Ever since December, when Kristin Thompson posted this ("Good Actors Spell Good Acting") on the blog she shares with her husband and co-author David Bordwell, I've been meaning to link to it. This is my favorite kind of article, leading you fluidly from one intriguing idea to another -- and you never quite know where it's going to take you. Not only does it begin with an account of how bits of movie dialogue (from "Rio Bravo," "His Girl Friday") have entered her life, and the lives of her friends and colleagues, but it then segues into a great quotation from Steve Roman on SCTV (playing Juan Cortez, the first Puerto Rican Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in the dramatic television series, "There's Justice for Everybody") : “It’s got good actors, and that spells good acting.” And, from there, to this:
Almost invariably we use this line when we come across one of those films that receive highly positive reviews largely because of one great performance. You know the kind: Charlize Theron in "Monster," Halle Berry in "Monster’s Ball," Hillary Swank in "Boys Don’t Cry," and more recently Forest Whitaker in "The Last King of Scotland" and Helen Mirren in "The Queen."That's a good point to keep in mind during Oscar season, when "best acting" is often confused with "most acting." The performances that win awards tend to have as much to do with the roles as they do the actors. Sure, the player has to deliver, but give a decent actor a juicy character (and a sympathetic director) and you're talking Oscar bait. If just about anyone had played Jennifer Hudson's mistreated chunky diva in "Dreamgirls," an emotive-showpiece part if there ever was one, and had not gotten an Oscar nomination, that alone would have made the film a miserable failure. Fortunately for the investors, Hudson was able to do what she was hired to do. (Twenty years ago on Broadway, it was another Jennifer H. -- Holliday -- who became a star playing the same role and singing the same showstopper song.) Robert Altman liked to say that casting was the most important part of making a movie, but nobody would say that his movies are interesting just for the performances. It's how he captures and presents them that matters just as much.Usually I avoid such films, because the reviews tend to plant the idea that they are primarily actors’ vehicles. I enjoy good acting as much as the next person, but I want the rest of the film to be interesting as well.
Are there any film classics that are truly great solely for the acting? It’s hard to think of any. Maybe "The Gold Rush," which is stylistically fairly pedestrian but which is redeemed by Chaplin’s inspired performance. Maybe "Duck Soup," also quite undistinguished for much of anything other than the Marx Brothers cutting loose without being saddled with the sort of plots involving young, singing lovers that MGM would soon foist upon them. Maybe a few others. Usually, though, we tend not to think of a performance, however dazzling, as adding up to a great film.
View image Helen Mirren, as the Queen, doesn't have to check her crossword dictionary to spell good acting.
And from there, Thompson moves into a stylistic analysis of Stephen Frears' "The Queen" -- a movie she finds to be more than the sum of Helen Mirren's Elizabeth II and Michael Sheen's Tony Blair:
Frears set out to contrast the two worlds stylistically. The scenes with the royals are shot in a classical, non-intensified style. Distant shots to establish space, two shots for face-to-face conversations, over-the-shoulder shot/reverse shots as the dialogue unfolds. The framing seldom goes in for the tight close-up but stays in medium shot or medium close-up. The cutting is slow relative to the current norm, as befits both the subject and the style. One reason people are so impressed with Mirren’s performance may be that it is not made up of a bunch of different shots stitched together. She has shots that allow her to develop a reaction or attitude slowly. [...]Brava!In contract, the Tony Blair scenes were shot with a handheld camera, to convey the bustle of his staff and the more casual situation. Even so, the camera movement is not obtrusive, and Frears still doesn’t constantly cut in for the tight close-up. Here, too, he keeps his camera back a bit, framing groups as they talk. The lighting tends to be brighter and more diffuse. The contrast works well, and yet Frears never pushes it in our faces and asks us to be impressed. [...]
But good directors spell good directing, and good cinematographers spell … You get the idea. It would be nice to see more rounded reviews. Variety’s reviewers, it must be said, seem to have a mandate to mention style, since every review comments at least briefly on the film’s techniques. But most critics give you no sense of the film as a whole—its narrative construction (apart from a plot synopsis) or its stylistic texture. It would be nice to see more rounded reviews.
Frears has become one of my favorite directors over these past few years,
"Dirty Pretty Things" was marvelous, and I thought "The Queen" deserved all of it's nominations. I'm glad to hear someone else implying so. There were surprising moments of such emotional power, only because the way in which it was edited was caught us off guard, as the news of say Diana's death might have for Charles, which I thought was one of the more brilliant moments in the film. What a fascinating movie, with so much talent behind it, and the talent is so good that it almost goes unnoticed as a great movie - it's almost too effortless.
Great observations, Jim. I am once again reminded of a post I wrote several weeks ago about how awards fundamentally undermine the art of cinema. They do so in that by singling out specific elements and making a contest out of which is the best, the whole point of film is missed. Cinema is about everything working together. Sure, we can take notice of individual elements, but these elements are never in a vaccuum. They are positioned by and interact with many other details that make up the visual and auditory experience of cinema.
