THE ACTOR, THE ROLE, THE VOTE

Reading the long short list of possible Academy Award nominees that Jack Mathews discussed in Calendar earlier this week, I wondered again, as I do every year at this time, just how you measure acting.

If you’re one of the 2,000-plus members of the acting branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who will vote the 20 nominations, how do you measure the blazing, once-in-a-lifetime collision of part and person by a newcomer who may or may not be a full-fledged member of the club?

I think, for example, of Dexter Gordon, the jazz musician who has spent a lifetime preparing for his role as a jazz musician in Bertrand Tavernier’s “Round Midnight.”

It is a performance, no mistake about that: lines, rehearsals, blockings, retakes, arguments over motivations, choices and fidelity to the invented character, all the aspects of the actor’s craft.

And it is Gordon’s movie, triumphantly so. Without him it is merely a story. I can’t bring to mind a non-musical actor who could have done “Round Midnight” and make you say, “Yeah, that’s the way it is.” You have to have blown too many choruses through a late-night fug of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes to get it this right.

But maybe the point to be noted by the voters is that it’s also impossible to bring to mind another jazz musician who could play a jazz musician with such laconic wit, world-worn fatigue and persisting passion for what he does. There may turn out to have been five better male portraits in 1986, but I haven’t seen them yet.

And what will the voters conclude about Marlee Matlin, the severely hearing-impaired actress who speaks not a single intelligible word in “Children of a Lesser God,” and who yet gives a performance of dynamic range and quiet depth such as you might not see--let alone hear--in a very long time.

Matlin is an actress, who had done a lesser part in “Lesser God” on stage. Hers is a performance, too, and her earlier life (she was 19 playing 25 when she did the movie) was less troubled than her character’s. Still, it is the congruence of the role and the life--actress and character coming to terms with a cruel jest of God--that gives “Children of a Lesser God” its double-barreled impact.

Hers, too, was the role by which the film succeeds or fails. It succeeds, and there is finally nothing more that can be asked of the performer.

The best acting, it is always said, is invisible; it doesn’t draw attention to itself as acting. If you see it, it’s not working. But then, as an actor complained the other day, “It looks so natural they say, ‘Ah, well, he’s just playing himself.’ ”

It should be engraved somewhere that, outside the documentary (and now and then, even within the documentary), performance is performance. You don’t get to play yourself after the first rehearsal; beyond that it’s performance, no matter how closely the character is tailored to your measurements. It’s master shots, close-ups, over-the-shoulder shots, retakes, all the impedimenta of the form. John Wayne may have got to play John Wayne, but it was not quite so simple as being John Wayne.

When a performance comes along that is seemingly natural and also restrained and largely internalized and implicit, you do wonder if the voters will pass it by as insufficiently histrionic. What happens if you don’t chew any scenery?

In “That’s Life,” Julie Andrews finally, at the end of the picture, gets to blow off some steam and scald Jack Lemmon as her husband for his self-pitying, self-obsessed gloom and ceaseless kvetching. Until then, she has been the still center of all the storms about her, concealing her desperate fears about the results of a biopsy, all too sure the news will be a death sentence, yet meanwhile bucking up children with problems and soothing a childish husband with a real enough if unwarranted mid-life crisis.

It is an extremely affecting performance and it holds the film together, as it has to. Andrews quite subtly conceals the character’s fears with a show of bravery which is not the kind of stiff-upper-lip nobility that in real life often demands to be recognized, but which protects her from the exhausting sympathy of those around her.

We are in trauma time amid the Malibu elite in “That’s Life,” and the film’s slapstick trimmings are as gross as the core issues of the film are universal and acute. The dichotomy may have turned off some voters, as it has some critics. Yet the Andrews’ portrayal, in its power of implication and its quiet complexity, is another impressive piece of work by an actress who has left Mary Poppins, role and image, way behind.

But the difficulties of the academy choices are boggling: the comic turn versus the tragic thunder; the lonely shining role within the excruciating bomb; the brilliantly written part versus the stiff stereotype that had to be wrung like a stone to produce the blood of life. There are, too, the bewildering numbers of supporting types (will someone remember, I pray, Lloyd Nolan’s last glorious outing amid all the other splendors of “Hannah and Her Sisters”?)

It’s useful to set up the voters’ difficulties, of course; it creates grounds for disagreeing later, however the nominations turn out.