Muriel Award: Best Body of Work

This was a befuddling category this year. A lot of partial votes, a lot of empty ballots on this category. And I can't really blame anyone - but we still got enough to declare a winner. (One I rather like, too.) Also, I'm both surprised and happy at our third-place entry.

Third place:



Manoel de Oliveira, director (Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl and The Strange Case of Angelica) [67 points / 9 votes]

Second place:



Mark Ruffalo, actor (Shutter Island and The Kids Are All Right) [67/12]

And your winner...





Leonardo DiCaprio, actor (Shutter Island and Inception) [72/12]

(The following piece includes spoilers for both Shutter Island and Inception. Forewarned is forearmed.)

"Leonardo DiCaprio needs to get over his dead wives. In both Shutter Island and Inception, DiCaprio plays a man whose attempts to solve a mystery are complicated by the memory of a spouse whose death he feels responsible for. This was the most obvious parallel between the two films, which found DiCaprio lost in labyrinths (a remote institution for the criminally insane and a multilayered dreamscape) that blur the lines between reality, memories and dreams. Ultimately, we don't know if these men escape their respective labyrinths - if they're crazy or sane, awake or asleep. Basically, Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan both decided to treat one of the biggest stars in the world like a rat in a maze.

The great thing about DiCaprio is that he seems totally up for being a lab rat. Judging from his collaborations with Scorsese, Revolutionary Road and Inception (among others) it's clear that DiCaprio is drawn to characters that don't necessarily have marquee-idol fates in store; not since '70s-era Jack Nicholson has a movie star played so many characters that lose everything. In Shutter Island, this means playing every scene on multiple levels - consider, for instance, the scene where U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels uses his pencil to unnerve a patient he is interviewing, how DiCaprio finds a perfect balance between suggesting the aspects of the character that we know and those we learn at the movie's end. It's remarkably nuanced work, and his performance in Inception is just as perfectly understated. The emotions in Christopher Nolan's film are strong but muted; it's DiCaprio, who carries the weight of Dom Cobb's loss on his shoulders in every scene, that finally lends the film its emotional impact.

The longstanding criticism of DiCaprio is that he still seems like a boy, not a man. It really is time to put that tired meme to bed forever. Whether playing a 1950s lawman in Scorsese's extended foray into pulp or a postmodern action hero in a movie that is much about the cinematic apparatus as it is about dreams, DiCaprio is totally convincing as a masculine archetype and more than willing to be vulnerable as both films subvert their hero in ways obvious and subtle. And the final scene of Shutter Island may be his best moment thus far; we only have to look into Teddy's eyes to understand the choice he makes. DiCaprio excelled this year at letting go, moving on, trying to forget and finally being haunted by a girl from his past. Pehaps we should get Leo a puppy; until then, he's doing solid work in the labyrinth." - Andrew Bemis

See the full results.