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: Savages

Savages (2012): Dir. Oliver Stone. Written by: Shane Salerno, Don Winslow and Oliver Stone. Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, John Travolta, Benicio del Toro, Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir. Rated R (Brutal and bloody violence, cursing in English and Spanish, and a dash of sex and drugs). Running time: 131 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

Lado Arroyo, played with vicious intensity by Benicio del Toro, prowls around like a rabid animal in Savages, Oliver Stone’s searing new thriller about the intersections between a Mexican drug cartel and the marijuana business in Southern California.

An enforcer for an infamous crime lord (Salma Hayek), Lado is an electrical rod, giving the film a jolt of energy whenever it starts to falter. Mr. del Toro’s performance might even embody the movie’s wild, multifaceted personality in miniature. Lado is brutally violent and misogynistic, and Benicio del Toro plays him with a cavalier demeanor that could be cold and calculating. Or it could be the menacing quiet of an absolute psychopath. When he interrogates people and gives them his calm, leering stare, it is hard to tell whether he has a plan or is making it up as he goes along.

The same may be said of director Oliver Stone, who also shares writing credit here with Shane Salerno and Don Winslow (who wrote the novel from which this film has been adapted). There are moments when Savages comes just shy of the grandeur of Martin Scorsese’s mob movies. But even the most frenetically stylized work from Scorsese bears an unmistakable mark of the director’s command over his material. Oliver Stone’s style is looser, relying on handheld cameras and quick editing. It can create an intoxicating effect but has its limitations too. Certain sequences in Savages have a woozy power but just as often the film feels as though it could spiral out of control.

Through the narration of a Laguna surfer girl named Ophelia (Blake Lively), we are introduced to Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch), who run a highly profitable business growing and selling the best weed in the world. Ben is the brains of the operation, though he would probably prefer to be called the spirit and soul of it. He is a longhaired and peace-loving young man, a Buddhist who has just returned from a humanitarian trip in Indonesia.

Chon, on the other hand, is the muscle of the business. An ex-Navy SEAL, he does the dirty work for his best pal – the usual busting down doors and collecting owed money from clients – and he carries with him a fair amount of mental baggage from the war.

Ophelia (“O,” as she goes by) has given her heart to both men, and all three seem pretty happy about that arrangement. She spends some nights with Ben, others with Chon and, on at least one stoned evening, both at once.

But their blissful paradise – an impressive villa overlooking the beach – can only last so long. A representative from the aforementioned Mexican drug cartel (Demián Bichir) visits them (having first sent a rather intimidating video of decapitated heads). He explains that his boss would like to go into business with them. Ben and Chon will teach the cartel’s workers the secrets of the trade and over the course of several years, then they will hand over the business entirely for a considerable payout. The deal is really more of a command though; Ben and Chon have little choice in the matter.

Things get complicated, however, as situations like this often do. There are kidnappings and ransoms, heated negotiations, infighting among the cartel, and a DEA agent (John Travolta) who has his hands in just about every piece of the pie imaginable. Whipping it all together in a frenzy that occasionally flirts with incoherence, Oliver Stone delivers an exhilarating genre picture that only touches peripherally on political issues that are often at the forefront of his movies.

The film also has a wicked sense of humor and a willingness to poke fun at itself. When a character says the movie’s title once, it’s tacky. When three different characters say the title over the course of the movie, the filmmakers are clearly having fun.

But Savages never quite finds its footing; it’s too busy running headlong into its next crazy idea. Portions of the movie are so frantic and energized that when the movie does slow down, we start to lose interest.

Still, Savages has plenty of good scenes and a handful of great ones that redeem its shortcomings. Not the least of these come from a superb cast. Benicio del Toro is a compulsively watchable force, as is Salma Hayek as Elena Sánchez, the woman pulling all the strings. In one of the best scenes, she unleashes a bilingual tirade on a few of her henchmen, swearing only in subtitled Spanish. Ms. Hayek balances the over-the-top with the understated, revealing occasional glimmers of tenderness in the fiery cartel boss.

John Travolta reminds audiences what a commanding presence he has, going toe to toe with Benicio del Toro in one crackling scene, another highlight of the film. With so much scene-stealing talent it would be easy to miss strong work from the three young leads. The best of them may be Taylor Kitsch, who pretty much only has one gear, angry, but he makes it compelling.

The ending, unfortunately, is a letdown. At first it seems lazy, then it tries to do too much and ultimately peters out with a trite voiceover from Blake Lively. (When a movie has a character reciting a Webster’s definition of the title, it’s a sign the filmmakers don’t know how to end it.) But this only briefly dampens the impact of the movie’s audacious heights, which burn on in spite of its flaws.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/16/12