Show me.. Emotion (acting 1 of 2)
I have always gotten into fights with actors and dramatists when it comes to the virtues of cinema versus theater acting.
More often than not, they feel that these two are one in the same, and the expression of so many facets is all important and thus should be what qualifies a great acting performance.
Call it a difference of opinion. I can’t stand Glengarry Glen Ross the movie. Lauding the actors for a muddled morality piece that claims to be about male competition. Feh. The whole play is filled with long, curse heavy, immaculately timed speeches. The actual content of the words themselves? Shit.
It’s the most streamlined, balls to the walls, male greed machismo talk, filled with speeches that sound exactly like those coaches give during movies like Friday Night Lights and Knute Rockne. Loud, aggressive, and as motivating as cold water to the nether regions.
As a movie, I don’t even buy it as a slice of life style film, because no group of people sounds like assholes all the time. It’s nothing more than a performance piece, and because you have guys like Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, and Kevin Spacey playing these roles as the more cleanly filtered version of their persona, it seems like these guys are doing a hell of a job.
It’s just not the same as if you saw them on stage, where you get to see the special dynamics, you can appreciate the change in cadence, the body language in the blowhard tête-à-tête’s that provide tension that doesn’t come through in a camera. The actors have to be in such a zone for two hours, they can’t flub the lines and do another take; they can’t hope that editing masks a scene where half of the performance is set.
Watching them tear through a play like Glengarry Glen Ross in a theatre is nothing short of breathtaking; the proximity to the right level of bombast is enough for you to overlook a bad text. Call it the Andrew Lloyd Weber effect.
But I have of course left out the Jack Lemmon role in the movie version. So pathetic, so weak, so drained of a character, it takes little to nail the depravity of the role. First off most everyone else is going big in the direction of loud voices and puffed chests. By not doing so, the base pathetic level of the character is already set, do take the character down a more introverted role, and it’s easy to steal the show, even a fair actor can do it.
But it takes a rare sort of actor to have a great performance, and it comes not from any particular acting chops, but just from charisma. Lemmon is so hapless in this, one can feel him drain away the collective confidence of the audience, teetering between failure and survival. Lemmon’s famous role is debatable, but for the sake of his endearment to the audience, his character in the apartment probably has the fondest attachment (if you unfamiliar with the character, but have seen American Beauty, Lemmon is a non-toking, less modern version of Spacey).
To see him as such a schlub, as the lowest form of masculinity, it works not directly from how he says it, but what he represents to the audience as a Jack Lemmon character. He was always so close to failure, and so joyful in success, to see him here suffer the downward half of the wheel of fate is more cogent, because in most of his roles, he’s been in the middle in the beginning.
Why Lemmon works opposed to some of the others is not just that he plays off type, but because his presence is the dominating aspect, we’re getting all of the iconography, and watching Lemmon carry it to the bottommost valley of his persona. So luckless is this character in this portrait, the Simpsons have made it a running cameo (but changed the name to Gil.)
++++
Most theater buzz is that America’s greatest living actor (who hasn’t become a caricature of himself in Ben Stiller comedies) is likely Liev Schreiber. And yet he picks the worst films to act in, and you can barely tell he’s good. In the Omen, he seems to be staring at the devil for a paycheck. But to watch him play a good part, like Orson Wells in RKO 281, you get the fire from this guy, he dominates the screen like few others, pulling all attention on the bravado of his delivery and the potency of his eyes when silent.
It’s hard to judge a great performance on screen with the same criteria that one would for stage, because it’s not a matter of if the two are interchangeable, it’s a matter of recalibrating the importance of one aspect over some of the others.
As I mentioned in the 13 going on 30 post, Premiere ranked Peter O’Toole’s performance in Lawrence of Arabia as the greatest ever. It’s in my top 10, but picking the best is hard, especially since Peter O’Toole gets away with more by the color of his eyes than by other expression, allowing the actor’s sexual ambiguity deliver more effect than any monologue ever could, and to be sure O’Toole is dynamite in this role. But he lost the Oscar that year to Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, also in my top 10 for simply his embodiment of paternal decency and good with benevolence to his children and steadfast courage in the face of oppression.
The best performances of cinema almost have to exist outside of the film itself, they have to be acted with precision and dedication, but there has to be a little bit of swagger/ iconography to some of them. After all, there are a thousand actors who can play a part like Hamlet; there is a reason why you remember Olivier: you see Olivier, in all of his prowess, killing the To be or not to be, and subconsciously you see him as the character, making that speech about contemplating life.
When it comes time for that kind of performance, you need a Schreiber or Olivier. But the joy of cinema comes often from the alternate side, when they play a vessel more than they function as an actor.
