Who Really Are the Best Actors?

Often around this time of year, someone tries to ice down our Oscar fever with a disdainful reminder that the movies are not an ongoing Olympiad and that it’s demeaning to assume artists can be graded like ice skaters and pole vaulters.

Occasionally a George C. Scott or Marlon Brando will even boycott the Academy Awards altogether. In a way they’re right, if we fall in the trap of thinking that the people who don’t win are therefore losers. Hollywood is a company town, and there are political and economic pressures subliminally at work on Academy Award judgment that have little to do with aesthetics.

Still, we all entertain notions of good, better and best in everything. As far as movies are concerned, it’s still the actor who moves and intrigues us, and embodies our views of ourselves and our conception of the world.

How do we really decide who’s a good actor and who isn’t? What does the actor do to convince us? What specifically does he use to trick open the combination of his character? For example, as well as anywhere, Laurence Olivier expresses Richard III’s implacably warring heart in his death scene, where Richard’s muscles still twitch long after their owner has been fatally cut down. In “Wall Street,” Michael Douglas’ rapacious corporate raider, lord of his computer banks and information-guzzling staff, stretches at the end of his successful office day in a feline, satiated gesture that suggests a predator ready for a well-fed snooze. With that intuitive gesture, Douglas says as much about his character as anything suggested by dialogue, story premise or directorial circumstance.

Douglas should win the Academy Award for best actor. I think Cher will win for best actress in “Moonstruck.” But these are not, to my way of thinking, the best performances of those nominated (I’ve seen all of them), not because they’re not good, but because their circumstance is limited.

My favorites are Sally Kirkland in “Anna” and Marcello Mastroianni in “Dark Eyes,” because they have a larger and more complex ambiance to draw on--they front fuller orchestral works.

“Dark Eyes” and “Anna” are European entries. By contrast, they show what Hollywood’s on-line corporate mentality has leached out of American movies: a sense of the universe of individual character. It’s a paradox that Europe, having been overrun by so many forms of authoritarianism--beginning with monarchy and ending with various forms of tank-tread socialism--should maintain such an appreciative eye for the eccentric individual (“Moonstruck’s” cartoon edges are softened by Canadian director Norman Jewison).

The Story of ‘Anna’

“Anna” states the case most succinctly. It’s based on the true story of Elizbieta Tchizevska, a famous Polish actress who fled Eastern Bloc thuggery for New York only to have the gold yanked from her teeth by American cultural fascism. Anna is befriended by Krystyna (Paulina Porizkova), a homeland waif whose Eve Harrington claws are kept winsomely tucked away until it’s time to make her move. “Invent your past,” Anna counsels her. It’s the American way. But Krystyna is not imaginative enough for invention; she appropriates Anna’s past, including Anna’s dead child, her bitterly estranged husband, the loutish Soviet official who urinated on her nation’s flag.

Anna watches Krystyna tell the story on a TV interview show, her jaw slack with disbelief. Krystyna’s impeccably beautiful face, a creamy gorgeous blank, could not possibly mask such experience. The TV hostess never challenges her. Nobody challenges her. She’s too far out into the self-fulfillingly prophetic jet-stream of fame. America watches, the way fish look out of an aquarium, its disbelief terminally suspended.

This is a story whose rancid injustice cries for the banal hysteria of a TV Movie of the Week. But except for a dubious ending, producer-director Yurek Bogayevicz’s sense of irony is too keen. And Kirkland’s performance is so shaded and particularized that we never lose sight of the person to whom this is all happening.

She shows us Anna’s mainspring early, after we first see her throwing herself together for an audition date for which she’s nearly overslept. She looks pale, pulpy (Kirkland gained 15 pounds for the role), miserably hung-over. Once onstage however, we see the ashen beauty that must have distinguished her in Czechoslovakia. The auditioners are asked to describe their erotic memories to the dumpy and nondescript interviewers out front. Anna refuses. She’ll read in character, but she won’t play a peep show. When she learns she’s got the job--as understudy to the entire cast--Kirkland gives a small, stunned inaudible gasp, as though she’s been struck at the base of the skull. An understudy ?! The humiliation of this once-famous actress is unbearable (it’s the first of many, all of which Kirkland plays differently. Her whole performance is a variation on the theme of a generous-spirited woman being humiliated).

