more believable because in real life he occupied this same mythical space. A member of The Royal Navy, an accomplished soccer player, a body builder, who also read works by Tolstoy, Proust, Ibsen, and Joyce, I mean c'mon, the man’s real life resume read like one of those 80s /90s action heroes, in fact his own John Patrick Mason in Michael Bay's “The Rock". This is the framework that made possible the aesthetic belief of Connery the screen legend, but the intrinsic belief came by way of skill, and presence. Connery had a simple but extremely effective and organic way of putting, placing , or saying things that reminded one of a warrior. Miyamoto Musashi- a famed Warrior who was also a philosopher - had what could be seen as a disdain for hesitation for doubt. He and others felt “be quick to action but graceful and poetic”, it was a common refrain and his code, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s as well. Connery embodied this spirit to the point even some of us who knew better let him pass as a world travelled Egyptian who picked up much of these warrior ethics along the way. John Patrick Mason, one of his most prominent characters molded in this visage was also one of his few escapes from this, it’s where Connery proves hes adept at vulnerability, and had he continued down this path it would’ve been profoundly interesting to see what he found. In “The Rock” Mason skillfully, and rather comically escapes the grasp of the FBI who seeks to use him as a pawn in their desire to get rid of an undesirable, and his first and only desire is to make contact with his estranged daughter. While telling her of his plans to try and build a relationship they’ve never had, Connery makes Mason unsteady but not hesitant, each word each thought has a rhythm, a bassline, even while the man himself is slightly unsure. This is courage, and it is grace, and it is extremely masculine and yet it is also a dash of the feminine. For a moment..the unknown in Connery makes an appearance, and when I say moment and dash, I do mean a dash and moment. For the entire scene his eyes have the Eastwoodian glare, that centrality of purpose, that “Oh so Male” sureity, while the body reveals the doubt beneath, but the moment he begins to utter the words “Jade I’m not an evil man..” they soften to reveal a depth of vulnerability rarely seen in Connery but severely wanted, because he wants this. It's something we’ve rarely if ever seen in Connery…desperation. We won’t see it again for much of the film, but it is enough and it all Connery needed.
This kind of unabashed appeal to masculinity is rarely tolerated these days , (and for the record I don't know that it should be) and those that have it (The Rock, Schwarzenegger, Stallone) , are usually completely unable to pull off the scholarly factor. One of the few actors that could shared the screen with him as his son ..Harrison Ford was one of the few, but Ford was always more vulnerable, more penetrable than Connery allowed, this is why it was so believable that Connery was intimidating father figure to Ford. Ford was an everyman that could be anything including scrappy and scholarly himself, but it was that new sense of vulnerability that he and later others "(Bruce Willis, Keanu Reeves) brought to the new hero that made Ford appear directly susceptible to the men they came from, the men like Connery they may have idolized. It was truly one of the more perfect castings ever put to screen. As a side note this is one of the reasons I was so disgusted by the rumor of Chris Pratt as the next Indiana Jones. Pratt's sore and total lacking in that all important scholar quality. Sure he could pull off being a smart ass, and scrappy, but a scholar? Indie sure, Dr Jones?? Not on your life. Pratts whole schtick is based on no one including him believing a word he says, it doesn't work putting him on positions of authority or intelligence. It tells us how far we come regarding our sensibilities about our heroes and also that not all forms of vulnerability and willingness to be unsure are equal, and when faced with the decision to choose between complete doubt in what you say or do, and complete belief in something that could or might be completely ridiculous, I think we’ve all at some point shown where we stand. It is in all this that I find that Connery was both statuesque and classic. Both a representation of the sturdiness of nostalgia and a relic of a by gone era. He tapped out just at the right time leaving us with the picture of the actor and the flawed and at times villain that was the man. We should remember both , not just for posterity, but because it encompassed and informed the work. What made Sean Connery Sean Connery was that he got through his life and work with no hesitancy and a definitive decidedness, that should be praised in his work and cautioned and chastised against in his and anyone’s life, and that is the fallacy of the man and the legend of the actor.
