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 Hunger Games

The Hunger Games (2012): Dir. Gary Ross. Written by Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray. Based on the novel by Suzanne Collins. Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland and Wes Bentley. Rated PG-13 (Surprisingly gruesome violence). Running time: 142 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)
 

“May the odds be ever in your favor.” This sentence gets tossed around a lot (probably a few too many times) in The Hunger Games, an adaptation of the immensely popular young adult novel written by Suzanne Collins that is smarter than your average teen craze. The irony of this eloquent bit of well-wishing is that the odds are illusory. Very little is left to chance in the battle-to-the-death blood sport that gives the movie its title. The shadowy figures who host the gruesome Hunger Games, a hybrid of Battle Royale and American Idol, carefully tweak their tournament to appease the masses that watch it on live TV.

Katniss Everdeen (played with unflinching stoicism by Jennifer Lawrence) is a teenage resident of the dystopian world, Panem, which is made up of a dozen districts and controlled by aristocrats in the wealthy capital. Some years earlier, an uprising was quelled by the government and as part of the rebels’ punishment an annual tournament began. Every year, two children from each district between the ages of twelve and eighteen – a boy and a girl – are selected at random to participate in a televised fight to the death. What the winner receives for coming out alive is never entirely clear, though there are vague promises of riches and luxury and (presumably) food to bring back to their famished home district.

When Katniss’s young sister (Willow Shields) is chosen for this year’s Games, Katniss volunteers to go in her place, an unprecedented move. She departs on the next high-speed train to the capital, leaving behind a handsome, platonic pal, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), whose clean-shaven face and impeccable hair suggest a Herculean devotion to personal grooming in the coal-mining town of District 12.

Accompanying her is Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), a less dashing but no less sensitive young man and District 12’s male entry. On their way to the capital, Katniss and Peeta meet Effie (a wonderful Elizabeth Banks), an enthusiast of the Games who is apparently oblivious to their lethal consequences, and Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), a whisky drinking former winner of the Games who mentors the kids on survival tactics.

Filling out an overcrowded supporting cast is Wes Bentley as Seneca Crane, the sinister producer of the Games; Donald Sutherland, the President of this Orwellian world to whom Crane answers; and a lively, blue-haired Stanley Tucci who provides commentary for the Games’ telecast. Lenny Kravitz also shows up in an extraneous role as the kids’ fashion designer.

There are a lot of characters in The Hunger Games and quite a few things to look at (including some beautiful photography from cinematographer Tom Stern), but it is Jennifer Lawrence who commands our attention. Ms. Lawrence, who has hop-skipped her way from obscurity to super stardom in less than two years, is a forceful actress who imbues Katniss with quiet intensity and dogged perseverance. She takes this character every bit as serious as her role in the 2010 indie noir Winter’s Bone, which earned her an Oscar nomination.

That is not to say The Hunger Games is a trivial tween fad. The fact that the violence (which we see in quick, suggestive cuts) is broadcast via hidden cameras for all of Panem to watch adds a fascinating, self-referential element to the film. Not only will Katniss need to be skilled with a knife and a bow, and be able to build a shelter and secure clean water; she will also have to win the affection of the viewers at home, some of whom are “sponsors” with the ability to send their favorite contestant valuable care packages of medicine and food.

So winning the tournament is less a testament to one’s strength and endurance than one’s ability to ham it up for the camera. Haymitch encourages Katniss and Peeta to play up a star-crossed romance between them in the hopes that this backstory may score a few sponsors.

The Hunger Games cherry-picks successful elements from other recent young adult fantasy novel adaptations – the tournament from the fourth Harry Potter, the love triangle from Twilight – but the live TV twist makes the movie more than another studio cash-grab vying for teen girl fandom.

In Twilight, a girl is torn between two young men and her decision takes four books (and five movies). In The Hunger Games, a girl who already has a thing for one guy falls for a second because her survival, both in context of the story and as a character in the franchise, depends on it. Author Suzanne Collins knows just as well as Haymitch the assured marketing power of a good teenage romance. The odds were in this movie’s favor the whole time.

- Steve Avigliano, 3/29/12

REVIEW: X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class (2011): Dir. Matthew Vaughn. Written by: Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. Story by: Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer. Based on characters created by: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Chris Claremont. Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, January Jones, Jennifer Lawrence, Oliver Platt and Kevin Bacon. Rated PG-13 (intense sequences of action and violence, some sexual content including brief partial nudity and language). Running time: 132 minutes.

1 ½ stars (out of four)

X-Men: First Class commits the cardinal sin of movie prequels. The film is all exposition, belaboring how the characters in previous films got to be who they are and why they believe what they believe. There are answers to questions I never particularly cared about – So that’s how Professor Xavier became paralyzed! – while others remain frustratingly unclear. The X-Men mythology has always suggested a great depth of storytelling possibilities but First Class is instead a by-the-numbers superhero flick, flat and forgettable.

