Best of 2012: My Favorite Performances

The Oscars have it all wrong. By trying to determine “the objective best” performances of the year, the same sorts of roles get nominated year after year and a lot of strong work gets overlooked. What follows are my favorite performances of 2012. Are they the best? I’m not sure I even know what that means. These are the performances that made bad movies decent and good movies better. These are the actors I was talking about with my friends as I left the theater. These are the ones I’m still thinking about.

I’ve listed them in alphabetical order, selecting one as my favorite of the year and one bonus prize for the best ensemble.

Josh Brolin – Men in Black 3

Doing his best Tommy Lee Jones impression, Josh Brolin as Agent K’s younger self was the highlight of the second, time-traveling sequel to Men in Black. He may even play the straight man to Will Smith even better than Jones did. Getting laughs with nothing more than a mean mug and a dry Southern drawl, Brolin made this thoroughly unnecessary movie a pleasant surprise.

Daniel Day-Lewis – Lincoln

At the heart of Steven Spielberg’s superb film is Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Abraham Lincoln. He disappears into the role as he always does but he doesn’t dominate the movie. The performance is low-key, painting the former president as a thoughtful, intellectual man. Of course, Lincoln is known as a great orator and Day-Lewis gets a few moments to shine in this capacity. But note also the quieter moments when he jokes with cabinet members or discusses with his wife the fate of their enlisted son. The performance is another in a line of great ones in the actor’s impressive career.

Andrew Garfield – The Amazing Spider-Man

There’s a moment in The Amazing Spider-Man when Andrew Garfield shakes his head, grinning, mouth agape, apparently speechless. I imagine I’d look much the same way were I lying in the arms of Emma Stone while she tended to my wounds. Garfield is thoroughly convincing as a teenager suddenly given super powers – a little cocky and a little clumsy but well intentioned. His Peter Parker is a charmer in a way Tobey Maguire never was in the role and his performance helped make The Amazing Spider-Man the most fun I had at the movies this summer. 

Salma Hayek – Savages

A wildly over-the-top Salma Hayek devours her role as a drug kingpin in Oliver Stone’s Savages. Cursing in two languages and wearing some fantastic wigs, she gives a movie that is already high off its own supply an added jolt of adrenaline.

Anne Hathaway – The Dark Knight Rises, Les Misérables

Yes, Anne Hathaway steals the show with her stellar rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” in Les Misérables, but I enjoyed her turn as the sexy, wise-cracking seductress Selina Kyle (a.k.a. Catwoman) in The Dark Knight Rises even more. The movie, which very nearly collapses under the weight of its own seriousness, is actually a lot of fun whenever she’s on screen and if there’s one thing it could have used more of, it’s her.

Philip Seymour Hoffman / Joaquin Phoenix – The Master

Any interpretation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s maddening new film hinges on how you view the relationship between Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman) and Freddie Quell (Phoenix). Is their bond that of a father to his son? A teacher to his pupil? A scientist to a lab rat? All of the above? Each actor makes his part nuanced and complex. We can never pin these men down and this inability to fully understand their relationship is what makes the movie so compulsively fascinating.

Samuel L. Jackson – Django Unchained

In a film that mostly ignores the complexity of race relations in the Old South, Samuel L. Jackson fearlessly digs into some very tricky material as Stephen, the loyal servant of a cruel and violent plantation owner. He is frighteningly intense but, being a Tarantino veteran, Jackson is more than capable of navigating the sudden tonal shifts from drama to comedy and back. Stephen is a fascinating variation on the Uncle Tom archetype, muddying the waters of Tarantino’s overly simplistic morality and enlivening the movie’s last act.

Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings Playbook

A far cry from her solid-as-a-rock performance as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence shows off her range playing the romantic foil to a manic depressive Bradley Cooper. She is emotionally guarded and prone to mood swings but watch how her face shows you everything her character is thinking and hints at the sudden outbursts just before they happen.

Channing Tatum – 21 Jump Street

Channing Tatum is hilarious. Who knew? He has comedic timing to match his good looks and his presence here helps freshen up Jonah Hill’s fast-talking shtick in one of the year’s most unexpectedly funny movies.

My Favorite Performance: Martin Freeman – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

If Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit movie wasn’t quite perfect, there was at least one aspect of it that was: Martin Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins. Freeman gets the part exactly right. His Bilbo is a homebody, curious about the outside world and with an impish streak in him, but mostly content to curl up by the fire with a good book. Whenever the movie threatens to get lost in a computer-generated frenzy, Freeman can be counted on to right the ship’s course. Though he is too often relegated to the sidelines in this first film, the next two parts of the trilogy would be wise to turn to Mr. Baggins more often.