Gary Busey: The Consistency of Chaos
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I love Gary Busey, I love him because he's volatile, because he's unpredictable as an actor, I love him because hes well…hes at least a little insane. Busey is raw combustible energy, chaos, connected to nerve endings, connected to tissue, connected to bone. He's a natural storyteller, and a natural performer and over time I feel that’s what has gotten lost in the drug abuse, the reality TV rants, and the antics. Busey's got a type of performing which is at the heart of why I love movies, the ever present possibilitiy to be wowed, especially by a performance, (maybe partially because I am an actor) this lingering possibility is always the juiciest part of turning on or sitting in a dark theater for me. In my world actors are the most accessible part of a movie. Even when direction fails, or writing is incomplete, or plot holes abound, a great performance or two will keep me interested, it's just the way I'm wired. It’s actually not even necessary for the performance to be great as much as it is interesting for the formula to work its magic in me. This is where Gary Busey over his entire career has never ever failed me. Busey is amongst my absolute favorites ever because he is almost always - if not flat out always - supremely, impossibly interesting to watch. The crackling purity of “WTF" energy in a Gary Busey performance is one of the most reliable forces on earth right up there with sunrises, gravity, and dog videos on the internet. I’ve watched him for over 30 years now and he is a model of consistency, as well as a complete original. My introduction to Busey like maybe many people my age was as “Mr. Joshua” in Richard Donner's "Lethal Weapon." I can recall with exceptional ease the way he shot up from beyond the screen to me, hell, he might as well have come from a pop-up book. Not only was there the look - the rabbit white hair, ( I always found it interesting that Gibson also found him to resemble a Rabbit "Jack Rabbit son of a bitch" ) the preppy look that alluded to his particular brand of covert sociopathy - but there was the focused electricity in his eyes and delivery. It's exemplified in his opening scene where he combines a laser-focused stillness exists in his eyes, with a body brimming with the energy of a shaken bottle of soda. Watching him it feels like a presentation of computerized animation of the inside his body might look like a cavalcade of exploding and firing neurons.
Character actor Ed O Ross ( an underrated actor unfortunately following the unfortunate trend of playing an ethnicity not of his own) screams fervently that these guys are crazy, and its pretty safe to assume much of that is directed at Joshua, whose hand it is being burnt by General McCallister. What I find fun to think about is that if the character of Mendez had known what kind of characters Busey would go onto play, Mr Joshua would seem rather tame by comparison, but this is Busey's range. In that way hes a bit like the great James Cagney, who was mostly remembered as one thing, ( his gangster roles) but lived far beyond that scope. Now Busey of course didn’t have Cagney's level of range, but he had more than he was and has ever been given credit for, and he also has Cagney's propensity for electricity with maybe a bit of Jerry Lewis for good measure. Busey's live wire nature and propensity for high energy is well documented in roles like Point Break, Predator 2, and Under Siege , but they're not the limit, there are multiple sides to that energy used in movies like Silver Bullet, Buddy Holly, and especially my favorite - his role as “Willy” in Dustin Hoffman's underrrated directorial debut "Straight Time". Busey plays a long time friend to Dustin Hoffman that ultimately ends up betraying him and while he still has those moments of spontaneous combustion, it's like there's a silencer on the gun, and the effect is profound, and beautiful, and tragic especially in his final moments..
A couple of things I really deeply admired about Gary Busey's career is A: that no matter the prestige or level of the film you were always going to get Busey giving you full 100 percent Busey. If there was a phoning-it-in performance it was very hard for me to tell, and I appreciate that kind of reliability. That particular quality is not local or present only and/or to Busey but it's important to state as it connects to B: That you could always count on at least one very "Busey" thing to happen in a movie he's in. You never knew when it was going to come, you never know or knew what time, it was always surprising (and in my opinion it was always pleasant ) never boring, but it was going to happen. Now even when other actors committed to their own style in a similar such way, such as John Wayne or in the latter half of his career Al Pacino, it's served either to remind you of their brand or that they were an actor's actor, but with Busey that “Busey-ness” was a direct part of what grounded the characters in something very real. The steeple to a church, lights on a Christmas tree, the things that inform you as to exactly the thing or what this thing is beyond just being a tree, or a building, or an actor. It was some action that would become inextricable aspect of that character, to their psychosis, their attention to detail, their spite. Whether it was a snapped finger as he "promises" Mel Gibson's Martin Riggs a quick death in Lethal Weapon, or an extra "Two!" as he leans out his car confirming his order for meatball sandwiches in Point Break ..
I call that grounding element of Busey's work follow through, and Busey had a wonderful follow through. In both basketball, (as it pertains to shooting) and baseball, (as it pertains to pitching) follow through is extremely important to technique. What it does is set the direction as well as the motion, and landing, of the pitch or shot. In acting follow through accomplishes much of the same save maybe change motion into emotion. The better your follow-through, the better the emotion of your action or feeling lands. Busey has a follow through so good it for better or worse lends power to the idea he's off his rocker, (and to be sure his rampant cocaine usage through a great portion if the 80s added to that) but its also about the intensity, velocity, and ferocity of his intention. Speaking on himself Busey once said "I was blessed with boundless energy, and reckless momentum" - I've rarely heard anything so damned spot-on in my life. It shows the kind of self awareness I find is actually rare save amongst the best of actors. It's Busey's superpower, and he could deploy it to a wide variety of uses. He could use it in a way that made him soft and endearing like in Silver Bullet where he played one of my favorite movie uncles ever because he let it live so intensely in the moment it added leverage to the characterization of his growth as stunted and child-like..
