2017 Muriel Awards: Best Supporting Performance, 5th Place

As you can see, we’ve consolidated the supporting actor and supporting actress categories into one single award this year. We’ve done the same with (SPOILER) the lead acting categories. The reasoning behind the change comes down to the question of how much different acting is for a female as compared to a male. And while I’m sure there are different nuances, in the end I didn’t think there was enough of a difference to justify keeping two separate categories. What do you think?

Counting down from #5…

Michael Stuhlbarg - Call Me By Your Name [161 points / 16 votes]

“Michael Stuhlbarg’s performance in Call Me By Your Name represents something rare in cinema and life: common decency. It was especially rare when directed towards queer teenagers in the early 1980s. Actually, I actively dislike Call Me By Your Name; it strikes me as a “gay film” made for heterosexuals, even though I like André Aciman’s source novel quite a bit. In its avoidance of explicit sex and gay identity, it shows how high the price of entry to the mainstream for LGBT people and their art remains. And it received a degree of attention and wide distribution that far better films about gay men released in 2017, like God’s Own Country, Beach Rats, Nobody’s Watching and BPM (Beats Per Minute), could have used. But the monologue delivered by Stuhlbarg as Elio’s father Samuel is one of last year’s genuinely sublime moments in cinema. Few parents would be capable of offering their sons such a thoughtful and measured account of the ups and downs of love, and how this is likely to affect them over the course of their entire life.

“Samuel does not explicitly tell Elio ‘I know you’re gay and that’s totally OK with me.’ Stuhlbarg’s performance conveys a modest hesitation and reticence in addressing his son’s sexuality, which seems natural given the period and the fact that Elio slept with his own assistant. But over the course of the monologue, Samuel works towards acceptance. Stuhlbarg does a terrific job of conveying this. 2017 was a big year for the actor; he also had supporting roles in The Post and The Shape of Water. He only appears in The Post for a few minutes, as the New York Times’ executive editor A. M. Rosenthal. His performance as a Russian spy in The Shape of Water is more substantial. Call Me By Your Name’s trio of male actors with major roles, he out-performs Armie Hammer, although not Timothee Chalamet, by a mile. The emotional force of Call Me By Your Name, which comes across much stronger in Aciman’s first-person narrative, relies mostly on Stuhlbarg’s big scene and the closing images of Chalamet as the credits roll. Whatever problems I have with the rest of the film, those scenes deliver, and Stuhlbarg is a major part of the reason why.” ~ Steve Erickson