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| August: Osage County |
I still haven’t seen The Wolf of Wall Street, unfortunately, so I apologize to Mr. DiCaprio for leaving him off the list. (But I’ll hold on the Top Ten Films of 2013 until I see the big bad Wolf.) Other shout-outs go to some of the performers in festival favourites that are being released in 2014 and will likely end up listed once more of you have had a chance to enjoy their films. Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him and Her, Colin Firth in The Railway Man, Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin, and Kristen Wiig in Hateship, Friendship are some of the goodies that film buffs can look forward to seeing in 2014. In the meantime, though, let’s toast the best performances—lead and supporting—that we saw in 2013.
The Top Ten Lead Performances of 2013:
August: Osage County
reminds me why Meryl Streep is the best actress the cinema has ever seen.
Violet Weston ranks among the best performances of Streep’s career: she’s up
there with Sophie, Miranda Priestly, and Suzanne Vale. This performance is a
loud behemoth. Meryl hits the words by Tracey Letts with exclamation point upon
exclamation as her virulent Violet cuts her family members with razor sharp
judgement. What’s most remarkable about this performance, though, is the
effectiveness of the acting trait that truly sets Streep in a league above her
peers: it’s her ability to convey shifts in a character’s consciousness. As
Violet slips in and out of personas—marked by her wig or bald head—Streep
realizes two very different mindsets for her character. One shows Violet
playing mean because she likes to; the other shows a terrified and vulnerable
woman. Streep’s multi-layered performance gives audiences a woman they can
hate, but also one who is worthy of their sympathy as she goes head to head
with her co-lead Julia Roberts. This outstanding performance in August: Osage County is the best treat
cinema had to offer in 2013.
In any other year, Cate Blanchett’s performance in Woody
Allen’s Blue Jasmine would have
annihilated this list like a nuclear bomb. She’s a modern day Blanche Dubois as
the financially ruined phony Jasmine French. Blanchett excels slipping in and
out of Jasmine’s neuroses as her character goes on a bender of meanness worthy
of the Weston family and is at her best while delivering Jasmine’s grandiose
yammering. It’s no easy task to realize a character full of so many
intertextual influences—Tennessee Williams, for one, plus real-life
contemporaries that inspired Allen’s film—and offer something so tangible and
not the least bit derivative. This is by no means just a performance of a
fallen trophy wife with inflections of A
Streetcar Named Desire. Cate Blanchett will win the Oscar this year and she
deserves it.
How many actors can carry a film with their eyes? Robert
Redford speaks nary a word in All is Lost,
save for one memorable expletive, but he says a boatload as his aged sailor struggles
to stay alive at sea. Redford puts his legacy on the line in All is Lost and the result is a
powerfully subtle performance that confirms him as a true maverick.
Chiwetel Ejiofor gives a commanding performance as Solomon
Northup. He plays Solomon with quiet dignity as the character tries to endure
after he is captured and sold into slavery. There isn’t a false note to this
performance as Ejiofor shows Solomon undergo a gut-wrenching experience as he
hovers between living and surviving, and ultimately finds a kind of kinship
with his fellow slaves on the plantation he is so desperate to leave. His
performance during the funeral hymn sung for one of the fallen slaves offers
some of the most masterful use of the close-up you’ll see this year.
Ahoy, sexy! There’s this scene towards the middle of Frances Ha in which Greta Gerwig
delivers a captivating monologue at a dinner party. The more Frances awkwardly
pours her heart out, the more it’s like watching somebody drown in a pool of
her own word vomit. The more she talks, the more confusing she sounds, yet
Gerwig performs a kind of inner monologue as Frances’s face contorts and
twitches in some sparkling excitement that tells you everything makes perfect
sense to Frances in her own way in this moment of kind-of sort-of clarity even
if her words make her seem endearingly loony. Everyone has a Frances in his or
her group of friends.
Labor Day could have
easily misfired into the realm of the ridiculous or the farfetched, but the
film is sold almost entirely on the strength of its performances. Kate Winslet
offers a heartbreaking turn as Adele, a divorced suburban mother who has virtually
forgotten how to love, who is brought to life by her affection for her son,
Henry (a strong Gattlin Griffin), and by her cautious interest in a mysterious
stranger named Frank (Josh Brolin—more on him below.) Winslet expresses how
Adele has all but resigned from life and her restrained portrait of Adele’s
suffocating melancholy allows Labor Day
to achieve the effortless poignancy and catharsis of its unconventional yet
wholly believable love story.
