Essential Film Performances – 2010 Edition Part Four

Naturally, after last year’s 100 Essential Female and Male Performances lists, we felt the need to further explore the performances by those great male and female actors that did not initially make our epic lists. Whether through the helpful suggestions in the comments section, grueling grad genre studies or just good old-fashioned movie watching, I have been made aware of some truly great performances over the past year that I think deserve a similar treatment, deserve to have the spotlight shined on them.

Though our initial lists of 100 were divided into “Male” and “Female”, further updates will merge the gender barriers for equality’s sake, queuing the honorees in alphabetical order, 25 men, 25 women. Some of the people on the list already transgress the boundaries of what is male and what is female: to categorize a performance like Volker Spengler as Elvira in Rainer Werner Fassbiner’s In a Year of 13 Moons by solely by gender makes little sense. In addition to taking the gender division out of list for this round, we are keeping the categories from the first list (Life Support, The Dark Side, Classics You Should Have Seen By Now, From Page to Screen and Under the Radar), though we are no longer ordering our lists bycategory.

FULL INTRODUCTION

The Dark Side
Michael Redgrave
Dead of Night
(1945)

Maxwell Frere (Redgrave) is a well-groomed older man whose success as a nightclub performer depends heavily on Hugo (John McGuire), his much younger and more talented partner. But there’s more at stake: Frere is also madly, obsessively in love with Hugo while the latter, like many a spoiled and attractive young person, enjoys exercising the power provided by his youth and good looks. When Hugo first flirts and then threatens to defect with a rival Frere responds with an outbreak of jealousy which to any impartial onlooker would seem to be excessive if not entirely laughable — because Frere is a ventriloquist and Hugo is his wooden dummy. Seldom has representation of a gay relationship been more efficiently smuggled under the radar of film censorship and Redgrave completely commits to the role of jilted lover while also providing a suitably eerie subtext in this psychological tale, one of five stories of the supernatural in the 1945 Ealing Studios portmanteau film Dead of Night. The idea of a ventriloquist dominated by his dummy has been revisited by, among others, Cliff Robertson in “The Dummy” (an episode of The Twilight Zone) and Claude Rains in “And So Died Riabouchinska” (an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode) but Redgrave’s performance remains definitive because it avoids providing a simple explanation for the events of the tale while suggesting several contributing factors including a descent into madness as well the encroachment of supernatural forces.

Sarah Boslaugh

From Page to Screen
Hanna Schygulla
Berlin Alexanderplatz
(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)

Icily aloof muse; spirited call girl; guttersnipe Lady Macbeth; faithful friend and lover: Hanna Schygulla packs them all into her portrayal of Eva in Fassbinder’s epic miniseries about life in late 1920s Berlin.

While Günter Lamprecht as hero Franz Biberkopf turns in a performance of great range and power, it falls to Schygulla to call attention to the full repertoire of Fassbinder’s cinematic stagecraft. She exudes emotion in filtered, gauzy close-ups, explodes in melodramatic excess in sequences that parody gangster films, and engages in naturalistic dialogue in static scenes that resemble a filmed play.

The protean nature of Schygulla’s performance serves to distance the audience from events on screen and invites an analytic response to the corrupt, savage culture depicted in Berlin Alexanderplatz. The miniseries, however, is not simply an extended exercise in theatrical alienation. All the characters, flawed and weak as they are, elicit sympathy and even respect, especially Franz and Eva, who resist the figurative and literal economy of Berlin, where goods, people, and honor alike serve as commodities available for exchange.

Eva, like many of the characters in the series, has constructed a persona that requires constant maintenance. In one of many mirror scenes, Eva watches herself as she puts her hands into her blouse and massages her breasts. She closes her eyes and cries out — whether in pleasure or distress, it’s unclear. Schygulla’s portrayal here combines narcissism, self-indulgence, and self-loathing to suggest the price exacted by a culture that requires citizens to invent and reinvent themselves in order to survive.