It passes. Anna has been through too much to be thrown by anything less than a teen crackhead with an Uzi in her face demanding sex and money. This is a woman whose bones are filled with an Old World wisdom of making do. Kirkland might’ve taken Anna in one of two directions, either as a lovably furry urban neurotic in search of a chuckling someone to wipe her runny nose, or as a new world Mother Courage filling the streets of upper Manhattan with a Slavic dirge. Kirkland’s Anna is an amiable stoic whose inner character is fused mollusk-like to a rock of spiritual resistance, occasionally lightened by a great spontaneous horselaugh. Her Anna is blowzy, a bit of a slob--you can almost smell the fetid mix of sweat and damp in her clothes--and easily capable of the forgiving acceptance that’s the lubricant of everyday life.

This Anna is not a psychological exhibitionist who lavishes on everyone within earshot the earnest spittle of her feelings. She keeps her counsel. On a Sunday afternoon, she stands apart from her divorced lover’s farewell to his young son. Kirkland stuffs her hands in her coat pocket and turns her back. Her lover is a bit of a jerk, but she’ll never have a kid again. Kirkland understands Anna’s indirect style of address. She looks in the mirror one day and says to Krystyna, “Go see Baskin” (a famous director who’s had the hots for the underaged Krystyna). She isn’t just giving career advice. It’s her way of telling us that we get old in a hurry.

Kirkland’s Anna takes a lot of blows--she shows up for a soiree at her prominent ex-husband’s apartment all gussied up and looking like a Gabor sister without the cheekbones. When he rebuffs her, she looks as though she’s caught a bowling ball in the sternum. As time goes by, Kirkland’s face becomes increasingly impassive--Anna is not a complainer. When finally she witnesses Krystyna’s psychic embezzlement of her past on TV, we see in her face the shock of a character who’s been coolly eviscerated. Kirkland is mute with rage. At last we understand that Anna’s sole form of self-regeneration was the memory of what was truly hers, her own experience. But nothing has prepared her for this new and unexpectedly thorough form of American totalitarianism, where they can steal your memory and play it out on TV with someone else in the starring role.

It’s unfortunate that at the last minute the movie is taken away from the characters who carried it all the way along by staging a fake ending shot from a helicopter. It deprives us of the sense of completeness from seeing a great performance played out to the end. But this is a portrayal people will be talking about for a long time. Aside from the appalling story it tells, “Anna” is a tribute to the actor’s genius for absorbing someone else’s experience and turning it out into something that makes us wince. How, one wonders, would the real Tchizevska have played it?

Comedy or Tragedy?

Anton Chekhov kept insisting that his plays were comedies. Everyone else (including a lot of people today) considered them tragedies. Had the word absurdist been coined at the turn of the century, everyone would’ve understood. Into the breach steps Marcello Mastroianni in “Dark Eyes,” a characteristically gentle tale, based on several Chekhov stories, in which we first meet Mastroianni’s Romano drinking alone at table in the empty dining room of a cruise ship, circa 1903. His thick hair is matted; his cheeks bear the radishy splotches of the heavy drinker; his kindly eyes are grave with the memory of a life that has become a silent ruin.

In his autobiographical tale to a compatriot stranger, he tells of his fruitless ambition as an architect, his sterile marriage into an aristocratic Italian family that bores him and barely tolerates him in return, and of his lengthy chase deep into the heart of Mother Russia in search of a married woman named Anna whom he met at a spa.

Mastroianni has never shown himself a more elegant farceur , and in Chekhov--who understood better than anyone how vanity, ambition, yearning, disappointment and failure are all drawn in the same breath, day in and day out--he’s made a match. In the scene used in the movie’s trailer, we see Romano wade with impeccably earnest aplomb into the spa’s mud bath, which comes up to the waist of his white on white outfit, to retrieve Anna’s hat. An over-polite aesthete (and philanderer) wading in the muck: It’s such a perfect summary image of Romano’s state that Mastroianni has the good sense to play it absolutely straight, deadpan. The gesture itself is sufficiently comedic. To do anything else would put him at an ironic distance from Romano’s foolishness, or blunt his sincerity.