Best Ensemble – Moonrise Kingdom

The cast Wes Anderson collects for his latest feature is an enviable one. Some of them play roles we’re familiar seeing them in. Bill Murray is as reliable as ever playing a sad sack and Frances McDormand is a joy to watch as his wife, a Type A personality who wears the pants in the family. But others play refreshingly against type. Ed Norton is a lot of fun as a scout leader who is still a boy at heart and Bruce Willis is touching as a lonely police officer. Add to that some fine supporting roles from Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel, Jason Schwartzman and Tilda Swinton, not to mention some excellent young newcomers (including Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as the eloping young lovers), and you have an excellent ensemble led by Wes Anderson, one of the best maestros around.

- Steve Avigliano, 2/23/13

REVIEW: The Master

The Master (2012): Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams. Rated R (Sex, nudity, language). Running time: 137 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

Many of the characters in Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, and particularly the two at the center of his latest, The Master, are unhinged and unpredictable. His films tend to be unpredictable too (I’m thinking specifically of the milkshake monologue in There Will Be Blood, the frogs in Magnolia, every scene in Punch-Drunk Love), but they are far from unstable. The style of Mr. Anderson, who wrote and directed this film, his first in five years, is always focused and assured. The actions of his characters are often bewildering and bizarre but the steadiness of his camera and the methodical pacing of his storytelling give us the sense that we are in good hands, that he knows where he is taking us.

Through the patient, almost voyeuristic lens of the film’s opening scenes, we meet Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a World War II Navy veteran just beginning his post-war life. The military has diagnosed him (as well as the rest of a roomful of vets) with an anxiety disorder but, this being 1950, he receives little treatment aside from a pat on the back and a “Good luck, son.”

On top of that (or perhaps because of that) Freddie is also an alcoholic and quite possibly a nymphomaniac. He stumbles about his life, leering at strangers, taking swigs from a flask that contains a potent homemade cocktail – a toxic blend of booze and household chemicals – and is fired from more than one job.

On an impulse one evening, he hops aboard a boat where he meets Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the leader of The Cause, a dubious religious organization, who is celebrating the marriage of his daughter (Ambyr Childers). The organization (is it a church? a school? a cult?) practices a pseudo-science referred to as “processing.” The “processing” method is essentially a psychotherapy session and at first does not seem to be so different from Sigmund Freud’s interest in therapy as a way to root out past traumas. The Cause’s ultimate goal, however, is to reconnect an individual with their past lives, some of which, Dodd claims, date back trillions of years. (Dodd is none too pleased when a vocal critic of his work reminds him the Earth is only several billion years old.)

It is easy to see how The Cause has gained followers. Dodd is a charismatic speaker and, in comparison to Freddie, who he soon befriends and takes under his wing, Dodd is a seeming picture of poise, authority and intellect. But does he actually believe in what he preaches or is he, as one character puts it, just making it up as he goes along? Dodd’s public image is further complicated by a family life that includes his domineering wife (a quietly menacing Amy Adams) and his son (Jesse Plemons), a member of The Cause but also a skeptic.

The relationship between Freddie and Dodd is an elusive one. Dodd seems genuinely keen on helping Freddie and, for all the questionable implications of “processing,” Freddie’s early sessions provide real breakthroughs into his repressed past. From there, things get murkier. Their relationship all but consumes The Master and yet, by the film’s end, it is difficult to know what to make of it. Dodd cares for Freddie with something resembling paternal love and Freddie reciprocates with an unwavering loyalty toward his mentor (sometimes violently so). There are also deeper layers to their bond that only occasionally bubble up and reveal themselves.

The performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman are stunning. Mr. Phoenix disappears into his role to a frightening degree, raving and shouting and physically abusing himself, while Mr. Hoffman’s subtler performance offers an interesting foil to Mr. Phoenix’s maximalist approach. Dodd’s silence and self-control make him even more inscrutable than Freddie.

Paul Thomas Anderson gives his actors plenty of room, shooting them in extended wide shots, then closing in for prolonged and mesmerizingly expressive close-ups. Working with cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., Mr. Anderson gives his film a lustrous visual style (worth nothing, the movie was shot on 65mm film, a rarely used format nowadays). He meticulously places his characters in the center of a shot, leaving vast amounts of open space in the frame.

In more ways than one, The Master may be seen as a companion piece to Paul Thomas Anderson’s last movie, 2007’s There Will Be Blood. The legitimacy of religious figures and the power they hold over people was a peripheral theme in that film and it is the main focus here. Mr. Anderson raises interesting issues regarding the crossroads of intellectual and spiritual pursuits and the degrees to which anyone can trust either.

But The Master is foremost a dual character study and the most pressing questions lingering in the air after the final scenes are about Freddie and Dodd’s relationship. There are a number of deliberately open-ended mysteries, loose ends left tantalizingly untied. The lack of closure makes The Master Paul Thomas Anderson’s most vexing movie to date but also begs an interesting question: If its characters are frauds who speak in empty language, does that make the movie empty of substance as well? What was all the tension and drama building toward?

I don’t know. And I suspect my own uncertainty is part of the point Paul Thomas Anderson is driving at, or it is at least an intended effect of the film. Who’s to say for sure?

- Steve Avigliano, 9/27/12