Michael C. Nelson

The Classics You Should Have Seen by Now
Takashi Shimura
Ikiru
(Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

Fans of film often talk about brave screen performances. Generally, we are too loose with such praise. How brave is it really to pretend to be someone else? However, there are certain performances that merit the adjective and none more so than Takashi Shimura’s rendering of a dull civil service chief who discovers he has only a short while to live. The notion of what it means to live lies at the crux of the film but unlike so many other treatments of this theme (filmic and literary), Shimura recognizes the point of life cannot be communicated to another. Most people, of course, do not know how to live themselves, and those who attain such knowledge seem to have glimpsed something close to madness. At various points in the film, Shimura looks another character in the face with such a profound recognition of life’s fragility that his interlocutor becomes afraid. But Shimura does far more than this. In two instances, Shimura stares directly into the camera and thus at (perhaps into, as well) the viewer for extended periods of time. The first instance occurs during a drunken spree when Shimura’s character hauntingly sings a song about the brevity of life. Director Kurosawa frames Shimura’s face straight on and the frontality of his visage and the despair in his eyes are overwhelming. It is one of those rare scenes in film where one really feels the spiritual texture of another human being. The second instance is at the end when, having accomplished his one redemptive act (creating the park), the civil servant again sings his song. Now he is without despair. Again the exposure of Shimura’s emotions confront us. But now we see something. He knows. What it is he knows he cannot tell us but somehow we are assured by the mere fact that he knows it.

Chadwick Jenkins

From Page to Screen
Jean Simmons
Elmer Gantry
(Richard Brooks, 1960)

Elmer Gantry brought Burt Lancaster his only Oscar award. Upon first viewing, no one would question the appropriateness of the award. Lancaster as Gantry, a consummate salesman turned evangelical huckster, blusters his way through the performance with a bravado suggesting that no one else on screen matters very much. Subsequent viewings disabuse one of such misunderstanding. The enigma that lies at the heart of the film is not Gantry (we see through him from the start), but rather Sister Sharon Falconer, played by Jean Simmons. Even if we accept Gantry’s transformation (if that is what it is), we can explain it; we can understand it. How does one account for Sister Sharon? Drawn by a religious fervor that brooks no exception and yet manages to justify her sexual longing for Gantry, Simmons demonstrates that Sharon is no hypocrite. She is a seer. And like all seers, she glimpses a world unbeknownst to the rest of us. What Simmons manages to do with this role is so perfect, so subtle that one is likely to miss it if not watching carefully. In a world of phonies, she is genuine, even if what she proffers is nonsense. Simmons plays Sharon as being so possessed by religious zeal that even her desire for Gantry (that most human of emotions) fails to bring her down to earth; instead, lust becomes otherworldly. Watch her eyes and you realize that the entire film (and not just the conclusion) documents her self-immolation.

Chadwick Jenkins

Life Support
Stellan Skarsgård
Good Will Hunting
(Gus Van Sant, 1997)

With over 40 years of performances from which to select, why is Skarsgård’s turn as MIT professor Gerald Lambeau in Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting the “essential” performance? A variety of reasons, really. Not least of which the introduction to audiences worldwide of the talent that made him so renowned in his Swedish homeland.

Skarsgård’s Lambeau is celebrated on the MIT campus for his mathematical ability. His character is a studied mix of confidence and charm. He wows his students and revels in their adoration of him. Only after meeting loutish math genius and floor-cleaner Will Hunting (Matt Damon) does Lambeau’s façade begin to break down. It’s in these moments that Skarsgård commands attention. Skarsgård takes Lambeau from arrogant to tragic seamlessly. In a pivotal scene, Lambeau must face Will disregard for his abilities, and he does so on his knees, hair and clothing mussed, confidence destroyed: “Some days I wish I’d never met you… then I could go to sleep at night not knowing there was someone like you out there.”

Beside a seasoned American dramatic performer like Robin Williams (in his Oscar-winning role), Skarsgård manages repeatedly to draw attention away. His key scenes with Williams throughout the film forced us, back in 1998, to ask: Who is this guy, and why have I never seen him before? While his choices since vary from the good (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, City of Ghosts) to the questionable (The Glass House, Beowulf and Grendel), to his successful collaborations with Danish tyro Lars von Trier, all these years down the track, Skarsgård has come to represent quality.

Nikki Tranter

James Stewart, Tilda Swinton and more…

The Dark Side
Volker Spengler
In a Year of 13 Moons
(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

The shots of water rippling and reflecting the morning’s first light that open Fassbinder’s most experimental, grueling film showcase a peculiar, muddily opaque transparency, which is also a great way to describe Spengler’s Elvira. Elvira’s basic properties might seem obvious to the spectator at first — built like a linebacker and wearing male drag when we first meet her — yet her inner life is much more fascinating and complex than basic water in its most usual liquid form. This is a character who has constantly been told throughout her lives (first as a man and now a woman) that she was worthless, useless, stupid. After a while, if this is all you hear, you might become convinced, as Elvira does, that this is what you really are.