He could use it so that it made him appear committed to destiny as in John Milius's "The Big Wednesday" or again in "The Buddy Holly Story", and he could use it to appear as a fiery but charismatic sociopath in an underrated B-movie version of The Most Dangerous Game called "Surviving the Game" where he delivers a chillingly memorable monologue about a frightening "rite of passage" into manhood
You watch that monologue and theres almost no action, no point he makes that he doesn't emphasize by accompanying it with a gesture. If the firecracker pops, so does Busey, the dog bites so does Busey, and when he says he wiped his Blood, Busey wipes the "blood" off his face. Busey has you in his grip, and much like that dog hes not letting go. It's not only good for selling us on character, but it's good storytelling. Something Busey was clearly into. Busey felt he had- a for lack of a better word- kindred spirit in writer journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and it’s not remotely hard to see his inspiration and effect on Busey. When once explaining his love of Thompson Busey said about Thompson's work and storytelling in general…
“That’s why it’s fun because it’s always leading you on to something new, something you haven’t seen before, something you haven’t discovered, something you haven’t thought about”
Its interesting because just as well as it is about Thompson's work, it could be about why we love movies, and at its core it’s definitely why I love Busey, and why I hope the shadow of the other stuff doesn't become the sum total of a brilliant actor. Busey embodied the ever present possibility of the unknown, the undiscovered, or unseen. I don’t pretend to know anything but less than nothing about Chaos theory but it immediately came to mind when I thought about Gary and so I looked it up and it boom, I'll be damed if it didn't come to be defined as such.. "Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary theory stating that, within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization." - that is Gary Busey. Chaotic, complex and both. A pattern of predictably unpredictable, loops, tics, idiosyncrasies, and repetition, deployed for the sole purpose of what seems like spontaneous on the spot creation, the freestyle rapper of actors, defiant, charismatic, and yeah a little insane.
Robert Pattinson in The Devil All the Time: Fascinating is not synonymous with good.
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Watching the trailer for Netflix's latest "The Devil All the Time" was pretty much like watching the movie, it was slow moving, with all the accoutrements of a great hillbilly epic, and symbols of a prestige movie, but none of the feeling. For a movie with so many frail, vulnerable, and doomed characters I never got close to being choked up, crying or feeling really any feeling, I just watched morbidly as the movie did. Character after character is introduced as unceremoniously as they are dispatched in a very "pay attention to how little attention we pay to these characters sort of way save for one very peculiar Robert Pattinson, who enters into and departs from the movie and the church like the wind from "Something Wicked This Way Comes". I have written about Pattinson before and he is an outstanding young actor. I Iove his willingness to be an avatar for the idea of shooting for the moon and at least falling amongst the stars. I love his imagination and how it allows him to go beyond the borders of self exploration and find something that looks as if it came from a wholly new dimension. Yet, in light if his recent tear of “Whoa, what is he doing?" performances I’m beginning to ponder the line between being unique, and being a peacock, mesmerization and wonder, and skill and service, and how Pattinson's performances inform our ideas about acting. Everytime Pattinson reaches into that abyss he's pulling back something new and strange and interesting, and its possibilities for revelation excites the spectator so much that like Dr Hammond in Jurassic Park we stop asking vital questions about the performance, like “what if what comes back has no regard for the material, the character, or even your co- stars?” What if it eats them all and swallows them whole? Watching what Pattinson does in “The Devil All the Time” interesting and engrossing though it may have been, I was not sure it served the script nor his co-stars, many times I was left confused as to what was going on like watching a magician who waves his hands about and recites incantations with no magic trick it ended up as much a novelty to his co stars and the work as it wass to the audience. There are those who applaud the idea of it, Pattonson being in a completely different movie than everyone else, and I understand where it comes from, because in specific context this can be wonderful, but it is not a one size fits all concept. For me whatever the “different” movie you’re existing in has to be a movie that still firmly exist within a similar context as the one you're actually in, or even rather that it must still serve the movie you're in and your co-stars. If it serves the script and the folks you work with by making their performances better and confrims your unmatched brilliance in comparison by happenstance so be it , but if not then it is simply upstaging and it is selfish whether it is intentional or not. Pattinson is amongst my favorite young actors working, but coherency matters and two of his most recent roles provide ample evidence to an issue by comparison In the first, David Michod's “The King” , I liked the performance, but it was also a very good performance. It was committed, but wild, fun, but as well crafted as it was unorthodox, and it made sense. It was informative to the characterization of the dauphin as this maladjusted, immature, self important wanna be. The rapping of the fingers, the posturing, the almost crooked way he sits in his chair. The luxurious way he moves, and yes even the accent felt like they all pointed to one thing… imitation by an imitator, a fraud…
In The Devil All the Time, Pattinson arguably does slightly better with the accent, but there's less information, less fun and more gestures to sell you on what's happening externally rather than internally, like when he tastes the sauce from a plate of food. There's narration meant to tell you what’s happening but Pattinson is just going rogue, and sure its intriguing, but there was nothing revealing about this moment in time. Exposition by Tom Holland's Arvin later in the car gives us the most likely motivation, but it's not backed up by Pattinson who makes it so mysterious it could’ve been any number of things, for instance that maybe he actually found the food distasteful. I sat on it awhile, when I am troubled like this I like to think about similar scenes with similar “asks”with actors who practice similar styles, see if any answers reveal themselves in the contrast. This time, I thought of what I think qualifies as a similar scene in Mary Herron’s modern classic “American Psycho" -the business card scene..
