“Every NBA All-Star Weekend, they hold a dunk contest. NBA players execute impossible dunks, feats of athleticism and strength that blow the mind. This year's contest was widely regarded as a disappointment. It wasn't that the dunks weren't challenging. It wasn't that the players didn't exhibit impressive athleticism and strength. It was... well, you could *feel them working hard.* The great dunkers in the history of basketball-- Michael Jordan, Vince Carter, Dominique Wilkins, etc.-- made their work seem effortless. You wouldn't feel their arms stretching, their body contorting, their attempts straining to seal their places in dunk history. They would simply float through the air, as graceful as any prima ballerina or Olympic gymnast. It's not impressive enough to do tremendous work. One must do the work while appearing to do no work at all.
“Cinema doesn't often follow dunk contest standards. Often the actor who *appears* to work the hardest is rewarded with the best accolades, reviews, and awards. Most actors strain when burdened with the task of delivering epic monologues, filling hefty roles, carrying emotionally draining films-- including many of the greatest actors who have ever lived. This strain is understandable. The complexity of emotions-- especially those contained within truly special scripts-- is a daunting task. You want to hit every beat, emphasize every word, push every emotion to the brink, in order to make the audience feel. There's no question that the actors who we often see nominated for Academy Awards are ‘doing tremendous work.’ We see just how hard they're working.
“Separate from the pack, however, is Viola Davis. Viola Davis is to cinema what Michael Jordan is to basketball. When she does tremendous work, she floats effortlessly across the screen. When you pair someone exceptional with the work of August Wilson in his play Fences, you get something magical. She must've known this would be a role that would qualify her for an Oscar (she won Best Actress at the Tonys for the same role), but you don't feel her straining for awards audiences. You don't feel her preening for glory. She simply serves the story.
“It'd be easy to talk about her big emotional scenes, her pained goodbyes, her snotty noses. I want to talk about the opening scenes, the scenes in which she plays a patient, loving, somewhat put-upon housewife. These scenes belong to her husband, played by her director Denzel Washington, but she's often present, keeping her husband's tall tales grounded, encouraging him to be the best man he can be, working to keep the family bound together. A lesser actress-- a.k.a. all of them-- would take her dialogue in these scenes and chew it to smithereens, trying to force her story into the forefront. Conversely, a lesser actress might also blend into the background, leaving us less aware of her situation, diminishing the impact of the eventual revelations that break her heart in the near future. Ms. Davis never steps on toes, yet she remains endlessly present. She is both the ultimate star and the ultimate team player.
“Mr. Wilson's script, faithfully executed by Mr. Washington, is an all-time great piece of storytelling in American history. You can't tell Troy Maxson's story without telling Rose's, and you can't have a titan of a performer like Mr. Washington portray Troy without a similarly titanic counterweight to balance the scale. Ms. Davis's performance moves mountains. It would be unfair to call her the Michael Jordan of the silver screen. We should start saying that Michael Jordan is the Viola Davis of basketball.” ~ Russell Hainline
“Annette Bening completely anchors 20th Century Women as Dorothea, the would-be matriarch of a makeshift family in 70's southern California (and a loose autobiographical version of director Mike Mills' own mother). Dorothea struggles with raising up a son, Jamie, to be a good man just as the socially agreed-upon definition of that is beginning to change, and her own sense of feminism is challenged by the young women in her son's life, for whom she can't help but both worry for and to some extent envy. Late in the picture she manages to both sum it all up and completely recode the film's perspective on her with nothing but her face and a single line. Jamie reads to her from a book on feminism with well-intentioned but still presumptuous feelings of sympathy, and as the text describes the way society ignores women of a certain age Bening's expression mutates effortlessly from a sliver of pride to a sliver of shame, and finally to a twinge of anger. ‘So,’ she says, ‘You think that's me.’” ~ Matt Lynch
“Isabelle Huppert wasn’t the only sixtysomething, foreign-film vixen who gave a ballsy, defiant star turn last year. Let’s give some love to that Brazilian goddess Sonia Braga for the performance she gave in Kleber Mendonca Filho’s mesmerizing Aquarius (which is ready to view on Netflix, by the way).
