Nearing the end of the year, we have no silly precursors to look at. Whatever films I have left to see don't have as much to do with the performances therein. So here's a fun list. I love every single performance on this list and I love writing about it, and I hope y'all out there who also loves these performances would love to read about them.
10. Joaquin Phoenix, I'm Still Here
Although his antics and film have generally come to be reviled by those buttsore at this film pointing out the depths of our society's shallowness concerning celebrity fascinations in this new media age, what Phoenix accomplished was remarkable. For an entire year he took what Sacha Baron Cohen did with Borat, made himself that much more noticeable and completely put his career on the line out of the passion for this project, and layered with with relevant commentary and satire. Everyone will say, now, that they never believed he was being serious, but I don't think there was anyone who didn't have a lingering thought in their mind that it could have been true...thus proves the film's point about the ease in which public persona is constructed (no matter how absurdly) and how much the public eats it up (I can point out more specific contemporary examples, but I'll be nice).
9. Andrew Garfield, Red Riding Trilogy: Part 1: 1974
An underseen gem from earlier this year (ineligible for Oscars due to some VOD technicality), Andrew Garfield starts off as an overly idealistic youth who, in both ours and his own naïveté, slowly guides us through a world of greed, horror, violence, and corruption. The film progresses at a pace as aggravatingly as his character gets as the film goes on to little avail of his goals, but also proving a highly capable mastery of physical performance with just how often he gets as many bones in him broken as possible in his quest for truth. It's quite a wonder at such a young age how Garfield has already proven himself to be more than capable of holding such an ambitious, mature, dark production entirely on his own shoulders in easily the most compelling installment of the entire trilogy even as he progresses into Travis Bickle-like madness by the end.
8. Kieran Culkin, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
One of the brightest, most refreshing surprises to me of the year came in the form of a joyride of a midnight showing the day that this movie opened in theaters, and one would have no idea from the audience response that it would have flopped so miserably. Culkin outshines every performer he goes up against (though close vis-à-vis Anna Kendrick) in this endearingly quirky production as the "cool gay roommate," emanating a charm that was as seductive as it was enviable. He rejects all the disgusting tropes an actor might usually attribute to a "gay" character and instead embraces the most purely awesome of his character's traits — from his second-to-none gaydar, to his hilariously active sex life, to his personality that can at once be described as flirtatious, sarcastic, friendly or vicious, that made one particularly annoying theatergoing tween girl behind me exclaim that she "wants one" (one, I can only presume, being a gay best friend — to which my straight best friend wanted to vom on her).
7. Mila Kunis, Black Swan
One only needs to look at her supporting counterparts to see where Kunis succeeded — generally one dimensional caricatures of written concepts — to contrast it with just why Mila Kunis' performance was so great. The role as it was written could have been entirely drôle and as thin as the others as it was written from Nina's point of view, but instead Kunis breathed a vibrant life into it that made her pop out the screen with natural fluidity, charisma, and unassuming street smarts. She completely nailed the effortless talent her character was meant to embody, and entranced us as much as she entranced any character she came up against and impressively proving her own against the next entry on this list.
6. Natalie Portman, Black Swan
For the first time in her career, I'd argue, Natalie Portman finally fully realizes her potential as a dramatic actress and transcends from simple performing into pure being by giving her first "great" performance, that will likely come to define her career. Her Nina Sayers goes through a startlingly drastic transition by plunging herself into a dark psychological hell of madness that she drags us as the viewers right in with her. In a completely baity role she takes the smarts she learned at Harvard and decides, against probable instinct, to reject many of the scene-chewing opportunities she was presented with in the film. Instead she internalizes her character's madness, stemming from pure ambition and perfectionism, and by the breathtaking finale we're left with when Nina's transformation into a black swan is finally complete.
5. Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Eisenberg was handed some of the most difficult cards of this year in Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network in which he had to tackle one of the most complex, enigmatic and ultimately unlikeable visionary geniuses that was ever going to be put to the screen. Yet Eisenberg actually turned out to be the perfect match for Sorkin's script, delivering his lines with a cadence that Shakesperean actors give to Shakespeare's plays. Delivering his lines with complete justice to Sorkin's voice on the page, but still staying true to how Zuckerberg himself spouts off so many words in what seems like one neverending sentence. What could have easily treaded into caricature territory Eisenberg placed very humane paradoxes to give him heart. These contrasts I'm referring to include his complete ineptitude for social interaction with his fellow students yet ability to so clearly and fluently tap into their social needs with this online device. Someone as clear minded and brilliantly intellectually yet at the same time so easily bitterly resentful and petty. When he looks out the rainy window, you can completely tell Zuckerberg's longing to be back at the offices on facebook and work on his precious brainchild. Eisenberg brilliantly communicated emotion that his very character is incapable of expressing. And, just physically, he gives Zuckerberg this stony exterior like a statue to block off any route to his heart. You can see it in the very blinkless glare of his eyes that convey such icy coldness. Yet when he runs, hilariously, you can see the sudden rush of cowardice to avoid any semblance of confrontation and as little interaction as possible.
3 and 4. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine
Perhaps it is so hard to go on at length at just what made these performances so great, but I think the only thing harder than that is to find any fault with either of them. I couldn't really separate the two in terms of talent, they were both about equal and the strength of both performances get to the heart of why their film is so effective. It's emotionally honest, authentic, devastating, and both actors bring forth an intense commitment to their parts. Reports actually indicate that Michelle Williams would scream from the entire car ride from set to her home every night because of how emotionally grueling it was to shoot. Williams had a particularly difficult task of justifying her leaving her husband, especially considering how great of a father he is to her daughter, but she did the brilliant job of showing that it was her rather than him. Gosling kept a burning spirit inside his character that you can see clearly from one scene to the next, but in different contexts you recognized that it was slowly fading out and slowly killing him. In this, Gosling does justice to every Brando comparison made to him since his breakthrough in Half Nelson — it's impossible to take your eyes off him in any given scene. And his commitment was perhaps clearest in the scene on the bridge where Cindy reveals to Dean her pregnancy, in which director Derek Cianfrance ordered Gosling to get her secret out of Michelle Williams no matter what he had to do and ordered Williams to hold on to that secret no matter what Gosling does. After a full day of shooting, Gosling instinctively starts climbing a fence separating them from the highway below out of aggravation that he hasn't gotten that secret out of her, yet. He even gets a full leg over, and its then that its clear just how far into his character he has disappeared and the risks he was willing to take for it. Considering how most of the film was improvised and most of the shots were kept in single takes, I think Gosling and Williams reached a level of greatness that will be remembered as golden standards of acting for years to come.
2. Andrew Garfield, The Social Network
It's one thing to be given easily the most emotional and sympathetic of the characters in a script. It's another to instill that character, even then, with the amount of humanity in which Garfield did to Eduardo Saverin. His performance played out marvelously to the already-marvelous Eisenberg. Whereas Eisenberg sang Aaron Sorkin's prose in a way that still kept Sorkin's voice present, Garfield completely owned every line of very written and still very Sorkinian dialogue and formed it into something entirely his own, entirely his character's own. His physicality was as intricately constructed as Jesse Eisenberg's, but even more delicately subtle. His accent was not just an American one, but one that quite precisely narrowed in on the idea that his character was a Brazilian immigrant raised in Miami but educated enough to go to Harvard. His mannerisms — the way he'd look at his best friend, the way he's bury his hands deep in his coatpockets, etc. — always wreak of a heartbreaking vulnerability and sensitivity. And he latched on to this deep love that his character had for Mark Zuckerberg, with what I feel is an added layer of subtext that blurs the line between a platonic love and verging on a more romantic sorts, that maximized on Sorkin's screenplay by having that make the final betrayal that much more impacting. His performance really starts to get the gears going when he shows up outside Zuckerberg's house in Palo Alto in the rain, ready to turn