There is narration and exposition in both the pot luck dinner scene in The Devil All the Time and in the business card scene in Anerican Psycho that allude to something internally going on, and the actors are both inherently interesting and intriguing, and both scenes one way or the other have at their core an implied jealousy, but in one the actor (Bale) is providing the subtext that deepens and enlivens the script. An unnerving energy seeps from behind Bales eyes, it’s in the trembling of his hands, the pursing of the lips. Bale looks like a prisoner becoming ill after staring jealously out at the sun from inside of his cell. On the other hand Pattinson sucks on the juice as the narrator says he “swished the juices around followed by the feeling of a sermon coming on” and I, A: have no clue what is going on -whether it tasted good or bad, or decent even, or B: That he feels a sermon coming on. Pattinson tastes and I see nothing, Im not even sure he tasted it, and then he just glides along acting and performing various gestures with seemingly no rhyme or reason, so that when Tom Holland's Arvin storms off into the car trying to console his mother after she was insidiously berated (again mostly by the script and not Pattinson) implying that what Pattinson just did was out of jealousy I don’t feel anything. I cannot join in with Arvin's frustration of anger, because I was genuinely confused by it all. I normally feel when I’m watching vile characters be vile on screen. I couldnt here because it didn't feel connected to anything emotively, because what I saw felt like a one man show going on in the middle of an ensemble scene almost completely disconnected from most anything that was going on, and it continues throughout the movie, in a car scene, in his final scene, Pattinson gesturing, and provoking but irrespective of anything the movie was asking or needed from him. I remember reading Stella Adler saying these words in her book “The Art of Acting" - “Truth in acting is truth in circumstances and the first circumstance, the circumstance that governs everything is Where am I" - and I remember thinking “YES!”. I believe it applies here, I believe even beyond the circumstances that exist in the presence of the character, their exists the circumstances that exist in the presence of the actor. What movie is this? Who am I working with? What are their circumstances? What is this movie about? Some of the issues I have lies with some questionable choices by Campos who seemed to me to be interested and disinterested in his actors at precisely the wrong times. Lines and words that deserve close ups are shot from afar or at best at mid distance. The writing also fails almost all of its actors, even as as it is telling a compelling story. The script did not, does not look empathetically or compassionately at its characters, which is okay inside the context of the film, but not outside. Inside the characters can be callous and disconnected, outside we must be made to care and be connected. The scripts mistakes are especially clear in its especially cruel treatment of its women, whom it fails in almost every way that matters. It dispatches and discards them without a care as to who they are, what they want, and subsequently why we should care. They are simply props, canvases upon which men’s disdain for self and god can be painted in blood. It wants so bad to show us it despises the evil that men do, as well as religion and God it puts it characters through hell to prove it, at the cost of story elements and good characterization. Still, the great weight of what goes on or wrong with Pattinson lies upon Pattinson, even if clearly hes being encouraged by lacking. Everything about Pattinson ’s Pastor Teagardin that matters comes from exposition not Pattinson's performance, because as others have remarked it is as if hes acting in a completely different movie.
