(My) Best of 09: Actor.

5. Filippo Timi in "Vincere" (read my review)

Filippo Timi is so effective as Benito Mussolini, that when the actual historical footage of Il Duce is shown on the movie, you will wonder for a second or two-despite your best knowledge-if this isn't the actor playing him.
Timi may not really look like Mussolini and he plays him during a part of his life from which few records exist but he does so with such an overpowering energy that you don't dare disbelieve his choices. Whether it's Benito's violent love making or his tempestuous mood swifts, Timi owns the man.


4. Ben Whishaw in "Bright Star" (read my review)

As British romantic poet John Keats, Ben Whishaw has the difficult job of transforming an introverted, sickly man into the ultimate sort of romantic hero.
For how can a man write some of the most breathtaking poetry in English literature and not be a dashing lad the kind of which Laurence Olivier would've played?
Whishaw takes the exact opposite road we would've expected and makes Keats almost as subtle as his work. He wraps himself in the excessive romance Keats wrote about and becomes a figure worthy of Thoreau who is at his best surrounded by nature. His face lights up amidst vast flower fields and he becomes one with a tree he climbs.
His scenes with lover Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) contain such delicateness that it's impossible for us not to sigh without falling into the lustful desire we often attribute to muse/artist duos.
Whishaw's sensitive approach makes you believe that Keats was perhaps too beautiful to remain for long in the mortal world.


3. Jeremy Renner in "The Hurt Locker" (read my review)

"The Hurt Locker" is a wonderful thriller that also happens to be an insightful character study and judging from the raw performance of Jeremy Renner we wouldn't have it be otherwise.
His work as Sgt. William James is so powerful that you don't know if to be more scared of the bombs he works with or his very own explosive nature.
As the kind of smartass who lives by his own rules he becomes a charming jerk but it isn't until we see him lost in a supermarket that we finally begin to see him as a human being as lost and scared as anyone else.
How he manages to go through a whole movie rarely showing sensitive emotion to have him all of a sudden pull the rug from under our feet is a remarkable feat.
That he becomes a mystery anew seconds before the film is over is just mindblowing.


2. Joaquin Phoenix in "Two Lovers" (read my review)

The first time we meet Leonard (Phoenix) he jumps into the bay at Brighton Beach to see if he dies. When he doesn't it's curious to detect a sarcastic disappointment in his face, as if he's saying "next time I'll succeed".
He reaches his parents' house where his mom (Isabella Rossellini) looks at him disapprovingly but used to this sort of behavior. Like a ten year old boy Leonard goes straight to his room as if he knew this was the thing to do when he misbehaved.
In a few scenes Joaquin Phoenix gives us the complete history of this man-child who moves through life propelled by inertia until his existence is defined by his love for two women.
Phoenix, who rarely has been so moving, evokes Dean and Brando while coming up with an internal conflict the kind of which most young actors would only dream of.
If his announcement to quit acting after this film is true he delivered the kind of swan song every artist would dream of by teasing us with all the potential he had stored within.


1. Tahar Rahim in "A Prophet" (read my review)

Story goes that director Jacques Audiard met Tahar Rahim almost by accident when they ended up sharing a car on a movie studio. The director saw something so special in the young man that he cast him as the lead of his planned prison saga and in the process a star was born.
Rahim who is as far from being a movie star as Audiard is from being a commercial director, imbues Malik el Djebena with such naturalism that the raw power of his performance truly takes us by surprise.
Even if he's in almost every scene of the film, he tries not to be there, the actor is like a chameleon who we notice only when he wants us to. He gives Malik all these details and nuances that we fall into that awful way of measuring brilliance and ask ourselves how much of him is in the character.

Two Lovers ***1/2

Director: James Gray
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw
Isabella Rossellini, Moni Moshonov, Bob Ari, Elias Koteas

