ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE CRAFT OF ACTING

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The article below appears in The Wall Street Journal. I found it here today, on Keith Davis' great site. I did not post its title as it appears in the WSJ because the title is "hogwash." Much of the article is also "hogwash." It does, however, point to an important aspect about the evolution of craft of acting. If Mr. Thomson had more knowledge of that craft he might have actually written something insightful. Because he's onto something but its source is far from the point of his misguided article.

In life, we act all the time. Brando said this, it was his mantra. That insight very much helped Marlon Brando be the genius actor that he was. He understood that "to pretend" is reflexive to the human condition.

"To pretend" is an aspect of "flight behavior" as in "to fight or fly." We all often "fly" by "pretending."

Very few actors understand what this means to our craft. Instead we can spend a great deal of time striving to be "honest" when humans, in fact, often strive for something else.

Here goes:

Most actors today fall into the trap of a false reflection of human behavior. This result is a by product of the great emphasis placed on the authentic expression of feelings within the Stanislavsky tradition, a tradition within which I belong and adore.

The acting that I'm talking about, is a kind of acting whereby the characters portrayed all try very hard to be very honest and authentic with one another. The actor striving for authentic emotion and action creates a situation whereby their performance does not ring true. Because the human behaviors of life most often disguise our feelings and intentions from each other, (see Persona).

We are all always wearing the social mask.

Authentic human emotion is what audiences the world over resonate with while viewing an actors performance. Stanislavsky's success is without question. His positive influence on the craft of acting is beyond dispute. The question is not whether his work was a masterpiece, but rather, can the critic recognize a masterpiece. (Though granted, rightfully, Stanislavsky's work it's not everyone's cup of tea.)

However, what so many of us forget is that human beings are also very afraid to let others know what we feel and think, most of the time. So we are always pretending to feel and think something different from what is really going on.

If this dimension is missing from a performance, guess what . . . the acting lacks a ring of truth. So much of this is going on that few of us even notice what I'm talking about. We tend to accept that in drama everyone is striving to be sincere with one another. Which is nothing like what goes on between people in our daily lives.

Mr. Thompson, has a point, but it's not the point he is trying to make. He quite accurately picks up the falseness in performances that reek of "how honest and deeply I feel the character's feelings," but misses that having evolved to a place whereby most all actors strive for authentic emotion, in our acting tradition, at the same time, we must also understand that human beings also exert much effort in hiding those emotions from one another, behind our social mask.

For example: Why in the world would I tell you that I think that I may be full of shit as I write this, and that I'm afraid of what a reader might think about what I'm writing, and self-conscious about that I used the word "shit" to make my point; or that where it says "hogwash" above, I really first wrote "bullshit," which is what I really think?

(One of Meryl Streep's great influences was Robert Lewis, as "Method" an actor as you will ever find. He had at least two nervous breakdowns before the age of 30, related to dredging up emotions from his past. If you read the article below, you'll see how Thompson's use of Ms. Steep to make his point is absurd.)

More information than you wanted?

Who has the time for all of these explanations?

We just don't have the time in our unrehearsed daily lives to let people in on our human frailties and insecurities . . . so, we "act." And I rarely see this huge aspect of human behavior reflected today in even our best actors' performances.

One exception: Bill Murry's performance in "Lost in Translation." A performance that shows us how much we all act throughout the course of our day. We all put on our best face for each situation to get what we want.

Thanks for reading. The article below is interesting nonetheless.

Enjoy!
José Angel Santana

By DAVID THOMSON

Something odd is happening to our actors. No one seems to talk about it, but it's there, and it has to do with our uneasiness over "sincerity." Now, we'd like people to tell us the truth—whether our president or our spouse—yet we find it hard to trust "sincerity." After 100 years and all those movies, wide eyes and an unwavering look too often seem like a proof of acting.

Everett Collection : Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

This line of thought set in a few days ago when I went to see "The Box." Why did I go, when I guessed that it was going to turn a seductive overture into a terrible disappointment? For two reasons: "The Box" is the new work from writer-director Richard Kelly, whose first picture, "Donnie Darko," a dark and disconcerting film about high school, is something you really should see.