There are ways to do this well, I feel like Laurence Fishburne is delightfully confused about what movie he’s in John Wick 2 and 3. He thinks it's Shakespeare in the Park, not a zany wild action movie, and yet it lives completely within the context of the film, and hell, maybe John Wick is Shakepseare, and Fishburne calls attention to that through himself not by calling it purely to himself. The performance supports that as well as many other of Wick’s needs, and those of his co-stars. Dare I say it compliments and improves upon them, and the franchise has been all the better for it. Here its more like Pattinson saying “I got my life preserver on I dont know what the rest of you are gonna do?” Pattinson makes himself look good, but also places himself on an island. I was fascinated yes, intrigued yes, but I wasn’t moved. Actors should not be applauded for merely being interesting. Acting is always an act of service ether to society or self or crew. It’s a collaborative effort that involves connecting actions and emotions that spring forth from the work, and then return to reflect upon the work, and to escavate the truth. It is not merely ostentatious oration and flailing for the purpose of captivating with no motive or objective and no service to anything but the actor . Being interesting is not enough, and fascination alone should not be synonymous with good, after all tantrums too are fascinating, but are they good? I ask the same here.
Chadwick Boseman Borrowed from an Icon then became one himself.
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I remember the first time I really really watched a Chadwick Boseman film. The film was "42", a film that I saw get decent reviews but from the trailer had turned me almost completely off. I'm not a particular fan of biopics, lesser so in the recent era since Taylor Hackford's "Ray" feat Jamie Foxx. I kind of mark that film as the beginning of what would be a downward spiral for biopics. Less truth, more catering to estates and public lionization, as well as a lot of straightforward uninteresting storytelling approaches. 42, directed in a very workmanlike way by a very workmanlike Brian Helgeland (who with respect did direct a very respectable remake of Point Blank in "Paybakc") seemed like just another in a line of mediocre autobiographical films that seemed unsure of what or how to tell these stories any longer, and at current movie prices I can’t afford the risk...for the record I was right, but one thing came out of it...Chadwick Boseman was legit.
When I think about Chad a number of things come up, but funny enough Black Panther is not first, legendary as it already is.. No, I think about the dance scenes in Tate Taylor's "Get on Up", and how the performance is so much of why the movie works. I think of how like any good actor Boseman seems more focused on the essence than the steps, not in that he didn't do them extremely well, but that the spirit, the quality of what drove the steps was MORE important. I'm thinking the scene where he argues with his band about the music. How precise his movements were; a wave of the hand, the arms barely leaving his side, his temper clearly raised, but never flexed in his face, the only give away being a tight glare. It works much like the way he captures James voice. There’s a clenched feeling to James Voice, a feeling that the vocal chords are not truly free, thus the wonderful breaking you would hear in songs like "The Big Payback". Boseman seemed to allow his physicality as Brown to stem forth from this tightness, that eventually gives way to marvelous explosions. It’s the kind of brilliant work and informed ingenious that gave power to Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles and Denzel as Malcom , it's much less about pure mimicry and much more about pure soul
That second name is important because it is a quality of Denzel Washington's I most respected in Chad. Outside of maybe his walk and his smile one of the main things Denzel Washington may be recognized for as an actor is his ability to make very average movies look good or be good. Chadwick had his own megawatt smile, and his own trademark swag, (on full display in the now iconic walk back onto the battlefield in “Black Panther”) but most importantly he had, and maybe borrowed somewhat - the same ability to make lesser material feel that much more entertaining…
This is the quality that leads people to say there is no bad Denzel movie. It's a very very rare quality in actors, that starts with the fact that the actor doesn't give a bad performance. This is an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish even in a barely over double digits film career like Chadwicks. It's a combination of picking your scripts well as they pertain to your abilities, ( not just their quality) knowing your wheelhouse, having an almost unholy quality of and more importantly consistency of personality, magnetism, charisma, and of course of technique, and work ethic. To keep yourself focused and consistent even when you can see or feel the material is a bore or boorish is no small feat, and even some of our greatest Brando, DeNiro, DDL ( “Nine” anyone? ) can appear disinterested or disengaged from the work.. not these two, or maybe they are and we just can’t tell. There's an effortlessness to their talent of the same type that kept folk underrating Redford and Newman for YEARS. For Boseman, there's an ever present intensity in his work that reminds me of Laurence Olivier, Montegomery Clift, and even at times a young DeNiro round the eyes. Theres a physicality that matches two of my favorite action heroes of all time; Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves. You don’t have to look hard to see all of this in Brian Kirk's extremely underrated "21 Bridges". The physicality I spoke of is in a harrowing chase scene with Stephen James that becomes all that more amazing when you realize what he was dealing with while performing these amazing stunts. The intensity, well, from basically the opening of the movie to the end, and finally the effortlessness in the final scene with the great J.K. Simmons. If you're not watching closely it appears as if Boseman is barely even trying, as if he's just standing there delivering lines, and yet he's giving each one a special purpose, special meaning. He carries some, let's others go, quantifies, enlarges another. He glares, he pauses, he ponders. But all of that is what I grasp by watching the scene intensely, when I first watched it all I knew is that I felt everything the scene was intended to do and I felt the power of both of these actors reacting and bouncing off each other even though Simmons was holding a lot of the more obvious power of the scene - for reasons I couldn't describe before focusing to watch and find the "why" - I felt Chad was Simmons equal the whole way through even while his dialogue, and character is not the level of inherently interesting that Simmons is...