From its washed out, spare aesthetic, to its anachronistic use of technology, "Two Lovers" feels like a piece of stolen time. Director James Gray (who also wrote the screenplay with Eric Menello) even made sure that the font used for the film's title in the credits, looked like something out of a seventies drama.
For once, this move isn't a selfconscious spectacle (unlike his previous movies tried to jam crime film references down out throats) but a melancholic ode to the fact that the movie's themes are inarguably timeless.
Set in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, the movie starts as Leonard (Phoenix) jumps into the bay attempting suicide.
He doesn't succeed and arrives to his parents' apartment completely wet. His mother Ruth (Rossellini) greets him with an offscreen "hello". After seeing the state she shows up in, she hollers for her husband Reuben (Moshonov) only to say "he's tried to do it again".
Leonard has already entered his room, episodes like this seemingly the most familiar thing, and his parents remain discussing his "bipolar problem" right outside his door.
The manchild moved in with his parents after a failed engagement and works in their dry cleaning business. He sleeps until noon, only because Ruth enters his room and wakes him up, while he flirts with the idea of becoming a photographer.
To his parents, his mother especially, Leonard is still a child and this comes to show in his relationships. Looking back at his torn engagement he has a flashback where his fiancée simply tells him "I have to go".
It is this kind of reasoning that opens the door to the film's central problem. He spots his neighbor Michelle (Paltrow) in the hall one day and invites her to his apartment while she hides from her crazy father; and just like a child would, he shows her his living room, introduces her to his parents and doesn't ask her to stay for dinner.
He's smitten. The next time he sees her he follows her to the subway, waits for her to see him first and then rides with her making awkward small talk.
While he feeds his crush his parents introduce him to Sandra (Shaw), daughter of his father's new business associate.
While it's obvious that she's into him, completely aware of the "set up", he continues dangling with thoughts of Michelle.
In her he sees the promise of glamor, excitement and Manhattan, with Sandra there's just the perpetuation of a lifestyle he obviously doesn't feel good in.
This doesn't stop him from pursuing both of them and by the end he will have to make a choice. At the hands of Gray this choice however doesn't come down to a basic choosing between two women, but choosing his own lifestyle.
The women in question, albeit being very human, realistic characters, are archetypes of the paths Leonard's life can take. Which is why "Two Lovers" might look and talk like a traditional romantic drama, but is far from being it.
Phoenix is smooth and wonderful making Leonard someone who deals with his demons as practically as he can. All of his choices seem to be easy to take and his disregard for responsibility is always covered by the "he was dumped" card.
The actor evokes James Dean's Jim Stark and in some scenes is as haunted as Brando was in "Last Tango in Paris", but the truth is that it's not easy to place his kind of performance and compare it directly to someone specific.
He might recall Method actors and seventies' geniuses, but what he does is all his'. Shaw and Paltrow provide wonderful supporting turns.
Shaw's Sandra is a delight to watch; she lives ruled by family laws and courting standards, but while she doesn't seem to ask for more than she can get, we know that she has compromised with herself.
Paltrow's femme fatale on the other side is an explosion of hysterics and unnecessary drama, that the actress makes her so refreshing and seductive is a miracle and proof that if we were in Leonard's position we wouldn't be able to resist her charms either.
And Rossellini (who inherited her mother's heartbreaking smile) is the film's most powerful female figure. Her overbearing need to see her son happy makes her a deity of sorts (notice how we know she's there in several scenes but we don't see her, she's omnipresent) and the fact that Rossellini plays her without recurring to Jewish mother clichés is surprising.
When Leonard first kisses Sandra in his apartment, he turns and looks at the pictures in his wall, he pulls away from Sandra and says he can't continue with mom "standing" there.
That moment sums up the bittersweet dilemma in "Two Lovers" and Leonard's incapacity to become a man of his own without blaming a woman for what he turns into.
Early on Gray makes us see who's good for Leonard, but we never really know if he's good for anyone, or if he ever will be.

We Own the Night *1/2

Director: James Gray
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Robert Duvall

How to judge a movie in which Eva Mendes' character is the sanest of the bunch?
During one key scene she points out to her boyfriend why everything he's involved in, is just plain wrong and unnecessary.
Her boyfriend is Bobby (Phoenix) who works as manager in, "El Caribe", a notorious club owned by a Russian mobster (Moni Moshonov) where they only seem to play Blondie songs.
His father , Burt(Duvall), and brother, Joseph (Wahlberg), are policemen, but Bobby has been able to maintain his family connections hidden just by using his mother's maiden name.
Things change, when Joseph is shot after raiding "El Caribe" and Bobby learns that (surprise!) it was the guys he works for.
Bobby has a change of heart and decides to make the family proud by becoming a double agent which makes the film turn into a lazy version of "The Deaprted" with biblical undertones.
Before things turn into a soap opera, which they do in the second half, you are already trying to convince yourself the characters' motivations are sparked by the least amount of coherence.
You never really know why Bobby became estranged from his family and why would he betray the people who treated him so well, even if they are drug dealers and murderers.
While Phoenix is such a good actor that he can convince you of almost anything (see this in an especially good scene where he sheds an unexpected, very Method, tear) you can't help but try and diagnose Bobby with some very serious Oedipal issues.
Duvall's performance seems to be fueled by an awkward patriarchal pride measured by how much his sons risk their lives and Wahlberg certainly has
The film's twists are constructed just for the sake of being twists and when one of the last ones happen, the real surprise is that you didn't even know you were supposed to be expecting a twist.
When more questions regarding the characters' motivations start circling your mind the only reasonable conclusion you may come to is the fact that you are witnessing a movie that has put every last ounce of coherence at the service of its plot.
How can you take seriously a movie that has a whole system (in this case the NYPD) working around its characters' redemption?


P.S: I carry matches and a lighter as well!