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Everett : James Dean in 'East of Eden'

My other reason was, quite simply, Frank Langella. You see, I had been relishing the television commercials for "The Box" where Mr. Langella, elegantly dressed in gray, playing a man named Arlington Steward, arrives at a tidy, happy suburban house (with some money worries) and tells the wife and mother (Cameron Diaz) that he has an offer for them. An offer they can refuse. It's a box with a red button: press the button and you get $1 million in cash—but someone, somewhere, dies. Though half his face has been stripped away by lightning—don't ask, just study the wreckage—Mr. Langella is so suave and serene that I was in love. I wanted to see the film just to hear his gracious speech, to see his Vatican-like politesse and to feel the assurance with which he offered his lurid bargain.

Once Mr. Langella has made his proposal, the film slips downhill at an accelerating rate. But I'm glad I went because 10 minutes or so of Mr. Langella being suave, weary and gray is as good as hearing James Mason talk in "Lolita," or Claude Rains in "Casablanca"—these are all actors who represent a spirit of lovely, hopeless intelligence. Part of the power of acting is that we like being with certain people. It's voice as much as look, and it's the confidence that distinguishes a great teacher, an elected president or a movie star—we believe them, even if they're uttering hogwash. As a younger man, mind you, Mr. Langella wasn't always this happy. He has found it in late middle age.

Everett Collection: EAST OF EDEN, James Dean (1955)

In addition, I had just seen Steven Soderbergh's "The Informant!" This is a far more satisfying film in which Matt Damon plays a young executive at Archer Daniels Midland who is a liar, a fraud, a con and a pretender. Mr. Damon plays the part in a glaring toupee, but with immense verve and panache. You're hooked by his act.

He's been around already for nearly 20 years, and once you could look at him as a kid who wanted to be nice-looking but who had a faintly squashed or shifty face. That's what made him memorable in a film like "Courage Under Fire," where he played a jittery soldier with a bad secret. And that's what encouraged a certain, parental protectiveness towards him in the audience for films like "Good Will Hunting" and "The Rainmaker" where he was keen to be a good, honest guy.

Then something happened: it was "The Talented Mr. Ripley," where Anthony Minghella cast him as Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, a social climber who would love to live like the irresponsible heir Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) and who makes a start by killing Dickie so that he can take over the part. "The Talented Mr. Ripley" freed something in Mr. Damon—naked pretense (you could call it lying, as much as acting). All at once, he owned up to his tricky face.

Acting is storytelling, and any child knows the delight in distinguishing a "real" story about what Dad did at work, and a fantasy—a pretend job—about what he wished he had done. (Of course, there are family situations where neither Dad nor the kid can tell the difference—and that's dysfunction.) A culture of acting is disconcerting, too, but everyone understands the basic energy in acting—let's pretend—because it's the same energy that carries us to the movies.

So I looked at Mr. Langella and Mr. Damon and the penny dropped: The Method is over. In the years after World War II there was an immense revolution in American acting. It was not a cultural awakening. War and its revelations of human nature had exposed the Hollywood ethos (the flawless hero, the happy ending, the feeling that life was swell) as simply not good enough. The American movies of the 1930s and the war years include many of our greatest, but their basic assumption—that the fantasy must prevail—was so much less tenable after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. A part of us, at least, wanted honesty, the gritty truth, and a more realistic or "grown-up" attitude to life.

Everett Collection: James Stewart and Donna Reed in 'It's a Wonderful Life' (1946)

This was a moment when American acting was the cheerful showtime of Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Then with startling speed it was challenged by what was quickly called Method acting. This was an approach based in the teaching of the Russian, Konstantin Stanislavsky, the institution of the Actors Studio (set up in 1947), and by the example of director Elia Kazan. In practice, the Method was exemplified by Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Rod Steiger and others (it was always male-heavy) and by plays and films like "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Death of a Salesman," "On the Waterfront" and "East of Eden."

It was a way of acting in which the players were urged to discover their characters in their own emotional history. It was pledged to sincerity and emotional truth, and it turned film-going into a profound psychological ordeal, and it was antagonistic to the old English style of acting in which young players were taught elocution, fencing, manners and pretending. This school included the English masters Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud as well as their English or Anglophile cousins in film—Cary Grant, Ronald Colman, Ray Milland and Bob Hope.

There were excesses or mannerisms in the Method, things like your not being able to hear what was being said; and its concomitant, the habit of the actors in forsaking the original "text" for the improvisations that came into their earnest heads and which were beyond reproach just because they had become their characters.

