Best Supporting Actors

Pete Postlethwaite

I want to start a Pete Postlethwaite fan club. I had not heard of the late British actor before I watched The Usual Suspects for the first time this week, but amid Kevin Spacey's award mugging and Benicio Del Toro's lisping and mumbling, Postlethwaite, as Kobayashi, stood out for doing what Laurence Olivier is said to have advised Dustin Hoffman to do. He acted, dear boy.

In the potentially cartoonish role of an evil Japanese henchman, Postlethwaite played it straight-faced and thus did a much better, and much less obtrusive, job of showing he was having fun than did Spacey and Del Toro. Naturally it was Spacey who won that year's Oscar for best supporting actor, not Postlethwaite. (But then, Spacey's character faked not only a physical handicap but also a borderline mental one, surefire Oscar bait.)

Not that Spacey's and Del Toro's performances were bad; those guys are too talented for that. But mugging by a good actor is still mugging.  Maybe he and Del Toro felt they had to stand out from a cast that included Giancarlo Esposito, Paul Bartel, Chazz Palminteri, and Gabriel Byrne, doing no better or no worse a job than he always does playing Gabriel Byrne.

Back to Postlethwaite. His performance was the best I've seen by a supporting actor in some time, up there with Paddy Considine's and Aidan Gillen's in Blitz, even worthy of mention in the same breath as Takashi Shimura's work in numerous films for Akira Kurosawa. 

Now it's your turn.  Do some method acting, become thinkers, and answer these questions: Why do some actors mug? Why do others not? Whose fault is it when they do? Are American movie stars more prone to mugging than British, Irish, Japanese, or other stars? What are your favorite performances by supporting actors (in the non-gendered sense; name some favorite supporting actresses, too.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Throwback Thursday at the Movies

In about twenty years, I'll be a few years short of joining the 21st century in movies. Until then ...

I watched Donnie Brasco for the first time this week, and I liked the bits of comic misunderstanding sprinkled throughout the dialogue ("What's fugazi?") I also realized that that sort of thing is more enjoyable on the page, where one can savor it. So if you like Donnie Brasco, you'll love Charlie Stella and Dana King.

Now I'm watching The Usual Suspects. On the one hand, its narrative is convoluted, so it must be a writer or director's movie. On the other, its stars feign speech impediments (Benicio del Toro), bad accents (Gabriel Byrne), and visible physical and, occasionally, verbal and mental handicaps (Kevin Spacey). That makes it an actor's movie. OK, those of you who have seen it, which is more overdone: This movie's direction, or its acting?

Goodnight for now, and I'll get back to you once I've seen Gone With the Wind.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

The Score: Actors who act as actors acting

You know that old commonplace that an actor's surest path to an Oscar is to play a handicapped character (Jon Voight, Daniel Day-Lewis, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Holly Hunter, Patty Duke, Harold Russell, et al.)? Edward Norton does something even more ego-gratifying in The Score, a 2001 heist movie that was also Marlon Brando's last film: He plays someone who plays at being handicapped.

Norton is a thief who uses a bogus handicap as cover to get a janitor's job at Montreal's Customs House so he can case the joint for a heist. (Wikipedia delicately calls Norton's character "intellectually challenged," ludicrous for its euphemism, and misleading, because the chief characteristics of Norton's guise are physical: distorted speech, a lurching walk, and a withered, clawlike way of holding his right arm.   He's an actor playing an actor. His role is self-conscious exhibitionism to the core, and he does a decent job of it. But then, he was playing opposite Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando, so maybe he felt like he had to do something to keep up.)

There's nothing terribly wrong with this workmanlike heist movie, but:

1. The salient aspect of its first half for me was its interior scenes. I'm from Montreal, and I got to see the gorgeous modern interiors of the gorgeous stone buildings of Old Montreal.
2. The heist, of a precious golden scepter, involves computer hacking, electronics, underground mapping, physics, and De Niro's character hanging like a spider from a ceiling.  I've always thought simplicity was best. What proportion of real-life big heists involve such elaborate gimcrackery?
3. The movie transfers to screen one of the hoariest cheats in crime fiction, that of withholding information from the reader/viewer to build suspense when such withholding is out of character with what has gone before. One scene has Norton's character reading aloud plans for the heist as De Niro shows them to him. I find it unlikely that a person would do this in real life, but it's an acceptable solution to the problem of how to convey large chunks of information. Later, though, when De Niro shows Norton the coup de grace that will let them overcome increased security at the Customs House, Norton just says something like, "Are you sure this will work?", leaving the audience guessing. It's a cheap tease.
4. A later trick is much less obvious and hence, more effective. It also makes narrative sense. I won't spoil things for you, but it has to do with Norton's character's deliberate temporary inaction after it becomes obvious he will double-cross De Niro during the heist, and it's a lovely touch.
5. De Niro's character owns a jazz club. This is a perfunctory excuse to get a nice song or two on the soundtrack. He could just as easily be a mechanic, an office worker, a lawyer, or anything else. His profession is at best irrelevant and at worst a distraction.
6. Again according to Wikipedia, Roger Ebert called The Score "the best pure heist movie in recent years."  Peter Travers, on the other hand, wrote that when "two Don Corleones team up," he expected "the kind of movie that makes people say, 'I'd pay to see these guys just read from the phone book.'"  Travers concluded, however: "There's nothing you can't see coming in this flick, including the surprise ending. Quick, somebody get a phone book." Travers was right

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Bruen's "Blitz" on screen

I was apprehensive when I heard Ken Bruen's 2002 novel Blitz was being made into a movie. The book's centerpiece, Southeast London police officer Tom Brant, is a feral, funny wild man, maybe Bruen's best creation, and I thought it would take a gifted actor and daring filmmakers to manage the transfer to a new medium, if the transfer were possible at all.

