2011 Muriel Award: Best Supporting Actor

So once again, here we are. The ballots have been cast and counted, the points have been totaled. We've checked and double-checked, tightened bolts and screws and made sure everything is as smooth as possible. We're ready. Are you? (I bet you are.)

This year's crop of winners... well, I'm real proud of both the runners-up and ones who got themselves up top. Think we got some awesome stuff lined up. But... well, I'm stalling. Best to just jump right in, eh?

So, first up, Best Supporting Actor.

Third place:



Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life [98 points/13 votes]

Second place:



Christopher Plummer, Beginners [147/21]

And your winner...





Albert Brooks, Drive [192/30]

"If Drive is electric like its supporters say, then Albert Brooks' performance provides the shock. Ryan Gosling headlines Nicolas Winding Refn's feverishly cool, unabashedly cinematic neo-noir as the anti-hero with no name, but Brooks matches him as Bernie Rose, the year’s best villain -- a standout character fueled by a searing performance.

Those of us familiar with Brooks’ screen persona can marvel at how it's been replaced by a fearless and unrelentingly vicious gangster with ice water instead of blood. It’s the sort of casting informed by screen iconography, one of the cinephilic flourishes throughout the film that turns a genre piece into a reservoir of adulation from the kind of people that cast Muriel votes.

Yet it’s not a stunt but a revelation. Here only the faintest trace of Brooks’ pedantic worrywart can be seen, the acerbic whining of his comedic work distilled into callous brutality; the familiar voice has its intelligence intact, but the words are now pervasive with menace. Out go the bookish glasses and the anxious scowls, in comes a slowly authoritative walk and an eerily unfeeling countenance.

As with Driver, Bernie would rather things have turned out differently than they do. But since it didn’t, veins must be opened, and he might as well enjoy it. Early on, he assures Gosling’s Driver that his hands are dirty, a prophetic remark we see verified as he readily plunges knives into his targets. Why would this gangster kill the way he does, sinking blades into flesh as he does even as he would just as soon have seen things go bloodlessly, if not for enjoyment? It’s with this murderousness that Brooks takes Bernie from intimidating to fearsome as a man who finds a bit of pleasure in the course of executing professional duties.

Bernie and Driver turn out surprisingly similar in their ruthlessness, the primary difference being their motives -- egotism vs. altruism, an ideal existential nemesis. In the end, Brooks has made his antagonist the inverted image of the hero. He is ultimately just as driven: a criminal who dabbles in freelance legitimacy, pitiless towards his enemies, on an irreversible course to lethal violence, letting actions build more character than words. Brooks, like Gosling, never flinches." - James Frazier

See the full results.