It's hard to exaggerate the impact of the Method. It was full of good work, but it was above all, sincere, American, robust and manly. Writing shifted to accommodate the search for a "true self." Thus, in "On the Waterfront," Mr. Brando wants to recover the crushed spirit in Terry Malloy the failed boxer, while in "East of Eden" the "bad boy" Cal Trask yearns to gain the paternal love he deserves. These models were imitated not just in movies, but in countless television dramas or episodes in which the story turned on so-and-so's rediscovery of his damaged human nature. It was quite close to psychotherapy and the Method, soul-searching and getting at your "process" all worked in harness. Almost as a matter of course, would-be actors went into therapy.

It was a rich moment and it gave us classics. I grew up shaped by Messrs. Brando, Clift and Dean and by the passing passion for emotional honesty. For a moment, I'm sure, I believed it was not just true, but The Truth. So it's important to admit that the histrionics of the years before 1920 (I mean Lillian Gishery—and Gish was great) seemed as true then as Mr. Brando did in 1954. What I'm suggesting is that the desperate intensity of the Method era is passing (like all fashions). It became stale, tedious and hollow just because it was employed automatically. (I fear that some Method geniuses—Robert De Niro and Al Pacino—have given too many dreary, monotonous performances in recent years that spoil the memory of their early fineness.)

The Method worked until the '70s—the first two parts of "The Godfather" are its triumph. It is alive and well (or begging for pity) in the films of John Cassavetes. Until recently, there was a television show with James Lipton (an old-fashioned hambone English-style actor) asking us to celebrate the Actors Studio.

Sean Penn is a steadfast Methodist still, but Johnny Depp, it seems, has an itch to pretend if only people would write comedy for him. The most influential actor in America today is not a man. It's Meryl Streep, whose stress on skill has made her one of the most glorious of pretenders. Method actors take their roles home with them: Once in they can't get out—Vivien Leigh nearly went crazy playing Blanche Du Bois. I'm sure that Ms. Streep feels the other self at home, but no one supposes that she was "doing" Julia Child all the time. She was nimble enough to go from one to the other with professional speed.

Still, for lack of a crucial turning point, here is a test case: Compare Anthony Hopkins in "Nixon," from 1995, with Frank Langella in "Frost/Nixon," which came out 13 years later. Oliver Stone's "Nixon" seems to me an honorable, strenuous failure in which Mr. Stone tries to get at the poisoned roots of a man he believed to be wicked. Mr. Hopkins was a great actor then (some barking at the moon has set in lately) and he sweated his head off to get at the psychic zero of Nixon. It was heavy-duty acting, and the harder it labored the more it left veteran Nixon-watchers (on TV) smiling sadly at a missed boat.

Whereas, the 2008 film "Frost/Nixon," from a play and a script by Peter Morgan, is a very different type of work. Instead of plunging Nixon into a search for his own truth it can live by the far more accurate daily reality—that Nixon was a connoisseur of his own fraud and a constant actor who had long since forgotten truth in the beguiling task of playing himself. The film is very interesting in that Michael Sheen gives a wickedly brilliant impersonation of David Frost, while Mr. Langella was encouraged to be himself and to evoke Nixon. By the film's close, it's a great charm that Langella manages to reveal Nixon by being himself.

The film flourishes because it has trusted Mr. Langella the pretender. I don't mean to say that this new, unofficial school (it has no studio, no text and little public understanding) has advanced as the Method did. But once you feel the seductive intrigue in pretending, then you begin to see it more and more—look at George Clooney (at his best, playing poker with the audience), the teasing stance of Robert Downey Jr., John Malkovich (daring us to find a way of liking him), Kevin Spacey (the limping Verbal Kint itching to turn into the strolling Keyser Söze). And others? Just think about it, and then see that this school stretches back to people like Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Bob Hope, actors who never had any intention of letting us catch them personally.

But just as the Method needed script material about the search for human truth, so this new cool pretending is founded on a way of looking at the world that says you can't trust anyone, can you? It suggests that—for the moment at least—we have given up on self-knowledge and feel ourselves being massaged or directed by most of our presidents, and nearly all of our eternal performers from Johnny Carson to David Letterman. (Secret principle: If you're going to last on television, you need to be mysterious or withheld.) Presidents move us from time to time, just as hosts make us smile, but most of them warn us that we're in a play or a game. Think of Ronald Reagan, the master, the Olivier of ordinariness, never exactly an actor but a nice guy playing an actor.

—David Thomson is the author of "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film" and "Have You Seen?" His short biographies of Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart will be published next month by Faber & Faber as part of the Great Stars series.

Related: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."