The movie, directed by Elliott Lester, released last year, and featuring Jason Statham as Brant and the excellent Paddy Considine as Porter Nash, could have been worse. It drops at least one major subplot and adds a narrative element that's not obtrusive but not necessary either.  It softens Brant's character, notably in the opening scene. The pruning results in a character a bit more believable but also a bit more conventional, a bit less maniacal, and a bit less funny, and a world not quite as dark as the novel's.

The movie also tones down Nash's reaction to the flak he gets from fellow officers because he's gay.  In the movie, he's a tough, righteous cop. In the book, he's a tough, righteous cop with jaw-droppingly funny chutzpah. And that's the movie, really: a milder version of a highly spicy book. Oh, and Bruen has a cameo role — as a priest.

(I discuss the appeal of the Brant and Roberts novels here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

D.B.B. watches The Big Lebowski

I finally watched The Big Lebowski from beginning to end. The Coen brothers know their Dashiell Hammett (and they want you to know that they do), and the movie beautifully captures the melancholy and excitement of Raymond Chandler when the Coens want it to.

But all that good stuff takes up about five minutes, and it's not what the Coens are interested in. The rest is cheesy fantasy sequences, stoner humor, pointless zaniness, weird art-house flourishes, and bowling.  I haven't smoked enough dope in my life to get the nuances.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Smithers to David Huddleston's Montgomery Burns and, in the rare moments when he isn't hamming it up as a repressed nerd, he's stunningly good. The story has a number of plot similarities to The Big Sleep, but the acting more closely resembles the group hamfest of Harper, which also borrows much from The Big Sleep. The Coens love to pepper their movies with references to other movies and to books. Could The Big Lebowski's assemblage of acting tics and shticks be one more such reference?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Acting up

Spurred by a fine old article from January Magazine, I decided to acquaint myself with Ross Macdonald, only I did so secondhand, through the 1966 movie Harper.

That Paul Newman vehicle, based on Macdonald's 1949 novel The Moving Target, alters one of the more famous names in crime fiction, turning Lew Archer into Lew Harper. It also brims with the early Macdonald's debts to Raymond Chandler that J. Kingston Pierce cited in January Mag, and more besides.

It's a highly watchable movie, though a weird blend of three eras in American pop culture: the wince-inducing Hollywood 1960s; the 1930s and early '40s, toward which Macdonald looked when he wrote the novel; and the late 1940s, when Macdonald, to judge from what we see on screen, had yet to make the "fairly clean break with the Chandler tradition" that Pierce cites.

Let me break down my comments into a list, and perhaps something coherent will emerge:

1) The Lauren Bacall/Raymond Chandler connections. In Howard Hawks' celebrated 1945/46 movie of Chandler's The Big Sleep, Bacall plays a sexy, spoiled rich woman whose father hires Philip Marlowe and hopes he can find a missing man, among other tasks. In Harper, she plays a sexy, spoiled rich woman who hires Lew Harper (Archer) to find her missing husband.

The Big Sleep has moody shots of oil rigs churning away in the California night; so does Harper.

Both stories take place in Los Angeles.

Both feature a troublesome, flighty young woman who makes herself a thorn in the Bacall character's side (Pamela Tiffin in Harper, the much-better Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep).

As a bonus, Michael Winner's 1978 remake of The Big Sleep, though transferring the setting to England, begins with a near duplicate of an early sequence from Harper.

2) The wince-inducing 1960s detail, and I don't mean just the laughable music and god-awful clothes and haircuts that are trotted out to indicate "1960s." I mean the acting. Just about anyone with more than thirty seconds' screen time spends some of it mugging or otherwise going over the top. Arthur Hill is not just Harper's lawyer friend, but a cringing über-nerd with thick glasses and a bad haircut. Shelley Winters plays a star gone fat, so naturally the camera captures her noisily stuffing her face.

Pamela Tiffin's go-go-dance-on-the-diving-board routine is so dated that I expected someone to yell, "Crazy, man!" Bacall grins evilly in one sort-of close-up, chewing scenery as if in an Agatha Christie parody. Even Newman, the anti-Pacino, the most graceful and restrained of stars, gets into the act, rolling his eyes and tossing his head in impatience. (He brings it off better than anyone else in the movie, making it a part of the character and not just a piece of schtick. With the exception of Tiffin, everyone in the cast can act and does so nicely when not mugging and grimacing.)

3) The really wince-inducing 1960s detail: The nightclub scene in which three musicians with English-style clothes and mod haircuts pretend to play guitar and bass to a soundtrack on which the only audible instruments are trumpets.

4) The pre-Chandler connection. The whiff of family secrets is still vaguely in the air, as in much crime fiction of Chandler's time and before. This was a hallmark of American crime fiction from the late 1920s on, as Robert Towne knew well when he wrote Chinatown.

A religious cult figures prominently, as in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse or "The Scorched Face" or Jonathan Latimer's Solomon's Vineyard.

Hey, I didn't promise coherence.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007