This energy, this broad appeal is the reason why Chadwick could be every bit as appealing in films like "The Express" or "Message to the King", (which maybe don't hold up to the level of talent that he has) as he was in Black Panther, or Spike Lee's "Da 5 Bloods". That exact same type of energy that allowed Denzel to be (at his age) running and carrying a string of sub-par action films that were basically upheld by his inescapable charm. Films that could have likely ended up as pure duds without him. Out of time, Unstoppable, a remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, Fallen, DeJavu, 2 Guns these are films that run the gambit from “having a quality of their own, but nowhere near the kind of quality they would reach with Denzel”, to “outright bad ideas that became confoundedly tolerable due to Denzel's existence in them”. This is exactly the quality that to me Chadwick Boseman was exhibiting in films that he was in. Before anyone can say that anyone was able to, or going to hold that mantle that Denzel had you would have to first show me that they could be this interesting in and hold up movies of this kind of quality. It is also one of the major reasons why I will miss Chadwick Boseman so much. In a certain way this leads to something that he also shares in common with Denzel Washington. It's a surprising thing (and maybe even something that points to race) that Denzel Washington over his entire career never really got to work with a (white) director that had an equal quality to himself. When considering the most revered and most known directors we have to date you could say the one name that reaches the top of the list is Ridley Scott ( American Gangster) . But if we're interested in assigning directors tiers ( questionable I know) many of the directors that Washington worked with over his career were undoubtedly anywhere from second, to third and fourth tier directors, with names like Zemeckis (Flight) , and Ridley's brother Tony ( A slew that included Crimson Tide, and Man on Fire) at that top second tier, and names like Nick Cassavetes ( Out of Time) , an Gregory Hoblit (Fallen) at the bottom. Spike Lee and the underrated Carl Franklin are great directors, but again we know over Denzel's career era that black directors were hard to come by. For an actor of his talent it strikes me as somewhat insane that we never saw him work with the likes of Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson or Michael Mann, or Fincher ( Almost the case on Se7en) or Mendes. This sadly is also the case with a Chadwick Boseman who never got to work with a director of his quality over his entire career. This also strikes me as insane and very telling of how narrow the opportunities for black actors and actors of color still are in the industry.
That Boseman never got a chance to work with a Derek Cianfrance, a Denis Villeneuve, a Tomas Alfredsson, a Tarantino, or even an Robert Eggers, nevermind the black talent that's has just started to flex its muscles like Dee Rees, Ava DuVernay, Nia DeCosta, Barry Jenkins, or Jordan Peele, and now never will, truly carries sadness to my bones. Boseman had the greatest of his generation written all over him and it says plenty that it's still pretty hard to take that away from him considering the quality of the films that he did do. Black Panther is truly iconic and it's the one time that we saw Boseman be paired with a director in Ryan Coogler that put him in material that would lend to his blooming iconic abilities. The fact that Denzel was secretly paying for Bosemans schooling is now making its rounds around the internet, and I think to myself it’s obvious Boseman inherited more than just money from the acting legend. I take solace in knowing that there is not one Boseman movie that I couldn't pop on right now and watch from beginning to end (especially when you consider something like "Message to the King” be as completely Netflixy as a Netflix movie can be ) and enjoy it knowing that he put everything into everything that he did, and left us with the hope and the belief that the unthinkable whole that will be left whenever Denzel Washington leaves us may not ever be able to be replaced, but can and will be carried on, and that just like the ancestors he speaks to in Black Panther and the mantle of the Black Panther itself, he passes it on to the generation he birthed quite literally from the hand he recieved from Denzel. RIP Chad.
Delroy Lindo Sets Black Masculinity Ablaze and Then Shows Us Redemption in “Da Five Bloods"
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It’s an incredibly difficult balancing act telling a story centered around Vietnam vets, that does not cater to propaganda about the military industrial complex and patriotism, that is honest in its portrayal of various forms of racism traded back and forth between different oppressed people's being used as tools against one another, and that offers a unique version of black masculinity that is so much freer from the normal rigid portrayals of black men from this time, but Spike Lee has done it in his Latest “Da 5 Bloods” and its central spigot is the performance put forth by veteran actor Delroy Lindo. Lindo's performance is a full bodied reckoning with black male masculinity and trauma that finds so many vibrant, symphonic, movements and sounds it’s easy to compare it to one of the great classical symphonies, or better yet, the masterful compositions of Quincy Jones as pain and release. It is performative jazz, with a clear intention and racing improvisation along the way. It’s all to tell us a story about a man we may all be familiar with, just not this intimately. He gives us a backstory to the folk we have come to despise relaying a tragic sorrow to the men we’ve lost to racism and patriarchy.
