The Name Might Escape, Not the Work
By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT
THE golden age of Hollywood may have passed, but these are boom times for great character actors. On the big screen and the small, in movies and in television, beautiful sad sacks like Paul Giamatti, Bryan Cranston and Steve Buscemi are running away with some of the best roles and lines going, and Viola Davis is suddenly on the verge of stardom.Reality TV and the tabloids can have the plastic people with the corrugated stomachs and corrected cheekbones. This season will have its share of muscular action heroes and sexy vampires and suffering spouses, but the richness of the new movies is more likely to lie in the ragged human details. We’ll take the sagging jaw line, the suggestion of mortality, the kinds of faces and physiques we recognize from the shopping mall, the office, maybe even the mirror.
Character actors endow the make-believe of movies with personality. They’re the performers nibbling in the corners of the screen, like the ticking bomb played by Stephen Root in "Office Space,” a basement-cubicle casualty in thick glasses, lost in a miasma of humiliation. Their faces, bodies and performances linger in your memory even if you can’t quite recall their names.
One look at the hollowed-out cheeks and scarecrow physique of William Fichtner and you know his résumé (HBO’s “Entourage,” “The Dark Knight”). Shea Whigham you may know as the comically tough-talking con in “The Lincoln Lawyer,” while the velvet-smooth Isiah Whitlock Jr. was the other insurance guy rooming with Ed Helms and John C. Reilly in “Cedar Rapids.” Fans of “The Wire” also know Mr. Whitlock as Clay Davis, the genial and corrupt Maryland politician known for his ability to stretch a common four-letter-word into an endlessly adaptable, three-beat musical phrase.
The killer in “Zodiac” was an elusive phantom whose identity consumed the lives of that movie’s triumvirate of stars (Jake Gyllenhaal , Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo ). Evidence points to Arthur Leigh Allen, a beefy, balding Everyman played by John Carroll Lynch with a chilling mix of blandness and menace. If you’ve seen “Gran Torino,” “Shutter Island” or “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” you’re likely to recognize his face, and if you were unfortunate enough to endure “Love Happens,” a forgettable 2009 romantic comedy with Aaron Eckhart and Jennifer Aniston, you will be grateful to Mr. Lynch, who played a grief-stricken participant in a self-help seminar and supplied that film’s only moments of authentic emotion.
A star imports outsized individuality into every role, playing variations on a person we believe we know. A character actor, by contrast, transforms a well-known type into an individual. In “The Descendants,” Alexander Payne’s soon-to-be-released film (Nov. 18), Judy Greer , best known for kooky-friend roles in romantic comedies, makes a strong, poignant impression in a handful of scenes opposite George Clooney playing a fairly tangential character: the wife of the man Mr. Clooney’s character believes his wife had an affair with. Whether clueless, bewildered or tearful, she shifts the film’s center of gravity and alters its emotional chemistry: Ms. Greer reminds Mr. Clooney’s character and the audience mesmerized by his star power that it is not all about him.
Screenwriters don’t always give much thought to the feelings and aspirations of the zany co-worker, the flaky best friend, the low-level expendable criminal, the assistant D.A. or the doting or disapproving mother. But if Mom is played by Donna Murphy (“Higher Ground”) or Kathy Baker (to be seen in “Machine Gun Preacher,” opening Friday and “Take Shelter,” Sept. 30) — or Lois Smith (“Please Give”) or Celia Weston (“Knight and Day”) in a more grandmotherly register — our familiarity may grow into interest, our interest may blossom into sympathy and, without our necessarily knowing why, our emotional stake in the story may shift and deepen. An otherwise disposable character takes on the complexity of a real person. Give that actor a few good lines, and suddenly the character in question can become a tragic figure within the confines of a single, haunting scene, like the melancholic jazzman played by Barry Shabaka Henley, who meets his fate with the soft pops of a silencer in Michael Mann’s “Collateral.”
Movies tell the same stories over and over (boy meets girl, good fights evil), so it’s no surprise that character actors are often asked to traffic in stereotypes, ethnic and otherwise. The hardworking funnyman Ken Jeong, best known from his squirm-inducing roles in “The Hangover” comedies as the deranged giggling drug dealer Mr. Chow, walks and sometimes swishes a dangerous line as the Asian fop whose effeminacy and eccentricity inspire both honest and unsettling laughs. It’s impossible to know if Mr. Jeong’s in on the joke, just as it’s often hard to know what the joke is: that his characters are funny because of their eccentricities or because they’re Asian men and are therefore “exotic,” effeminate and all the noxious rest.