As is typical for an X-Men film, First Class is crowded with storylines, some more satisfying than others. We meet Erik Lehnsherr (Bill Milner as the young Erik, and Michael Fassbender as the all grown-up version) in a concentration camp in 1944. Lehnsherr is a young boy when a German named Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) takes particular interest in his strange powers and separates him from his family. Shaw tortures the boy with cruel experiments that, years later, fuel an older Lehnsherr’s quest for revenge. We see how Lehnsherr’s tortured past leads him to become the nefarious Magneto and we are reminded of the old Yoda maxim about how hatred leads to suffering.

We jump ahead to 1962, where a college-aged Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is charming young women at the pub. There, a CIA agent (Rose Byrne) offers him a proposition. She has reason to believe some particularly nasty mutants led by none other than Sebastian Shaw may be behind a nuclear threat in Cuba and she enlists Xavier’s help. Xavier, in turn, begins recruiting some young mutants to join his team.

Between First Class’s dual protagonists and the several asides and tangents the film takes with its secondary characters, there is more than enough to fill one movie. Erik’s Nazi-revenge narrative offers some of the more entertaining scenes, capturing some of the gleeful violence that Tarantino tapped into for his Inglourious Basterds (which also featured Fassbender). Here, Fassbender is exceptional as the young Magneto. He sketches out his own dark and brooding take on the character while keeping in mind how the immortal Ian McKellen made Magneto the kind of villain we secretly root for. As the Nazi-turned-Soviet Shaw, Kevin Bacon is appropriately cartoonish, though he plays the role a few shades below Gary Oldman territory (the gold standard for over-the-top villainy).

Xavier’s storyline is less satisfying because it is bogged down in exposition that lays the groundwork for what we already know. As the wise mentor to the young mutants, McAvoy has clearly studied Patrick Stewart’s eloquent diction and knowing smile. Unfortunately, the script restricts him to establishing Stewart’s take on Xavier and unlike Fassbender, McAvoy does not have sufficient room to stretch out and make the role his own.

The alternate history is a letdown too. I usually enjoy this sort of history-twisting but First Class does not make the most of its Cuban Mutant Crisis, which neglects to explore the implications of its fictionalized version of the famous event. This is largely the fault of a dramatically clumsy script that often inserts scenes for mechanical plot purposes without adequately setting them up.

I must admit that I am not an expert on X-Men mythology, though I have always been intrigued by it. The second X-Men film, X2: X-Men United, does a wonderful job of exploring the X-Men universe, revealing the many fascinating ways in which mutants interact with humankind. After watching snippets of that film on TV again recently (the channel FX has been playing the earlier films ad nauseam in preparation for First Class), I was excited to see the new film, which I hoped would continue to flesh out the complex history of human/mutant relations.

Such subtleties are not to be found here. Aside from our two leads, each mutant is reduced to their respective power, dutifully performing their supernatural feats when the action demands they do so. Occasionally, they take on traits that roughly resemble character but only when convenient for the plot.

Am I alone in wanting to learn more about the world of X-Men? Why, for example, are some of the mutants’ powers extraordinary while others are little more than party tricks? How can so many different powers be unified as a single genetic trend?

There is another problem with X-Men: First Class that is indicative of a larger trend in today’s blockbusters. All of the important characters are without exception white men. Around the movie’s midpoint, however, a black mutant named Darwin (Edi Gathegi) is introduced. When another character describes how humans mistreat mutants, the camera cuts to Darwin on the word “enslavement,” as if his only purpose in the film is to underscore the parallels between the plight of mutants and real-life historical prejudices. He gets only two brief scenes prior to this and as the token black character in the movie, his fate can be guessed.

Then there is a very strange sexist joke late in the film involving Rose Byrne’s CIA agent. The line, which is laugh-out-loud funny if only because of its jarring placement in the film, reminds us how one-dimensional the women in First Class are. One of the mutants, Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), has potential to be a fully developed character but the film spends more time emphasizing the physical developments of her scaly, blue body as she vies for the desires of up to three different men.

In today’s age, these glaring choices cannot be dismissed as incidental, and for such blatant discriminatory casting and writing I deducted a half star from my rating. Director Matthew Vaughn and his writers (listed above) should be ashamed of themselves. After last month’s Thor, which similarly degraded its token Asian character, and now this film, my mind drifts to the yet-to-be-released Green Lantern whose filmmakers opted for a white incarnation of the title character. For studios to be too timid to green-light anything but a sequel or a by-the-numbers superhero movie is one thing. That those same studios have become so afraid of damaging a film’s marketing potential that a role of substance cannot be played by anyone but a white male is, frankly, sad.

There is much to love about the world of X-Men and its mutated heroes, but First Class makes no effort to do anything new with that world. The film is a wasted opportunity to reinvigorate a flagging franchise and falls instead among the ranks of uninspired superhero outings.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/6/11