This is a history of stars Bogart, Gable, (Harrison) Ford, (Cary) Grant, Gene Hackman, Eastwood, (Jimmy) Stewart, and Cruise. These are the favorites in almost every era on both box office and acting. None of them were particularly great at acting. They were very good, but we loved them more for the iconography than we did their raw skill.
When they come between, where we see them as actors and stars, a reverence of gold circles everything they did.
Stars like Brando, Nicholson, DeNiro, Pacino, Spencer Tracy, Morgan Freeman and the like (and I’m leaving out many) get the benefit of being known as acting giants first, stars later; the dichotomy is we granted this title to them because they did what they were expected of so well that we consider them to be above the norm of a media they thrive in.
In the final moments of Oliver Stone’s Nixon, we see Anthony Hopkins as the president looking at Kennedy’s portrait.
He says: “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.”
Kennedy and Reagan were adequate presidents on most accounts. But they had that air of desire, somewhat godlike and yet completely human, (and I think Nixon may have been better than either of them) but they are always cherished for what they embodied, not in action, but in hope.
Before I get to the other section, here is my incomplete list of the top 10 male performances of all time (comments are on for this one, please interject with yours if you’re out there and care).
Peter O’Toole – Lawrence of Arabia
Gregory Peck – To Kill a Mockingbird
Robert Duvall – The Apostle
Robert DeNiro – Mean Streets / Raging Bull (the first is his best, but it’s a supporting role)
Daniel Day Lewis – Gangs of New York / My Left Foot (the latter is only worth watching a second time for him, the former is worth 20 minutes every time to catch him in it)
Al Pacino – Dog Day Afternoon
Sylvester Stallone – Rocky
Dustin Hoffman – Tootsie
Marlin Brando – The Godfather
(there are many left out, and I could extend this to 25 if I really wanted to be sure, but these are some of the only films where I watch the film for the performance as much as I do the film itself)
Ok some more
Peter Sellers – Dr. Strangelove
Jack Nicholson – Chinatown
Bill Murray – Stripes and Groundhog Day
Clark Gable – It Happened One Night and GWTW
Orson Welles – The Third Man and Citizen Kane
James Cagney – Yankee Doodle Dandy
Jimmy Stewart - Vertigo
See, unless you set up boundaries and categories, it’s personal preference. So, it’s onto another post, the best male performances of the 2000’s on.
More often than not, they feel that these two are one in the same, and the expression of so many facets is all important and thus should be what qualifies a great acting performance.
Call it a difference of opinion. I can’t stand Glengarry Glen Ross the movie. Lauding the actors for a muddled morality piece that claims to be about male competition. Feh. The whole play is filled with long, curse heavy, immaculately timed speeches. The actual content of the words themselves? Shit.
It’s the most streamlined, balls to the walls, male greed machismo talk, filled with speeches that sound exactly like those coaches give during movies like Friday Night Lights and Knute Rockne. Loud, aggressive, and as motivating as cold water to the nether regions.
As a movie, I don’t even buy it as a slice of life style film, because no group of people sounds like assholes all the time. It’s nothing more than a performance piece, and because you have guys like Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, and Kevin Spacey playing these roles as the more cleanly filtered version of their persona, it seems like these guys are doing a hell of a job.
It’s just not the same as if you saw them on stage, where you get to see the special dynamics, you can appreciate the change in cadence, the body language in the blowhard tête-à-tête’s that provide tension that doesn’t come through in a camera. The actors have to be in such a zone for two hours, they can’t flub the lines and do another take; they can’t hope that editing masks a scene where half of the performance is set.
Watching them tear through a play like Glengarry Glen Ross in a theatre is nothing short of breathtaking; the proximity to the right level of bombast is enough for you to overlook a bad text. Call it the Andrew Lloyd Weber effect.
But I have of course left out the Jack Lemmon role in the movie version. So pathetic, so weak, so drained of a character, it takes little to nail the depravity of the role. First off most everyone else is going big in the direction of loud voices and puffed chests. By not doing so, the base pathetic level of the character is already set, do take the character down a more introverted role, and it’s easy to steal the show, even a fair actor can do it.
But it takes a rare sort of actor to have a great performance, and it comes not from any particular acting chops, but just from charisma. Lemmon is so hapless in this, one can feel him drain away the collective confidence of the audience, teetering between failure and survival. Lemmon’s famous role is debatable, but for the sake of his endearment to the audience, his character in the apartment probably has the fondest attachment (if you unfamiliar with the character, but have seen American Beauty, Lemmon is a non-toking, less modern version of Spacey).
