What
makes a film? Is it the directing? Well naturally, I mean that's a given. Is it the
cinematography? Indeed it is. Is it the soundtrack? Again, spot on. All of
these are essential to a good film, and they are all essential to the telling of a story and can also be beautiful and
expressive and gloriously elaborate. But there is one other factor that has the implicit ability to make
a good film great! I am, of course talking about, the art of 'performance'...
Now the
Oxford Dictionary would have us believe performance is “the action or process of performing a task or function”…but I
(always) think differently. Performance to me is the ability to forgo and
forget oneself in order to become immersed in the body, mind and indeed the
very essence of another.
Cinema
has brought us some fantastically iconic performances in its time; there
have been Shining performances from Jack Nicholson, psychotic performances from
Christian Bale and heavyweight performances from Bobby De Niro...but for
today's class, we're going to look at some more recent standouts - a selection
of cinematic displays that are justly swathed in superlatives...
So
without further ado, let us roll camera on Where's my Seat...?'s top 5 most powerful performances
of recent years...
- Charlie Bronson (Bronson) – Tom Hardy’s captivating performance of the
notorious Charlie Bronson is bursting with contrasts, contradictions,
combustions and eye-popping unpredictability. Calm conversation is
interrupted with explosions of incomparable anger, sparked by the flint of
exaggerated paranoia. The classical chords and traditional music is
employed to fantastic effect to contrast the lead’s flammable persona, as
Hardy throws every inch of himself into the madness of truly becoming
- Detective Norman Stansfield (Leon) – This depiction of a drug-fuelled, self-serving police detective is second to none in its sheer exuberance. Gary Oldman delivers a performance that waivers intricately between the subdued (yet ever-present) psychosis of an ego-obsessed yet calculating lunatic, interspersed with vein-burstingly emphatic bursts of anger, frustration and bottom-line desperation of a man who has lied, cheated and murdered his way to the top of a now-teetering tree, and can feel the man coming a-knocking anytime soon. Desperation and greed in equal measures makes for a fascinating cocktail...
- Dickie Eklund (The Fighter) – Through all his squirrelly and frenetic idiosyncrasies, Christian Bale's 'Dickie' is a likeable, even loveable, character...his portrayal is exuberant without being over the top, serious yet humorous...and Dickie's honest and even vulnerable demeanour opens our hearts to him for being so immovably welded to the past and the glory of his youth, which drips further and further away with each bead of boxing or drug induced sweat...
- Drexl Spivey (True Romance) – As a bombastic, fast-talking, gun-toting,
culturally confused pimp and drug-dealer…Drexl might not seem to be the
obvious role for (now) middle-aged Brit Gary Oldman, but that just
demonstrates the dexterity in his abilities. In a film brimming with
stand-out performances, Oldman's bad-boy Drexl is an enthralling
portrayal of reckless abandon and callous selfishness, that sees the
audience completely lose the actor behind the man, and become solely
engrossed in the man…
- The Joker (The Dark Knight) – Well what can we say about Heath Ledger's Joker that hasn’t been said before? It is a career defining portrayal of one of the most renowned pop culture icons of all time. And Ledger didn’t just play The Joker – he absorbed him…absorbing him to the point that, as is well documented, he couldn’t shake off the effects of embodying a psychotic schizophrenic of The Joker’s nature, and was sadly found dead from an accidental overdose, apparently after trying to cope with nightmares and depression from plunging himself so deeply into the depths of the macabre. But before the story was told, Heath lived and breathed the maniac behind the mask and brought to the screen one of the most mesmerising depictions of what true, reckless insanity is like, and made sure that Ledger’s legend lives on…