“Braga is Clara, an aging music writer enjoying her golden years in the same beachfront apartment she’s lived in for decades. All she wants to do is listen to her LPs, spend time with family and friends and relax. Unfortunately, a construction company wants to tear down her apartment complex (which she’s the only inhabitant) and would very much like her gone. But Clara, a breast-cancer survivor, is staying put and is ready to go to war if she needs to.
“But Aquarius isn’t all about Braga’s character getting her fight on. It’s mostly a movie about a woman who continues to live life to the fullest, even when people feel she should be living in a retirement home. Clara may have some wrinkles, but she’s far from senile. There’s still some fire in that gal. She’s passionate in every sense of the word, mainly because she’s been through everything – cancer, losing a spouse, etc. – and she’s still here. While there are scenes which has her singing along to Queen’s ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and Roberto Carlos’s ‘O Quintal Do Vizinho,’ it wouldn’t have been surprising if there was a scene of her grooving to P. Diddy and Mase’s ‘Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down.’
“Aquarius ultimately reminds us that Braga is still as sexy and vivacious as she was when she starred in such erotic, ’70s Brazilian flicks as Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Lady on the Bus. Excuse me for getting my male gaze on, but I can proudly say that, at 66 years of age, Sonia Braga can still get it!” ~ Craig D. Lindsey
“I thought about that later-in-life preference when I was watching Michelle Williams’ simple, eloquently restrained work in Manchester by the Sea. Without much pomp and circumstance, she’s given the brief opportunity to make an impression as a young woman mired in two distinctly different phases of motherhood—helpless exhaustion, during which her love for her children, and even for her sincere but unambitious husband (Casey Affleck), manages to register even when we sense that she’d probably rather just be left alone, and helpless grief. Both instances are characterized by immobility, physical (when we first see her, she’s sick in bed, fending off Affleck’s amorous advances with humor and slight impatience), and then emotional paralysis. In Williams’ signature scene, she’s unable to move away from or hold back a flood of sympathy for a husband responsible for a great tragedy whom she’d always regarded with some measure of righteous anger, and she’s further wrecked by his inability to accept her forgiveness. It’s a performance that feels molded from a sensibility which doesn’t fit in with the predominantly impatient modus operandi of much of modern film acting, and in context (as opposed to having been extracted for display on awards shows) it’s far more than a simple demonstration of how convincing she is when wracked with tears.
“Williams has never been an ostentatious actress—it’s why her turn as Marilyn Monroe was so surprising (and so surprisingly effective), and why she’s the perfect muse for a director like Kelly Reichardt, a filmmaker who crafts mood and character from the least histrionic of directorial attitudes. In Manchester by the Sea she demonstrates with perfectly calibrated understatement why less is often more. I always get the sense from watching Williams of leaning forward, not because I can’t hear or absorb what she’s transmitting, but because the invitation to the intimate is an irresistible element to what she does. And yet here she exhibits a trembling evanescence, as if leaning in too close would cause her to disassemble into thin air. Affleck’s haunted shell is the movie’s nexus, shuffling along the streets of the titular coastal town, permeated by awful memories. But it is Williams whose bittersweet presence shadows Affleck, and the life of Manchester by the Sea, a spirit reminder of happiness lost, stinging like the ephemeral and insistently bitter cold breeze on an otherwise beautiful day.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
“The inherent artifice of performance is called to attention constantly by scenario and mise en scene but also by Cotillard’s actorly, ever-so slight precise quirk. What’s even more impressive is how she retains her emotionality not only on a surface reactive level, but that of every level of her character through this affectation. She’s probably the most naturalistic element of the film to be truthful. Her synthesis of movie star charm and genuine tenderness is both irresistible and trepidations. This film was the single most detailed meta work on the nature of cinema and it’s nearly all located in Cotillard’s character and performance. The post modernist interrogation of genre heritage, gender roles, cinematic artifice and true love are all on her shoulders. This is by far the most difficult role of the year, and a lesser actress simply couldn't have fulfilled it this completely, leaving the film to rely completely on a narrative kuleshov effect, but Cotillard deepens the pathos and intrigue in every layer in impossibly sustained fashion. This could be her greatest work.” ~ Molly Faust
“Pretty easily, actually, because Greene’s premise is flawed, but that’s an essay for later. But here’s the thing: without Rebecca Hall, it’s likely that Christine would be just as flawed.