For a good actor, a stereotype can become an opportunity for subversion, whether scripted or not. African-American and Latina women have been typecast as maids since the silent era, but the tradition of turning those roles inside out — of communicating the humanity of marginal, taken-for-granted servants — stretches from Louise Beavers in the 1934 “Imitation of Life” and Hattie McDaniel in “Gone With the Wind,” to Adriana Barraza in “Babel” and Ms. Davis in one of this summer’s hits, “The Help.” Ms. Davis has long been one of the best character actresses, and few other performers around could snatch a movie from Meryl Streep as nimbly as Ms. Davis did in “Doubt,” her quiet intensity making Ms. Streep’s thick Bronx accent sound very loud. A star on the verge, Ms. Davis is having a much-deserved breakthrough moment that will last until the next Oscars.
“You can have a weak, utterly bad script, and a good cast will turn it into a good picture,” the director John Ford said. That’s why, while the studios picked the stars, he chose the lived-in faces and unmelodious voices that define his work as much as the mesas of his westerns and the towering figure of John Wayne. The film critic Tag Gallagher nicely observed that Ford’s films, like those of Howard Hawks, could be described as “a series of skits by character actors” and much the same can be said of the movies of Judd Apatow, a difference being that some of his favorites, including Seth Rogen, Jason Segal and Jonah Hill, broke out early from the ranks of bit players to become supporting players, headliners, even stars.
Not every character actor breaks into the majors, moving from the sidelines to the center as the camera, filmmakers and audiences take note. It takes something extra, the ability to hold the screen, not just embroider around its edges, and it helps of course if you have a patron like Mr. Apatow. Just a few years ago Mr. Hill, who costars in “Moneyball” (opening Friday) with Brad Pitt — one of the few real Hollywood stars around — was playing a bit part in Mr. Apatow’s “40-Year-Old Virgin” as an earnest young man anxiously trying to buy a pair of glitter high-heel platform boots at an eBay store. Seven years, many movies and lost pounds later, Mr. Hill has eased comfortably into supporting player mode, his recent weight loss perhaps an indication that like his sometime colleague, Mr. Rogen, he is looking to shed his fat and funny tag to become a utility player.
There have always been Hollywood stars who looked more like character actors than glamour gods and goddesses, though in the past their names were changed from Emanuel Goldberg to Edward G. Robinson and more than a few noses were bobbed. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Hollywood and the new let-it-all-hang-out realism meant that there was more room for different kinds of faces — like those belonging to Dustin Hoffman, Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould — who with their shaggy looks and hair would once have been relegated to a few lines, a walk-on or, at best, ethnic types. A durable star since the 1970s, Mr. Hoffman is essentially a character actor writ large, commanding attention by disappearing into his roles while also playing someone we recognize as a “Dustin Hoffman” type.
Traditional beauties like Mr. Pitt still have the advantage of course; that’s why the industry keeps trying to turn Ryan Reynolds into a major movie star. Mr. Pitt was a terrible star in his younger days and seemed to enter a narcoleptic haze when called to carry movies like “Meet Joe Black.” He came alive in tiny if crucial roles in movies like “12 Monkeys,” where as a twitchy, wildly gesticulating Looney Tunes of a mental patient he leaped around as if joyously liberated from the burdens of stardom. Johnny Depp has turned a plum character role, the dandyish pirate captain Jack Sparrow, into one of the best-paying gigs in contemporary movies, raking in millions with wildly exaggerated gestures and eyeliner and playing a role that now seems definitively Depp.
In the end the greatest difference between big stars and character actors may have more to do with fame than craft. As the ranks of large-scale, old-style movie stars continues to dwindle — and as more and more actors migrate between large screen and small, between franchise pictures and indie passion project — it is possible to imagine a vast democracy of talent taking shape. What James Joyce once said about his characters surely applies to ours: Here comes everybody.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/movies/in-praise-of-character-actors.html
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