In the beginning it’s not made instantly apparent, ( but damn near) that Lindo's Paul is a shell of a man, much like so many mortars left behind in a war he was conscripted to fight in, on behalf of a country that never loved him, or his people. There came a point in the movie when he says “We fought in an immoral war that wasn't ours for rights that weren't ours”, and I thought “this is kind of the underscore of this movie”, the ghost around which this shell is wrapped. They are powerful words that speak every bit as much to Paul's inciting incident of trauma as does another poignant scene involving forgiveness. Lindo in every way sevices this role with an intelligence, an almost prophetic fire , and an intensity and emotional sincerity that governs his every move. Paul is a Volcano. A rock of a man, who refuses to move from the birthplace of his harm, filled with burning resentment that explodes in repeating intervals making it hard to be around him. Lindo adds features that further explore his bodily agitation and mental unrest as it appears on his body. There's constant shifts in his weight, his mood, and even the wrinkles in his face. His voice trembles, he seems to be reaching for his breath on occasions where he has been triggered, and the script and Lindo work together to let us know this is because he is repressing, and by the time the movie nears its end we will find out exactly what it is he's been holding. His clueing us in is important because even if subconsciously, it validates the experience. The great Arthur Lessac - the famed voice and body coach created his “Lessac Method” to show the connection between the body, the voice, and health, which in turn can also be used to show a lack of it. Changes in the potency of ones vocals or movements, or the ways in which they radiate can suggest to an audience exactly what's going on physically or mentally with a character in a way that doesn’t constitute “acting” because accessing that particular wavelength informs our bodies as what to do. It’s very funny how tapping into a certain action will bring you to an emotion. Sanford Meisner (Another extremely famous acting teacher) devised a technique that might involve banging your fist to find anger, in Lessacs case, quivering ones body would not only inform the audience of your frailty, but you of your own. Lindo whether through training or not seems to understand in ways very few actors can or have these concepts, and deploys them profoundly.
Later when we see Paul at a bar with Eddie (Clarke Peters) Paul will allude to this pending reveal in the movie again speaking to the fact that “his pain is different”. As he thinks on it Lindo covers his mouth, (again repression) he almost cries, but he holds it in, he says “I Saw him die”. We don't know yet what it is, how it is, what that is, we allow it stand on its own, because it stands to reason considering. He closes his eyes, it’s coming again, he wrinkles his mouth to one side, contorts his face round the left eye to fight it back, swigs his beer and its gone... the bucket is sent back down to the well.
What Paul carries is the same water many black men carry, and have carried, and more importantly he carries it how most black men carry it. It can be said that while black women carry burdens alone because they have to, and in many ways are left with no other choice, black men carry burdens alone voluntarily under the belief that they want or need to, informed by their sturdy belief and not-so well hidden admiration for white patriarchal power. In that way Lindo’s Paul transcends the screen and reminds us of the pain we inflict upon ourselves and those closest to us, by not even reconciling with our own trauma.
“The wounded child inside many males is a boy who when he first spoke his truths was silenced by paternal sadism by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings - bell hooks”
Later on in the film, after yet another explosion- Paul rebukes his own child for a perceived betrayal, the trauma continues to be generational. Much of what forms and constitites Paul’s anger is betrayal - betrayal by people, a country ,and ultimately life, and he passes this down, and around to those who love him most. Paul heads off on his own, as he moves on further into this breakage and into the foliage of the jungle, he begins to scream, we don’t realize it yet, in fact it seems as though he's only diving deeper down regressing into a manic state of cantankerous madness the pinnacle of which Lindo explores with the kinetic genius of Dizzy Gillespie, and the focused intensity of Denzel - but we are being fooled by our own bias, he's beginning to break, and as Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire once said in the titular film, “Breakdown - Breakthrough”.
Not always, but on occasion when the breakage is deep enough, on the other side of a breakdown is a breakthrough. Lindo's primordial yells are spiritual in nature, and they are painful, and representative of his need to let it it all out, but still he is holding back, still he is holding on, and I’ve heard very few things like it. It’s as if someone merged the spiritual energy of Robert Mitchum singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” in Night of the Hunter, and the purging menace of Deniro speaking in tongues in Martin Scorcese's Cape Fear..