back to a cab back to the airport before he points his fatal puppydog brown eyes at the beguiling Sean Parker answer the door. At this point, we hadn't seen his character in a little while, but Garfield makes up for the absence with a highly increased stress and attention that was presumably built up in his life when we weren't following him — from going door to door looking for investors for Facebook or his extremely possessive and psychopathic girlfriend. We see someone otherwise so lovable and innocent as his world is increasingly starting to crash down and he needs the love of his best friend Mark more than ever when it seems like Mark has already shifted his attention to Shaun Parker in all the glory of his cult of personality. He's desperate for Mark's attention, who doesn't live up to what Eduardo hopes he will do and say 99% of the time, but we see that 1% of the time at work when Eduardo returns to his apartment and gets a phone call from him and Mark orders him to come back to California to sign a major contract. We see, all of a sudden, a drastic shift in Garfield. His face lights up, and he grins from ear to ear, and we see his sudden confidence and physical strength to break up with his girlfriend right then and there. It's this unpredictability — this pure rejection of creating a constant yet predictable and boring character arc in the effort to make someone completely human in reactionary unpredictability and emotional development that Andrew Garfield bares his soul here in one of the two greatest performances of the entire year. His quiet moments of concern and love are as powerful as his more self-conscious outbursts of anger and fear ("DON'T FISH EAT OTHER FISH?! THE MARLINS AND THE TROUT!"). But he ices the cake of this otherwise subtly momentous performance with his final betrayal, when he realizes the fault of having signed that contract Mark was referring to over the phone. He takes all of the tension and stress he had been building up both onscreen and off from his character and allowed it to boil over in this entirely pure eruption of emotion. All the love, the loyalty, the faith, the attachment that he had focused into his only real friend (and vice-versa) exploded from being unreturned for so long and finally being completely broken. He goes back and forth between the loudest of shouts to Shaun ("SORRY my prada's at the cleaners...") to the sharpest of whispery rebukes to Mark ("I'm coming back for everything") within seconds of each other that makes for the most compelling, honest, impressive, badass moment of acting in the whole year.
1. Lesley Manville, Another Year
Mike Leigh always manages to get fantastically real performances out of his actors and actresses thanks to a process that roots their characters in a deep history and backstory, and with Mary in Another Year and and Manville create what seems to be his single most accomplished character in his career. Lesley Manville's performance stands alone as a work of out, and as she tells her very own story within the film with her performance you see a true maestro at work. Manville's Mary is an optimistic character in the vein of Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky — she's a generally excitable lady who always tries to look on the brightest sides of a situation and always see the glass as half full. It keeps most of the movie light, at the start — completely on its toes. And Manville's comedic talents had the audience at the New York Film Festival in stitches at almost every turn. But that's Mary giving her own performance, in a way, and we see with each line of dialogue Manville delivers another layer to Mary that is unraveled. The layers fall down strip by strip until the last act of the movie when we find Mary at her barest — the shocking, haunting, empty shell of a woman who is desperate for love, desperate to feel loved, desperate to at the very least be admired by other people and probably well past the end of her string. In her optimism she keeps a youthful air to her appearance until she is told she looks about 60 by her best friend's brother-in-law, after which in just a split second her face completely changes and it seems like she ages about 10 years right before our eyes. It all leads up to the very final shot of the movie wherein Mike Leigh very smartly keeps the camera's attention focused on Mary alone, as the other sounds start to drown out and he slowly pans in. She never looks directly at the camera, but the New York Times worded it perfectly when they described her acting in that shot as communicating "a lifetime of pain, loneliness and resignation without uttering a sound." It's this complete mastery of performing the most sophisticated and hilarious of comedy simultaneously with the most heartbreaking of drama, going back and forth effortlessly to create this truly fully formed spectrum of a tragically average person who, in their advanced age, has never been shown the kind of love and attention they truly need and have long yearned for, that makes Lesley Manville's performance one for the ages and truly the most accomplished work of acting this entire year. The critics leaving her out of their awards should truly be ashamed of themselves, and it'd be a snub of all-time proportions if she's ultimately left out of the Academy's final nominees for either lead or supporting actress. Read more!