Two or three other things I’ll remember about Mastroianni’s Romano: The swift delicate mix of expressions with which he greets his new-found acquaintance in the dining room--a blend of enthusiastic politesse, Pan-like silliness (an indirect comment on Romano’s loneliness), decorous cheer and, in those milliseconds when Mastroianni’s expression turns inward with an introspective lowering of the eyes, the ravaged sadness of someone whose life has been left somewhere Out There, in the ship’s wake.

In search of Anna, Romano’s long Russian trek is made on the pretext of introducing a new unbreakable Italian glass, a large pane of which he trundles from city to city, official to bureaucratic official, all of whom are too terrified of responsibility to sign a purchase order. After a couple of scenes of this, Mastroianni carries us along in the joke without breaking character, without slipping us a crumb under the table. One official has no ink with which to sign. Another has ink, but shows no hands with which to hold a pen (Mastroianni holds the pen in mid-air, and gazes with inscrutable disbelief at the official’s empty sleeves). Nothing in his elegant forebearance tells us what he really thinks of these fools, though in the subtle tilt of his head we get a hint, confirmed later when, having located Anna’s whereabouts, he slings that damned pane out of his carriage into a river.

Lastly, Romano’s recollection of the trip home when he’s gloriously filled with the thought of reuniting with Anna, and his carriage is overtaken and passed one morning by a mirthful troupe of Gypsies singing balalaika music. In the ship, Mastroianni raises his chin slightly, as though the memory bears a fragrance. Everyone’s high spirits, the still-intact (but soon to fade) hope of an epic lover’s reunion, the shroud of morning mist slowly drawn like a wedding gown across the eastern mountains by the rising sun--Romano recalls it all, looking into his glass. Unlike Kirkland’s Anna, his memories are still his own, and they fill up his eyes with a bittersweet glow.

I’ve never seen more music in a human face.

High-Powered Douglas

Gordon Gekko--what a name! It describes an evil that lives on long after the good has been interred with “Wall Street’s” well-intended bones. Michael Douglas plays Gekko, the ruthless corporate raider whose every pore seems oiled with power lust, and he tears into the role with the gleaming rapacity of a hammerhead shark.

It’s a pity the movie is so freighted by Douglas’ performance--Charlie Sheen’s Gekko heir-apparent, undone by a suspicious attack of conscience, is so lightweight that he doesn’t look as though he could make it past office boy. To keep us interested, a great movie, like a great play, needs the wrestle of a strong adversarial relationship, which isn’t forthcoming here.

But so what? Douglas plays the most powerful and cunning screen villain since George C. Scott in “The Hustler” (they both even share a Centurion chin), and it appears he’s tapped into a lifetime of personal observations of high-level power types in action--the movie looks as though it could easily have been transferred to studio executive suites in Hollywood.

Part of Douglas’ authority is gained from jumping the rhythm of his scenes, which makes Gekko seem more forceful and peremptory. He brings people into his tempo. The operative in this performance is calculated impatience. Douglas’ Gekko relishes his power; he has the fierce gaze of the demagogue and his jowls look plumped with privilege. Writer-director Oliver Stone may have conceived of Gekko as a contemporary force of evil (“I create nothing. I own”) but Douglas plays him as someone who lives for the adrenal rush of the high-stakes power game, and treats challenge with a welcome, combative sneer. It’s easy to see that this kind of insatiable Richard III vitality couldn’t rest well under conventional moral constraint.

It’s not a one-note performance either. In the scene where he stands between the assembly of Teldar Paper stockholders and the Politburo formation of vice presidents lined up on the dais, Douglas makes his Ivan Boesky “Greed is good” speech sound incontestably logical; he’s a low-key Goebbels with a Pat Riley haircut selling his program for future betterment.

Douglas’ Gekko is that rarity on screen, a character whose passionate liveliness makes everyone else in the movie look inert (except for the icy shrewd Terence Stamp, of whom we should have seen more). At one point, Gekko jokes about being inhuman, but to me he was more human than anyone in the movie, since most of the others (except Martin Sheen’s character) conceived of themselves in even narrower terms. I like Douglas’ absence of sentimentality too. Standing on a Long Island beach one dawn, his acquisitive mind favorably compares the heavy sky and turbulent sea to any painting ever done. Douglas’ face looks washed clean of its anger and cunning in this moment that brings him as close as he’ll ever come to inner peace. The pity isn’t that no one is there to share it with him; it’s that he’s fixed it so no one would want to.