Both you and Kristin Thompson make some really good observations regarding this point. Her observations regarding "The Queen" are also fascinating in light of issues of image representation and interpretation. She and David Bordwell are rigorously fighting for the future of film criticism, one that's more appropriately focused on the images themselves.
That is one great thing about this Internet of ours -- it does allow for longer pieces that explore more aspects of a movie (though I'm as guilty as anyone with ending up most of the time with shorter reviews, the curse of newsprint infection). Sadly though, especially with the sorry state of the newspaper industry in general, too often writers can't expound the way they'd like simply because the newshole is too small to allow them to do so and flustered execs, uncertain as to how to battle TV, the Internet and the futile quest for young readers, think the answer lies with the shorter the better.
So many things can make or break a performance, and a lot of it, as suggested above comes down to how a film is edited. How long a shot is used before cutting away, or cutting to. I also do some editing, and it is a profound tool for heightening a performance, and sadly, come Oscar night none of those actor's will thank the editor for cutting out the bad moments and lingering on the brilliant.
One thing I thought that made Whitaker's performance that much more powerful was the use of camera movement. The way it seemed to quickly shift to capture his slightest motion. It's was almost as if he had power over the camera, his presence was that dominating. I thought it made up for the fact that, script wise, I never truly felt how powerful he was as a human. It eased up on some of the calculation I found lingering in Whitaker's performance, which, especially for Amin, should not have existed in any way, shape, or form. In the end style also helped shape his performance as well.
So, how do you conclude best actor? Is it the one who survives despite the style or who embraces the style and disappears into it.
What about Altman's Secret Honor?
I have to admit I'm lost reading that. Thompson says she avoids films that sound like actor's vehicles because she wants the rest of the movie to be interesting, but then she points out that a seeming actor's vehicle like The Queen has a lot of other filmmaking going for it to enhance the performance.
But she also says that movies like The Gold Rush and Duck Soup are stylistically pedestrian, but redeemed by great performances. So is she saying that sometimes a director's work can be separated from the actor's work? If not, how can she say that Chaplin and Leo McCarey were pedestrian in their directing if they got those good performances in their movies?
Dan: that was the first example I thought of too. But then I thought that to offer Secret Honor as an example of an answer to the question, "Are there any film classics that are truly great solely for the acting?" would be to diminish the fact that, despite there being only one man on screen, it is decidedly not a one-man show. The restless paranoia that Altman himself brings to the film with his creeping, prowling camera, with its emphasis on the bank of video screens monitoring the empty hallways leading to Nixon's Oval Office, and the way it settles on the portraits in the room, or on Nixon's fingers fumbling with the simple operating mechanism of the tape recorder -- these add up to a directorial presence that truly does make this a great film, not just a Give 'Em Hell, Harry! recording of a stage play. Therefore I'd have to say that Secret Honor wouldn't qualify for the question.
Recently I saw Barbara Stanwyck in the pre-code melodrama Baby Face?, and I'd say that might come close to qualifying. Stanwyck takes sheer determinism and brash sexual desire and links them with a very human-sized lust for power that practically defines her career as an actress, even at this early (1932) stage. She elevates Baby Face out of its standard B-movie trappings into a whole new level. It's arguable whether Baby Face is a great movie, but it is certainly a good and a sometimes marvelous one, and it is most certainly suspended on the wings of the terrific performance at its center.
I also have to question the designation of Duck Soup's style as "undistinguished". Never mind the mirror scene, what about Firefly's coronation with Groucho arriving in his pajamas down a firepole, the stuff with the fight over the leomonade man's hat, the shot tracking down the table as Firefly bounces a ball during a meeting, the Freedonia's Going to War number, the montage of elephants and dolphins charging, etc.
This brings to mind many conversations I have had with my brother (an actor) about my favorite actors versus his. He is always looking for great versatility, such as: could that guy get up on stage and do King Lear? while I just want someone who will find his niche in each movie and bring some of himself without getting in the way. We agree on a few, like Hackman, who is somehow both infinitely versatile while always being himself, but in the end I mostly prize directors and "character" actors who may simply make good choices on where to work while he likes the big and the bold who seem to me capable of being great and awful in consecutive pictures because of the material. I guess that's just my long-winded way of agreeing that: "Good films spell good acting but good acting rarely spells good films."
Even so, I don't think we can avoid the fact that most people understand acting in a way that makes it much easier to write about then the subtleties of directing, editing, etc. For better and worse there is more of an intersection in film, than in the other arts, between what's commercial and what's brilliant. Because of that, we have to endure a lot of shallow writing about masterpieces by hacks who don't know what they're talking about. How many semi-pro wordsmiths are even going to try to explain why a great painting or poem is worthy of accolades? This is the blessing and curse of the (arguably) most democratic art form.