The scene that Spengler knocks out of the park in his lived-in portrayal of pure desperation and loneliness, is set in a slaughterhouse as Elvira screams a monologue that punctuates the death cries of animals as they hang upside down and bleed rivers of thick, red liquid onto the floors. Twitching in final death throes, their sinewy muscles, skins, furs, bones and fatty yellow gristle are exposed, manipulated, worked and explored by Fassbinder’s camera as Elvira ( who as a young man did this job), stands unflinchingly by, shrilly and loudly recounting her past traumas. For Elvira, whose body was butchered by a shoddy surgeon’s knife just like these animals (a detail to which no doubt inspired the creation of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch), being in the slaughterhouse is simply another reminder that these are the same fragile, tenuous materials that our own bodies are made of and that her choice to alter her body was the wrong one.

The significance of her watching and narrating all of this dreadful action is to remind the viewer that Elvira’s body too has been cut up, torn asunder, and altered too. Surviving that brand of radical transformation, coupled with being constantly reminded of it, can change one in very mysterious, sometimes dangerous ways, particularly when the extreme behaviors stem directly from the rotting corpse of that ages-old albatross: unrequited, binary, hetero-normative love. Haven’t we all been there? While we might seek out chocolate, inebriation or even meaningless rebound sex, Fassbinder’s version of a hell-on-heels Joan Crawford chooses auto-erotic asphyxiation while listening to Christmas music by child choirs, rough trade Czechoslovakian male prostitutes, and gleefully assisting people with suicide. Elvira has a lot of problems but really no solutions. It is to Spengler’s credit that this kind of oddball, operatic character has a soul and doesn’t become a caricature or completely un-redeemable harpy. Elvira is neither reviled nor celebrated as some kind of transsexual martyr or victim, she is a very troubled, very complicated, unsentimental rendering and Spengler makes the delusional highs and the dysfunctional lows equally meaningful by exposing a raw nerve onscreen and cutting it up for two straight hours.

Matt Mazur

The Classics You Should Have Seen by Now
James Stewart
The Philadelphia Story
(George Cukor, 1940)

“C. K. Dexter Haven” — it’s a throwaway line, a character name that shouldn’t illicit laughter. Yet, in Jimmy Stewart’s remarkable hands, it does just that. Not much about Stewart’s performance in The Philadelphia Story doesn’t illicit laughter, though. Easily, at least a half dozen performances by Stewart could be on a list of unforgettable performances, from the somber Anatomy to a Murder to the whimsical Harvey, but his role as Mike Connor is among his most complex. Watching the film, one sees a typical easy-going Stewart performance; look closely, though, and one sees an “everyman”, disgusted by the excesses of high society, yet slowly seduced into that world, a man torn between the sensibilities of life as a result of the recent economic depression and the power of opulent, privileged living. The film’s ending, in which Mike suddenly notices the loving glances of his girl-next-door assistant, is far-fetched, but Stewart makes the cliches totally believable. The Philadelphia Story features Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant at their comedic best, but is Stewart who is the core of the film, and Stewart who walked away with the Oscar that year, for Best Actor, his only competitive trophy from the Academy despite having one of the most storied, “movie-star” careers in Hollywood history.

Michael Abernethy

Under the Radar
David Strathairn
Limbo
(John Sayles, 1999)

John Sayles’s Limbo starts out, reassuringly enough, as a quintessentially Saylesean community-analysis, setting the viewer down in a small Alaskan town and observing with perceptiveness and wry humor the interactions of the inhabitants — all the while zeroing in on the slowly-building relationship between three characters: a former fisherman, Joe Gastineau (Strathairn), a singer, Donna De Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and the latter’s daughter Noelle (Vanessa Martinez). But then Sayles pulls the rug out from under the audience’s feet, and Limbo morphs into a tense survival-in-the-wilderness drama before shifting again, in its unforgettable final sequences, into more spiritual and esoteric terrain. Reviewers at the time seemed uncertain how to interpret these shifts, suggesting that Sayles had somehow lost control of his material. In fact, the structure makes perfect dramatic sense for a film that is deeply concerned with risk, chance and the unpredictability of human experience.

