| At the end of the year, I wish to say
that there is acting and then there is the movie star situation prevailing in Hollywood
that supports what passes for acting. Consider the beautiful George Clooney in Ocean’s
Eleven, which my local City Paper implicated as a cake needing something more
than icing. Clooney barely moves in the role, exerting next to no vocal or emotional
energy. His stasis allows us to notice him all the more, as if he were a sculpture, but
exhibiting stasis resides in the realm of modeling rather than acting. Then there is
Clooney’s costar, handsome Brad Pitt, evermore putting food in his mouth as if eating
were tantamount to building a character. Since Clooney is bent on regaining his ex, Julia
Roberts, and sidekick Pitt is without a woman, his food fixation feels like a thankless
attempt at metaphor. To the discredit of Ocean’s Eleven director Steven
Soderbergh, not only are the performances anemic but so too is the logic of the movie. The
only motivation advanced for why Julia Roberts abandoned George Clooney is that he had
lied by omission, not having told her he was a thief. He is now out of jail and she is
with Los Vegas casino owner Andy Garcia who presumably has told her that he
is a thief or maybe he has only admitted to being a very rich casino owner and she
doesn’t know a gangster when she sees one. The plot follows George’s
Clooney’s device to rob Garcia by undermining his impenetrable security system and
subsequently to win back Julia Roberts. In the weak gestalt of the movie, the actual
justification for Garcia being laid low by the Clooney/Pitt gang is not his avarice,
aggression, or smugness (though Soderbergh wants us to believe that) but the actual
justification is that he doesn’t smile, whereas Clooney and Pitt always smile.
Ultimately Garcia is exposed as being more attached to his money than to Julia, which
supposedly clinches his comeuppance but actually his comeuppance comes because he
won’t lighten up. In Ocean’s Eleven good guy acting is being easy to look
at, like toothpaste commercials, and bad guy acting is not showing your teeth. Ocean’s
Eleven is an inane pointless story with a degraded view of human behavior all around
and with a depleted concept of acting. For the New Year, it would be a kindness to wish
Soderbergh the gift of two assistants: an uplifting editor and an acting coach.
This sort of Clooney-Pitt modeling disguised as acting stands in
remarkable contrast to the kind of performance, whether subdued or histrionic, produced
respectively by Billy Bob Thornton in the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t
There and by Ian McKellen in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. I was
exhilarated seeing McKellen embody the enormous and variegated power of Gandalf the
wizard. He could have been one of the seven samurai transplanted to Middle-earth! To
verify that McKellen’s capacity for grounded theatricality is not simply the result
of Lord of the Rings’ clever camera and computer work, just witness his
performance opposite Helen Mirren in a revival of Strindberg’s Dance of Death
on Broadway. Joyfully playing an artillery captain in decline, McKellan finds the kind of
desperate energy needed to burst open Edgar’s wasting existence, bringing to mind
Dylan Thomas:
Do
not go gentle into that good night,
Old
age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage,
rage against the dying of the light.
He storms the role, and why not since the locale is a coastal fortress?
To witness his performance is to experience a wrecked ship gathering and holding and
binding its ribs so as to stay afloat for a last launch with the woman of his torment, the
dance partner of his life, before sinking. McKellen doesn’t smile for the camera or
the audience. He acts.
Nor do we get a movie star grin from Billy Bob Thornton in the role of
a taciturn barber whose life was as if not there. Film critics have apparently not gleaned
the metaphoric depth of both The Man Who Wasn’t There and Thornton‘s
performance. What exactly is invisible, in shadow, in the life of barber Ed Crane? What is
he clammed up about? The Nation critic Stuart Klawans looked back on the movie and
kept "seeing something that seems to be going unmentioned," and arrived at the
correct conclusion: "I believe The Man Who Wasn’t There is about a deeply
closeted gay man, living in a time and place [late 1940s small California city] when it
was hard to admit such desires, even to oneself." The homosexuality of the character,
covert in the script, is a delicate infusion underpinning Thornton’s performance.
Without the word homosexual ever being mentioned (making the barber’s reality
functionally not there), what emerges as the subject of the movie is dammed
self-expression. The point of the movie is the sad consequences accruing to all the
characters, and us too, as a result of dammed self-expression. There are clues indicating
the "not there" gayness of the barber all along (and I cannot understand how
film critics could have missed them):
- He is after all a hairdresser.
- He married his wife Doris (Frances McDormand) with alacrity without courtship following her
proposal. They are childless and have not slept in the same room for years, yet there is
affection between them and not Strindbergian hostility. With a heavy-duty testosterone
guy, Big Dave (James Gondolfini), she is having an extra-marital affair, of which her
husband is aware, unknown to her, and over which he is not jealous.
- He is homophobic in the face of a salesman’s sexual advance. The salesman (Jon
Polito) must recognize a fellow traveler without realizing the traveler is way in the
closet.
- He is attracted to the piano playing but not the sexuality of a high school girl. She
sits on her bed provocatively and he is as if blind. In his car she offers oral sex and he
is repulsed.
- He goes to his death in the electric chair for the murder of the gay salesman, a crime
he did not commit, without defending himself. He lives in a world where self-expression is
circumscribed and in his case, in his mind, impossible. He welcomes death, after which he
believes he may be free to speak his nature. The person to whom he shall speak is his wife
(dead before him) whom he cared for but with whom he was sexually incompatible.
The Man Who Wasn’t There is an elegant etching of
repression, the searing essence of which Billy Bob Thornton epitomizes in his earnest
non-smile. He gives us a man that fails at expression on every level and yet he gives us a
man redeemed by expression. The movie is the man’s redemption. The movie is the man
coming out, telling us the journalistic facts of his story, without naming the underlying
truth or pushing the inherent pain. It would be terrible of us in the time of his
after-death still not to acknowledge the man who was there behind the door of the
closet. For the New Year let us wish the Coen brothers continued poetry.
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