Paul finds redemption in the form of accountability through literally facing his ghost. He was infected with poison, the poison of betrayal and grief, and finally it’s being sucked out. Lindo himself speaks of the fact that he informed Paul's ideas, his very traits with this exact intention and purpose, with this poisom. In an interview with “The Daily Beast” he says..
“In the process of creating a biography for Paul I also placed in a number of other personal betrayals so we have the large betrayal of the country and the culture and then we have the betrayals that I had suffered- the loss of my wife, the loss of my son. When I say the loss of my son, I mean the fact that the relationship is as fractious as it is. That constitutes a loss, because I cannot interact with my son and express the love that I have for my son in the way that I would like so those are two very, very deep-seated losses”
Creating an actor biography ( a backstory beyond the script) is indicative of training for actors, it has a long history and it's a powerful factor in deepening the connection between actor and role. But Lindo’s intellectual approach to this particular character also showed a understanding of the common attributes that plague black men in our society (especially one of his generation) and that connection not only deepens our connection to him through our own experiences or our understanding of the experience- but also deepens our understanding of the character. Paul is a rusted relic of a war not only waged by a country to another country, but also by country on its own peoples. Like so many of those landmines left in Vietnam he too was left there, and also like them, once triggered he's bound to explode. This explosion reaches out beyond the screen and spreads emotional shrapnel onto any audience member viewing it. Touching them, hurting them, triggering them, but at the highest moment, the very peak moment of the performance it provides us with secondary emotional catharsis through the journey of redemption that Lindo brings us all on through a number of minutiae and larger performative activities that remind us of Lindo’s genius, and our own struggles for emotional and physical freedom from a world that hates us, and more importantly from ourselves. When the movie ends we find that in fact it is only beginning, and Lindo is where we are all at, or at least where we need to see ourselves at. The entrance and intrinsic change that starts with accountability and taking down the ghosts of our collective and individual pasts. Once more bell hooks..
“For me forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their Humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
Oh Nino, Oh Nino, Wherefore Art Thou in the Canon?
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I’ve studied acting for thirteen years officially and formally, unofficially I've been studying acting since I was a very young boy. Even though I loved movies in their entirety, always I had an acute focus on actors. From top billed to bottom. I was always mimicking lines, quotes, paying attention to certain gestures, walks, creases in the mouth, I’d watch Bogart smoke, Nicholson scowl, Whoopi animate a hand gesture. Once I began to actually study, it bothered me how centralized the focus was on white actors, when many of my favorites like Glynn Turman, Yaphet Kotto, Lynn Whitfield, or Diahann Carroll were black. That centralized focus continues even today. It colors the way we see the canon of acting, and harms the way actors grow up. So I feel it my duty to bring into the forefront some of the past performances of black actors that really deserve a lot more word of mouth and passing down through the ages than what they have received to this date. One such performance is Wesley Snipes work in New Jack City. Though it is most certainly well known, it is still rather underappreciated. In fact its the fact it’s so well known that informs me of its lack of true understanding as one of the all time great performances on film. Consider that the bulk of this movies power is owed to him in a way very few movies have been indebted almost solely to their lead actor. Scenes that don't include him hold the weight that they do because of the character he has created. Nino Brown is a cloud over the city, Snipes over the movie. His shadow looms separate from his body. The cold unaffected eyes pierce through objects, characters and the audience. He deploys that ferocity of the eye much the same as Pacino uses in Godfather and equally as effective. He mines every single word for its optimum value.
From the very first iconic line reading of “See you and I wouldn't wanna be you” (one of many) I was sold. I knew that I was watching someone that had that had that level of presence, magnetism, and skill that can only be called a Movie Star. Snipes was like nothing I had seen before, chiseled high cheekbones sunk into onyx saturated black skin, a resonant vocal pitch that was always floated between a threat and a charm. He was the antithesis of Denzel, eh seemed a rebuke of that kind of respectability and dignification that seemed rooted in acceptance. The scenes in New Jack City that contained him had a clarity of purpose that reminded me of Konstantin Stanislavsky talking about a class where in the teacher did an experiment to have someone just sit in a chair and look out to the audience. A student then comes up, sits in the chair, and commits to trying to act, they keep trying to do something “interesting”. Stanislavski explains that the audience was not the least bit moved by this persons actions, but that when the teacher goes up himself and sits - they were transfixed on him, mysteriously unable to move their attention. The teacher first showed them, then explained to them the difference. Stanislavski goes on to say ..
“What is the secret? He told us himself. Whatever happens on the stage must be for a purpose. Even keeping your seat must be for a purpose, a specific purpose, not merely The general purpose of being insight of the audience. One must earn one’s right to be sitting there. And it is not easy. ”