“Hall’s Christine Chubbuck would immediately stand out, even if the film were somehow about some other character. With her pale skin, large eyes, and reed-like form, accentuated by her long, straight black hair, one could mistake her, visually, for a Shelley Duvall-esque character. This impression is immediately undermined when we hear her voice: surprisingly deep, yet also nasal, with a Midwestern flatness. This impression is then torched when we see her tone-deaf aggressiveness that manifests itself even when she’s being friendly.
“These choices are informed by the real-life Christine Chubbuck; Hall makes her own choices that deepen the characterization, and make Christine seem both odd and at-odds with her world. In her voice, she places an undercurrent of judgment in every syllable, while putting tension in her mouth and chin, which comes across as defense mechanism, an overt signaling of ‘toughness.’ She often keeps her eyes low and piercing, as if literally trying to see into the people she’s talking to. For this film’s Christine, who wants to be successful enough to interrogate the president on TV, the world is one big news interview.
“Hall’s work here is flawless, and it needs to be, as the script’s conception of Christine is a difficult needle to thread. The real Christine Chubbuck’s death was shocking and tragic, and we can never really know why, precisely, she did it. So it would’ve been simple to present the film’s Christine as a victim: of her boss’s thirst for blood-drenched ratings, of her handsome co-worker’s cruel charms, of her own body rebelling against her.
“Christine doesn’t do this. From the very first, Christine is clear that, whatever obstacles get in her way, Christine is the author of her own troubles, and her own fate.
“Is that cruel? Perhaps, but this is the license fiction grants us. Christine could never be about Christine Chubbuck; it always had to be about something else. And that something else is about the dangers of living in one’s head.
“Hall’s Christine lives in her head; not in a fantasy world-type way, but in an intellectualized way. She has a rigid conceptualization of how the world works, and there’s no place for chaos or messiness. (‘What’s with this zoning obsession of yours?’ asks her boss, unknowingly hitting the nail on the head.) She can’t let anyone in, because that would be chaos and messiness. But because her head is a closed fortress, she becomes self-centered and never sees the world from another perspective. (‘Why don’t you manage your expecations? Adjust your thinking?’ asks a helpful group therapy member. ‘I don’t understand the question,’ is Christine’s only reply.)
“So we’re hit with a tsunami of ironies. She never expresses any interest in the emotional well-being of anyone else (‘I’m a person, too, Chris,’ pleads her mom) while nearly every character is expressing interest in hers. She constantly looks for subtext in her dealings with others, never realizing that everyone else is saying exactly what they’re thinking. She can never share in other people’s victories, whether it’s George’s new job or her mom’s new boyfriend, only see them as part of a zero-sum game. The biggest irony is when she shows her boss her big idea, a kind of *ahem* documentary-fiction hybrid, exploring what seems to be, to her, a revolutionary idea: “What would it be like to be someone else?”
“So when Christine contrives a meeting with station owner Bob, the God of this world, in order to figure out what she needs to do to fit in, she learns that God has no plan. (‘I just try not to overthink these things, you know?’ he says to a dumbfounded Christine.) It’s only then that she decides to retaliate with her own meticulously-planned chaos.
“And this is where Hall’s importance truly shows itself. Because the person I just described is, on paper, just awful. But Christine isn’t awful. Hall shows us the roiling emotions underneath, shows us her passion, shows us her intellect. Without betraying the banged-up core of the character, she threads the needle. We care about this woman. We identify with her. Because Hall never for a moment fails to do the one thing that her Christine couldn’t: let us in.” [Editor’s note: effin’ A, man.] ~ Kent M. Beeson
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