In Tune With Cher

“Moonstruck” could easily dissolve in the comic opera fuss of its character’s eccentricities, except that Cher is right in tune with its intent (as far as her character’s concerned) as a parable of sexual awakening. That’s far from a novel discovery, but it’s the uncommon strength of Cher’s personality that makes the struggle worthwhile.

In the beginning, when it looks as though she’s been prematurely consigned to the permanent twilight of widowhood, Cher’s sullen, punctilious, exacting mouth and her vehement sense of propriety are an indirect comment on tamped-down sexual hysteria. That she can be so easily tumbled is more of a surprise to her than anyone else, and it’s comical to see this woman who has been so insistent on control become swept away.

What gives this portrayal its odd, affecting angle is Cher’s underlying street toughness (that’s no dainty slap she gives the importunate Nicolas Cage when he says “I love you” and she angrily replies “Snap out of it!”). For as much as she’s been fussed-over as a singing star and fashion plate down the years, Cher is not a narcissistic performer. Her earlier career in music and her introduction to acting by way of the stage have obviously served her well, because these forms require ensemble play--unlike a career begun in TV and movies, where the performer’s concern tends to be with the whereabouts of the camera and not the human expression.

Cher locks in on whomever she’s playing with like a fighter cutting off the ring, her expressions intensified by the Modigliani sharpness of her face. She pressures everyone around her to be as economical and precise as she is; she sticks with the beat of a scene (one of the more dismal legacies of the Actors Studio style, which dominated American technique for so long, was the device of playing behind the beat, which the better actor used for introspective effect but the lesser actor used merely to call attention to himself and gum up the forward movement of his role).

Another actress might have made Loretta’s transformation from waspy priggishness to glowing sexual opulence an occasion for a lavish star turn, the object of the whole role, and indeed one of the visual pleasures of the movie is watching Cher ripen into supernal beauty, like one of those fast-film sequences of a maturing tropical flower (when she gazes at Cage at the opera, she looks tipsy with pleasure). But this doesn’t seem a giddy sexual flare-up that’ll disappear with middle-class domestic constancy; it’s an adjunct to the passionate nature of someone who speaks with her whole body. And Cher’s blunt, percussive Brooklyn accent, used with more exaggeration than anyone else in the cast, undercuts the suggestion of mere prettiness.

The ‘Ironweed’ Bums

Memory of most of the rest of the nominated performances will vanish once the last Oscar is handed out for the night. Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep as Frances and Helen, two bums scuffling along the wintry streets of Albany, can’t rescue themselves from “Ironweed’s” glacial pace. Had author-screenwriter William Kennedy managed to incorporate Helen’s genteel, musically glowing adolescent past into her ruined present (as he does grippingly in his book), Streep wouldn’t be stuck inside a shantytown edifice of mannerisms. She is one of our great screen technicians who tirelessly works at new designs on herself. Here she gives us tired rheumy eyes, a worn lacquered voice, lips perpetually rippling in wordless reply to lousy memories, and 15 soulful minutes of a down-and-outer’s quiet dying, brilliantly begun with an agonizing attempt at a tiny bite out of a piece of restaurant toast.

Nicholson gives us somewhat less detailed work. His reptilian eyes gaze levelly out of a smudge pot face and frame like a creature squeezed up out of an underground urban Galapagos. Nicholson’s normal pace tends toward the languid, which doesn’t help; here he never solves the movie’s inertia (unlike Tom Waits), and becomes clogged in its deadly rhythm as he trudges through his day, occasionally picking his nose. Kennedy’s book implied that one doesn’t necessarily fall into the gutter through innate degeneracy but that some people’s psychic strength is filament thin, and easily broken for good. In the movie, Nicholson and Streep are given too little to work with. One can only improvise so much.

In “Fatal Attraction,” Glenn Close does as much as she can with a role that’s been conceived as a sexual meat hook. Before the movie is overrun by its Grand Guignol hysteria, Close suggests menace by her habit of interrupting people just before they finish their sentence, or of leaving little or no space between their lines and hers--the device is a clue to her compulsiveness, her uncontrollable anger. Her line “Do you think I’m some slut you can (use) and throw in the garbage” rings with the incredulous truth of any number of angry young women (though the movie has been touted as playing on the nightmares of yuppie husbands, or any man who’s had a shrewish woman on his hands). Close slips the line in with the murderous coolness of a rifle bolt, and she has a way of stepping in front of people (Michael Douglas in this case, looking appropriately nonplussed), cutting off their path, which makes her seem even more oppressive. But the movie’s second-guessing of itself (she’ll pour acid on Douglas’ BMW but not on him), guts the character of its true horror, before she shrivels into drive-in horrifics.