To see him as such a schlub, as the lowest form of masculinity, it works not directly from how he says it, but what he represents to the audience as a Jack Lemmon character. He was always so close to failure, and so joyful in success, to see him here suffer the downward half of the wheel of fate is more cogent, because in most of his roles, he’s been in the middle in the beginning.
Why Lemmon works opposed to some of the others is not just that he plays off type, but because his presence is the dominating aspect, we’re getting all of the iconography, and watching Lemmon carry it to the bottommost valley of his persona. So luckless is this character in this portrait, the Simpsons have made it a running cameo (but changed the name to Gil.)
++++
Most theater buzz is that America’s greatest living actor (who hasn’t become a caricature of himself in Ben Stiller comedies) is likely Liev Schreiber. And yet he picks the worst films to act in, and you can barely tell he’s good. In the Omen, he seems to be staring at the devil for a paycheck. But to watch him play a good part, like Orson Wells in RKO 281, you get the fire from this guy, he dominates the screen like few others, pulling all attention on the bravado of his delivery and the potency of his eyes when silent.
It’s hard to judge a great performance on screen with the same criteria that one would for stage, because it’s not a matter of if the two are interchangeable, it’s a matter of recalibrating the importance of one aspect over some of the others.
As I mentioned in the 13 going on 30 post, Premiere ranked Peter O’Toole’s performance in Lawrence of Arabia as the greatest ever. It’s in my top 10, but picking the best is hard, especially since Peter O’Toole gets away with more by the color of his eyes than by other expression, allowing the actor’s sexual ambiguity deliver more effect than any monologue ever could, and to be sure O’Toole is dynamite in this role. But he lost the Oscar that year to Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, also in my top 10 for simply his embodiment of paternal decency and good with benevolence to his children and steadfast courage in the face of oppression.
The best performances of cinema almost have to exist outside of the film itself, they have to be acted with precision and dedication, but there has to be a little bit of swagger/ iconography to some of them. After all, there are a thousand actors who can play a part like Hamlet; there is a reason why you remember Olivier: you see Olivier, in all of his prowess, killing the To be or not to be, and subconsciously you see him as the character, making that speech about contemplating life.
When it comes time for that kind of performance, you need a Schreiber or Olivier. But the joy of cinema comes often from the alternate side, when they play a vessel more than they function as an actor.
This is a history of stars Bogart, Gable, (Harrison) Ford, (Cary) Grant, Gene Hackman, Eastwood, (Jimmy) Stewart, and Cruise. These are the favorites in almost every era on both box office and acting. None of them were particularly great at acting. They were very good, but we loved them more for the iconography than we did their raw skill.
When they come between, where we see them as actors and stars, a reverence of gold circles everything they did.
Stars like Brando, Nicholson, DeNiro, Pacino, Spencer Tracy, Morgan Freeman and the like (and I’m leaving out many) get the benefit of being known as acting giants first, stars later; the dichotomy is we granted this title to them because they did what they were expected of so well that we consider them to be above the norm of a media they thrive in.
In the final moments of Oliver Stone’s Nixon, we see Anthony Hopkins as the president looking at Kennedy’s portrait.
He says: “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.”
Kennedy and Reagan were adequate presidents on most accounts. But they had that air of desire, somewhat godlike and yet completely human, (and I think Nixon may have been better than either of them) but they are always cherished for what they embodied, not in action, but in hope.
Before I get to the other section, here is my incomplete list of the top 10 male performances of all time (comments are on for this one, please interject with yours if you’re out there and care).
Peter O’Toole – Lawrence of Arabia
Gregory Peck – To Kill a Mockingbird
Robert Duvall – The Apostle
Robert DeNiro – Mean Streets / Raging Bull (the first is his best, but it’s a supporting role)
Daniel Day Lewis – Gangs of New York / My Left Foot (the latter is only worth watching a second time for him, the former is worth 20 minutes every time to catch him in it)
Al Pacino – Dog Day Afternoon
Sylvester Stallone – Rocky
Dustin Hoffman – Tootsie
Marlin Brando – The Godfather
(there are many left out, and I could extend this to 25 if I really wanted to be sure, but these are some of the only films where I watch the film for the performance as much as I do the film itself)
Ok some more
Peter Sellers – Dr. Strangelove
Jack Nicholson – Chinatown
Bill Murray – Stripes and Groundhog Day
Clark Gable – It Happened One Night and GWTW
Orson Welles – The Third Man and Citizen Kane
James Cagney – Yankee Doodle Dandy
Jimmy Stewart - Vertigo
See, unless you set up boundaries and categories, it’s personal preference. So, it’s onto another post, the best male performances of the 2000’s on.
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