Keeping It Real, By Chris Derrick – Sympathy for the Devil #5

January 15, 2012 Chris Derrick 0 Comments

Acting, from what I’ve learned in my many years of writing and directing films, is all about conveying the truth through credible behavior.

The biopic is standard Hollywood fare, and usually we see some actor get heavy accolades for portraying another celebrated person around Awards Season. This year Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams are carrying the torch for the biopic to Oscar gold camp, in THE IRON LADY and MY WEEK WITH MARILYN. Both films are a little filmsy in narrative, but they burn extra bright in their respective films… Michelle Williams does Marilyn as good as Norma Jean Baker “did” Marilyn. It’s a sensitive portrayal of the blonde bombshell; the role is inadvertently sexy, but tender and tragic at the same time. The recently surfaced and published personal journals & letters of Monroe shed an additional sad light on screen legend that is expertly alluded to in this film. I like this type of biopic more than most, because most people have a few defining moments that can be summed up in a microcosm (for instance, there’s a long rumored Miles Davis biopic in the works – several, in fact – and the one that concentrates on his trip to France and love affair with Ms. Grecco is probably going to be the most interesting… if they ever see the light of a Red Camera), and that’s what we see in Williams enchanting performance; one of the best scenes in when Marilyn and X are greeted by several tourists at an English manse and Marilyn says “shall I give it to them?[sic]” and then she proceeds to vamp it up in full innocent sex kitten mode. This moment reminds me the quote attributed to Cary Grant, when he said, “everybody wants to be like Cary Grant… even me”; a bold indication that the screen persona was an Atlas-esque weight that these people lugged around and COULD NOT get rid of. The burden of “having to be” someone else when the cameras are off is no doubt punishing and aggravating.

Speaking of troubled mental states, in THE IRON LADY, Meryl Streep breathes a gracious amount of humanity into Margaret Thatcher that’s utterly captivating. Streep pulls out all the stops as Thatcher during her heyday and Thatcher current day (when she’s suffering from dementia)… it’s one of those performances that elevates the film narrative all by itself. As the movie glosses over many of the charged and defining moments in Thatcher’s career as the first female head of state of modern Western country (much like how J. Edgar dismissed some potent and poignant career-defining moments of Hoover, namely how implemented a divide & conquer agenda against Black Civil Rights leaders and fostered dissent among those Blacks trying to uplift the race during those trouble times). The pressures of being a female leader during the waning days of the Cold War surely warrant a tougher examination, but it seems that filmmakers want to shy away from the moments that cemented these political characters in the public eye and examining something else (they may or may not be as compelling or the reason why the audience paid ducats to see the film in the first place; like doing the Barack Obama story and primarily focusing on his years canvassing Chicago’s South Side).

Still there is something oddly attractive, from a technical acting perspective to recreate someone with lots of visual and cultural references onscreen; the challenge being: we know what these people look, sound and behave like, so how good at you are mimicking while still imbuing the person with the inner depths that the limelight never revealed.

Conversely, Rooney Mara truly gave a knock-out person of an extremely “real” person invoking truthful behavior at every turn in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO; perhaps the movie is too grisly and lengthy in its submergence in a twisted world to really take hold with US audiences (although at close to 3 hours, the film loses a showing every day; so the grosses are probably under-performing by 20%. Nonetheless, Mara, as the titular Lisbeth Salander, is outstanding; the dose of Asberger’s Syndrome that Salander has in the book is brought to light in Fincher’s film in a way that was a little light in the Swedish original. I’m taking ANYTHING away from Noomi Rapace’s inhabitation of the character, but Mara’s was gripping, vulnerable (at times) and haunting. A fully realized character/person.

These three actresses are on my short list for Oscar gold.