The ‘News’ Team

The moment Holly Hunter did her laugh-and-cry-at-the-same-time number early in “Broadcast News,” the performance stopped dead for me; it looked too much like a sense-memory demonstration at a regional-theater acting seminar. Her role as a seasoned TV news producer, ostensibly aware of the treacherous undercurrents of her profession and of the gleam of unsheathed egos all around, suffered from an excess of pert (one can think of brightly hard-edged Washington career women, but this didn’t have the same cunning glitter). She made formal dress at an editorial awards banquet look like prom night. But Hunter is a maturing talent. Her eyes generate intelligence and warmth, and she has the gift of validating a scene by being a good listener.

I never thought William Hurt could be miscast in anything (well, maybe not a good Quasimodo or Vince Lombardi), but that’s the case in “Broadcast News” as well, where he plays a good-looking ostensible blank who works his way to the top on charm (the movie, if you recall, is a comic lament over airhead newscasters leap-frogging to national exposure over the backs of hard-digging and informed veteran reporters).

The blur in this movie has to do with the confusion between ignorance and stupidity. Much is made of the more qualified newsman’s intellectual credentials (a note Albert Brooks keeps effectively in mind as a teacher’s pet whose crayons keep getting stolen by sinister classroom forces). But any politically astute boss would keep his eye on someone who casually professes his ignorance, as Hurt does. Hurt’s reading doesn’t suggest someone aware of intellectual oxygen debt; it suggests more of Aristotle’s note on the confession of ignorance as a weapon of the wise.

Hurt’s Tom doesn’t clutter himself up with issues and answers. His subtle shift here, undermining to the movie, isn’t that he’s incapable, but that he’s uninterested. The play of humor at the edge of Hurt’s lips, the friendly shrewdness in his eyes, suggests someone who knows all your punch lines in advance, someone who can read your emotional blueprint at a glance (as he does with Holly Hunter, when he walks out of a seduction scene for a greater payoff later). Also, Hurt’s ostensibly good-looking hunk turns out to be extraordinarily self-possessed. Instead of being an empty manipulator, he gives us a consummate politician (the Reagan years have shown us that a politician need not be deeply informed as long as he can absorb an effective brief). If Hurt wins the Oscar, it’ll be a tribute to an actor’s subversion of a role.

Williams’ Wild Ride

The problem with Robin Williams’ acting--extravagantly exposed in “Good Morning, Vietnam”--is that when he’s on he’s as brilliant as a Roman candle and when he’s off he’s dead in the water. “Good Morning, Vietnam” highlights the lengthy cadenzas that have made Williams one of the most intuitive artists of our time, a comedic Nijinsky who crackles and pops and spews out all the channels of relentless media overload that erupt over us daily. But Williams hasn’t solved the boredom of acting, that is, how to express something when doing nothing. He may enjoy the relative calm of acting (he uses himself up furiously as a comedian), but he’s not yet open to the quiet discovery of sustaining devices (admittedly an introspection that the movie, which looks like Vietnam reconceived through the editorial eye of the National Lampoon, doesn’t require).

For example: Toward the end of the movie, Williams (who plays a gonzo Armed Forces Radio broadcaster in Vietnam, very loosely based on the career of Adrian Cronauer), chases a young Vietnamese named Tuan who once befriended him and has now turned out to be a Viet Cong terrorist. Williams is supposed to be enraged (the discovery of the friendship, not to mention the VC’s atrocities, has led to the loss of his job), and chases Tuan into a clearing. Williams expresses his anger by stiffening his arms at his sides and spasmodically stamping his foot, a gesture taken from his comedy treatment of petulant gays. It’s an odd borrowing, and a telling note on how easy it is for an inattentive actor to become trapped in one of his own cliches. We see it all the time. Sometimes the academy, which prizes the familiar, even votes for it.