2011 Muriel Award: Best Actor

Last category before the big enchilada!

Third place:



Michael Fassbender, Shame [108 points/16 votes]

Second place:



Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy [147/23]

And your winner...





Michael Shannon, Take Shelter [164/23]

"Michael Shannon has a reputation for playing "crazies," but that somehow seems reductive. Anymore, the idea of cinematic insanity tends to have less to do with mental imbalance than it does with an urge to do evil, thereby giving our big-screen heroes an implacable force with which to do battle. But while Shannon is lined up to play the Kryptonian baddie Gen. Zod in Warner Brothers’ latest attempt to make us care about Superman again, he’s never really been in the villain business. No, what makes Shannon such a great actor is that he doesn’t fall into the trap of reducing his characters’ madness to a method -- or, for that matter, a Method.

Blessed with perhaps cinema’s best haunted look since Peter Lorre, Shannon is also a highly precise actor, which gives a rich level of detail to his performances. This is doubly true for his portrayals of people in psychological turmoil, whether it’s his character’s disregard for others’ personal space in Bug or the off-kilter sense of timing he brings to My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? With Take Shelter, he manages to give his best performance to date, in part by giving the film’s protagonist Curtis a level of self-awareness that’s rarely seen in characters of this sort.

It’s somehow easier for us as audience members to witness characters who are, to use the quaint old British expression, "barking mad." After all, they can’t control themselves and certainly can’t see how nutty they are, and since we’re more or less in control of our behavior, we take comfort in the fact that at least we’re not completely nuts. But so many people with psychological problems are like Curtis as played by Shannon, mindful of their demons but fighting every day to keep them at bay. He knows how to behave and what’s expected of him, but he just can’t stop himself sometimes, which causes him deep shame. That his mother has been institutionalized only makes it worse for him, since he knows where he himself could well be headed.

And yet... his visions seem so real to him. When he dreams of oily rain or birds plummeting from the sky, it seems like more than just his imagination working overtime, especially when the pain lingers even when he’s awake. And when the visions invade his daily life, he knows he has to do something about it. What makes the movie so heartbreaking is that he does what he does for the "right" reasons. When he chains his beloved dog up in the backyard, it’s because he wants to protect his daughter, despite the dog never having been a problem before. Similarly, when he pours all his money and effort into building a storm shelter -- losing both his job and his family’s much-needed health benefits in the process -- he’s just looking out for them. Once again, he knows he should have other priorities, but there’s just something about those things only he can see that makes his need to build the shelter impossible to dismiss.

All this leads up to perhaps the most spellbinding scene of the year, in which Shannon’s talents are on full display. When a storm (perhaps not THE storm, but certainly A storm) hits, Curtis and his wife and daughter barricade themselves in the shelter he’s constructed until the storm dies down. But when it’s time to open the door, Curtis just can’t do it. His wife insists that there’s nothing to worry about, and there even seems to be a part of him that senses that the worst is over. Yet he’s helpless in the face of his fear. It’s like when you saw the monster in the closet. People can tell you over and over, "the monsters are only in your head," but when your fear takes over, inside your head is the scariest place to be.

But there’s more to Curtis’ fear than that, since there’s no happy ending once the door is opened. Either the visions he’s seen are legitimate and a disaster is nigh, or it was all in his mind and he’s not just mentally unstable but also a risk to himself and his family. Combined with his more elemental fears, can you blame him for not wanting to see what’s behind the door? It’s said that an unwillingness to face reality is a sign of insanity, but when your options are that unattractive, not wanting to confront them doesn’t sound so crazy to me." - Paul Clark

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