At Limbo’s core is a superb performance from regular Sayles collaborator Strathairn. As Joe, the actor achieves a not inconsiderable feat: making a fundamentally decent man interesting. Strathairn presents Joe, initially, as a regular guy, helpful to others, competent in his work. But as more pieces of the character’s history are revealed — a promising basketball career cut short by injury, his responsibility for the deaths of two friends in a fishing accident — the actor conveys the sense of wariness and reserve underpinning Joe’s daily encounters. Strathairn works beautifully with Mastrantonio and Martinez, his scenes with the former capturing the awkwardness, surprise and pleasure of mid-life romance. By the time Limbo’s protagonists are standing on a beach together, bravely awaiting their uncertain fate, Strathairn has charted a journey from reticence to greater emotional openness with masterful skill. His performance is like the beautiful Bruce Springsteen ballad with which Limbo signs off: soulful, tender, understated, and destined to resonate for a long time in the mind.

Alex Ramon

From Page to Screen
Donald Sutherland
Don’t Look Now
(Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

“Nothing is what it seems”, John Baxter (Sutherland) says absently to his wife at the beginning of Nicholas Roeg’s supernatural thriller about a couple grappling with the death of a child. Despite evidence to the contrary that accumulates as the film progresses — the warnings of a blind woman who claims to have seen the spirit of the dead daughter, Baxter’s own visions — Baxter refuses to give up his belief in an explicable world.

This could be a portentous, even lugubrious performance, but Sutherland humanizes the role by portraying Baxter’s limitations as flaws of a well-meaning man trying hard to rescue his wife from the all-consuming grief that he has managed to throw off.

Aside from the scene that establishes the depth of Baxter’s loss — he emerges from the brackish pond with his dead daughter in his arms, an anguished animal crying out in pain — Sutherland’s performance is characterized by restraint, punctuated by occasional eruptions of mirth, affection, or anger.

In a church, a smiling Baxter covers, then uncovers his eyes, like a child playing peek-a-boo, as he hides from the clairvoyant and her sister, who have happened into the church. He’s willing himself not to see them and the threat they pose to his hard-won equilibrium, but at the same time acknowledging the silliness of the gesture.

Finally, though, the man who spends his time recreating the past and who misses no detail in the crumbling church he’s trying to save, is too prosaic to picture the future. It makes the tragic consequences of wanting, needing, to look, but being unable to see, all the more wrenching. In the film’s climax, Sutherland’s open, engaged face turns to an expression of horror as Baxter recognizes the fate that his blindness has made inevitable.

Mike Nelson

Under the Radar
Tilda Swinton
The Deep End
(Scott McGehee and David Siegel, 2002)

“Change, overcoming the idea of oneself as created by society, has been one of my main interests,” Swinton has said recently. “I think that being resistant to one’s inexorable mutations, let alone one’s ability to live simultaneously multi-faceted lives, is a serious and sad mistake.” Swinton’s extraordinary career encapsulates this stance; is there another actress working in films today who has demonstrated so consistent and compelling an ability to transform herself in performance? In a 1992 appraisal of the actress, Michael O’Pray notes Swinton’s “chameleon presence in films” and identifies her “ability and desire to range wide across roles.” It’s an assessment that’s become only more accurate as Swinton’s career has progressed, and the actress has shown herself to be equally at ease with Derek Jarman and Jim Jarmusch, Bela Tarr and Brad Pitt, grit and glamor.

In the under-appreciated The Deep End Swinton proves conclusively her ability to play “ordinariness,” and render it every bit as compelling as a gender/epoch-hopping Orlando. Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s film is a contemporary re-imagining of Max Ophuls’s 1949 noir The Reckless Moment, about a middle-class mother confronted by a blackmailer after hiding the dead body of a man that she believes her child has killed. An ardent cinephile with a keen awareness of genre and performance history, Swinton places The Deep End in “an honorable tradition: the melodrama dressed up as film noir. It’s the film about the woman who’s thinking her way through a crisis, usually in close-up, with nobody to talk to. She’s forced to make decisions and take responsibility.” Swinton’s achievement here is to both pay homage to this tradition of screen heroine while also making her characterization resolutely contemporary, an approach that’s in keeping with The Deep End’s subtly subversive reappraisal of The Reckless Moment’s sexual and gender politics. McGehee and Siegel provide a characteristically stylish ambiance, but it’s Swinton’s taut and deeply sympathetic performance that’s the beating heart of the film.

Alex Ramon