Over the Top for an Oscar

Of all the performances I have seen this year, Ellen Burstyn’s in “Requiem for a Dream” may be the most staggering--and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

In this grim drama about several forms of addiction, Burstyn plays Sara Goldfarb, a mother who goes bonkers after she gets hooked on diet pills. Beginning with an exaggerated Brooklyn accent that sounds like a bad Borscht Belt impression, this performance is a doozy. Burstyn relies on a whole bag of actor’s tricks to indicate dementia--the bulging eyes, the drooling mouth, the tremulous whimpers. Burstyn has done splendid work in the past, but everything about this performance is shrill, overbearing, sadly misconceived.

In other words, she’s a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination.

There is a certain kind of showy performance that has always polarized people. It wins awards and glowing accolades from many critics but strikes other people (admittedly a minority, but a passionate one) as the equivalent of a fingernail raked across a blackboard for an unendurable two hours. These are love-it or hate-it performances, and there is usually no middle ground.

Actors who deliver these grandstanding performances often rely on false accents, quirky vocal mannerisms or gaudy makeup; they do a lot of hysterical screaming and weeping in their blatant bid for attention. There is no shortage of recent examples of performances to die for (in more ways than one). Among those that I loathe and you may love are Bjork in “Dancer in the Dark,” Brenda Blethyn in “Little Voice,” Billy Bob Thornton in “Sling Blade,” Julianne Moore in “Magnolia” and virtually the entire adult cast of “Pay It Forward.”

This brand of overacting is hardly a new phenomenon. Good actors have always had a weakness for stunt performances that betray their greatest gifts. Spencer Tracy won his first Oscar for “Captains Courageous” in 1937; to play Manuel the fisherman, he curled his hair and spoke in a pidgin Portuguese accent. Seen today, it’s one of his few unconvincing performances. (Tracy himself never shared the academy’s enthusiasm for “Captains Courageous”; he told one friend that he thought his accent sounded more Yiddish than Portuguese.

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In 1966 Sandy Dennis won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her portrayal of the birdbrained Honey in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” She beat out more restrained, accomplished actresses Wendy Hiller (“A Man for All Seasons”) and Vivien Merchant (“Alfie”). I guess that was because people could tell Dennis was acting, even if she practically gobbled an entire soundstage in the process. A bundle of tics, wheezes, giggles and hiccups, Dennis is never at rest. Even then, not everyone was enthralled by her antics. Critic Pauline Kael once suggested that “connoisseurs of egregious acting are sometimes known as the Sandy Dennis Fan Club.”

More recently, Robert De Niro was nominated for an Oscar for his garish performance in the 1991 remake of “Cape Fear,” in which he sported an exaggerated hillbilly accent and laid on the menace with a trowel. When Robert Mitchum played the same part 30 years earlier, he gave a performance of far greater subtlety. The sense of danger he conveyed was understated yet all the more chilling as a result. Of course he got no Oscar recognition for one of the most frightening portrayals in cinema history.

I don’t mean to say that all flamboyant, hyperactive performances are equally grating. There is a difference between actors who disappear into a manic, brain-damaged character--as Geoffrey Rush did in “Shine” and Leonardo DiCaprio did in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”--and performers who seem to stand outside the character and cry, “Look, Ma, I’m acting!”

Admittedly, that line between honesty and fraudulence is elusive, and evaluations are highly subjective. Even Rush and DiCaprio had their detractors, which only goes to prove that these are the kinds of performances destined to divide people.

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British actors are probably better trained for histrionic acting than Americans. The Brits have vast experience with the classics, which means that they know how to perform grand gestures and a medley of distinctive accents without coming off like kids at a Halloween party.

It’s also true that grandstanding performances seem more forgivable in a campy melodrama than in a film aiming for realism. Charles Laughton chewed the scenery as a bombastic Southern senator in “Advise and Consent,” but he did it entertainingly, and the movie was no more than a juicy piece of skulduggery anyway.

Gary Oldman’s flamboyant turn as a right-wing congressman in “The Contender” follows in the Laughton tradition. “The Contender” has a few serious pretensions, but it works best as a lively, trashy melodrama, and Oldman’s way over-the-top performance is part of the fun. Yet in my view, Jeff Bridges’ more subtle performance as the president in the same movie is even more satisfying--and it probably won’t get the same recognition as Oldman’s splashy stunt. Bridges does an extraordinary job of creating the character of a charismatic, hard-nosed pol who loves the perks of power. What’s more, he brings off the feat without ever calling attention to his technique.

My main objection to showy performances is that quieter performances are almost always drowned out by the bellowing of the heavy-breathing hams. Bridges, a perennially undervalued actor, has been nominated only once for best actor, and that was for his stunt performance as the herky-jerky extraterrestrial in “Starman.” Bridges works in a modest, low-keyed, naturalistic way that doesn’t scream acting out of every pore. He was brilliant in “The Fisher King,” playing an embittered wreck of a man, but his co-star, Robin Williams, got nominated for his aggressively adorable turn as a whimsical street person.

In 1994, Tom Hanks won his second Oscar playing Forrest Gump, a skillful enough but predictable rendition of a marble-mouthed simpleton. He beat Paul Newman, whose performance in Robert Benton’s “Nobody’s Fool” may be one of the few perfect performances in American screen history. Newman achieved maximum emotional impact with a minimum expenditure of effort--which should be the definition of great acting. Perhaps it takes a lifetime to arrive at that kind of minimalist grace, but if you watch “Nobody’s Fool” again, you’ll be astonished by the subtlety, economy and complete naturalness with which Newman etches a vivid, unique character. It looks effortless, but it’s actually a lot more difficult to underplay tellingly than it is to wield the exaggerated drawl that Hanks employed in “Forrest Gump.”

This isn’t meant to be a put-down of Hanks. I thought he was great in “Nothing in Common” and “Punchline,” two beautifully naturalistic performances that won no accolades whatsoever. In fact, most of these actors are capable of far better work than the performances that wow the public and the academy. Burstyn was marvelous in “The Last Picture Show” and “The Exorcist” and half a dozen other pictures in which she wasn’t drooling and gibbering as she does in “Requiem for a Dream.” Even the cringe-inducing Williams did subtle work in “Moscow on the Hudson” and “Awakenings,” but there were no nominations for those performances.

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For a couple of years I’d like to see a ban on prizes given for hambone performances so that lovely, understated work could be appreciated. Will there be an award for Laura Linney in the upcoming “You Can Count on Me,” which is one of the most delicate and shattering performances I’ve seen in years? I doubt it. She plays an ordinary person--a single mother trying to hold her life together--but she finds moments of wildness, willfulness and loneliness that give the character remarkable dimension and complexity.

John Cusack has never been nominated for an Oscar, but he did an amazing job last year in “Pushing Tin” playing a cocky air-traffic controller, and he was equally convincing this year as the melancholy slacker in “High Fidelity.” He created those two completely distinctive characters through purely internal means; there were no false noses or corn-pone accents to underline his virtuosity.

Actors who pull out all the stops are far more likely to win awards, but they also run a greater risk of turning into laughingstocks for a small but growing band of detractors. But for the moment, flashy pyrotechnics seize the limelight and crush the competition.