Judi Dench makes acting look easy with her effortlessly
impeccable performance as Philomena Lee. Dench navigates Philomena’s delicate mix of humour and heartache playing the daft
Philomena. Dench never plays her character for laughs, though, and finds the humour
by contrasting Philomena’s faith in drug store novels and the Catholic Church
against Steve Coogan’s stodgy stickler Martin Sixsmith. Philomena’s innocence
and high spirits make the final turn of Dench’s performance especially
devastating: anyone not moved when Philomena returns to Roscrea must be made of
stone.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are a marriage made in movie
heaven as Jesse and Celine. It’s been a thrill to watch them mature in the Before trilogy and Before Midnight is the culmination of both their work. Hawke is calm
and assured while Delpy is perfectly neurotic as their energy finds a kind of
fusion. You can’t take one without the other, so Before Midnight is a tumultuous high for the trilogy as Hawke and
Delpy find a synergy to their performance they haven’t hit before. It must be
the perfect marriage of their talents after 18 years of sharing a story as they
trade barbs in a kind of call-and-response dance number of George and Martha
craziness.
How Andrea Riseborough isn’t a bigger star continually amazes
me. Her work in James Marsh’s Shadow
Dancer is the kind of jaw-dropper that deserves to catapult a younger
talent into stardom. Her performance as Collette, an IRA member turned MI: 5
informant in 1990s Belgium realizes her character’s fear and desperation so
ferociously that the viewer is always on Collette’s side no matter how deep
into trouble the character gets. Her expressive, malleable face is a stealthy
weapon, though, as the calculated Collette is always one move ahead,
manipulating her onscreen counterparts and surprising us with every turn.
Cara Gee gives the best performance in any Canadian film
this year. She’s fierce as Lena, the troubled middle in three generations of
women that form the layered family drama of Empire
of Dirt. Lena’s an angry and lost character, but Gee always finds a middle
ground in the performance as Lena leads her daughter and mother to find a kind
catharsis as the ghosts of the past come full circle. Gee’s final monologue is
a powerful tour-de-force that exposes
every layer of the character and strips Lena bare in an intimate confessional.
The Top Ten Supporting Performances of 2013:
James Gandolfini’s performance in Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said reveals a side of his
ability as an actor that he hadn’t shown before. Gandolfini certainly had a
funny bone while playing Tony Soprano—remember that episode where he whacked
the guy during the college tour with Meadow?—but he shows a droll skill for
comedic timing as Albert charms his way into Eva’s heart in Enough Said. Gandolfini is like a big
teddy bear as Fat Albert proves to be a sensitive and vulnerable when he’s
caught in the middle of the film’s odd triangle.
Every Blanche needs a Stella, so Sally Hawkins is the perfect
counterpart to Cate Blanchett’s showy lead in Blue Jasmine. Hawkins is heartbreaking as her Ginger gets taken
advantage of by all the smooth operators in Allen’s film. She offers someone to
root for, thus balancing Blanchett’s deliciously unlikable Jasmine. But Hawkins
starts to mirror her onscreen sister after a while and shows what a destructive
force Jasmine can be as she infects everyone around her. Like the onscreen
pairs of Streep and Roberts or Hawke and Delpy, the teamwork of Blanchett and
Hawkins lets one performance act as an extension of the other. This seems like
what great acting is all about: creating a believable relationship with another
actor and making the drama a satisfying game of give and get.
Chalk this up as the most surprising performance of the
year. Oprah Winfrey is dead sexy as the boozy matriarch of Lee Daniels’ The Butler. Her smoldering screen presence uses her
gargantuan star persona to great effect as she works her character Gloria with
the mojo that’s become the Oprah hallmark. One wishes she acted more. (Or rocked
out in disco suits more often, at least.)
Add Brolin and Winslet to the great onscreen pairs of 2013.
The actors sell every frame of the suburban Stockholm syndrome romance of Labor Day, and Brolin’s natural
performance as the man eager to feed Adele’s hunger makes this film the warmest
and most affecting love story this year. Frank’s lust for life brings a
stirring passion to Labor Day as
Brolin reignites his character’s desire to become a family man again after
escaping the same isolation from which he saves Adele.
Jennifer Lawrence continues to amaze me. She outdid herself
in her second turn as Katniss in The
Hunger Games: Catching Fire and she one-upped her Oscar winning performance
in Silver Linings Playbook with her
second collaboration with David O. Russell, American
Hustle. Lawrence steals the show from an ensemble of heavy players in her electrifying
performance as the fast and flirty wife of Christian Bale’s combed-over con
artist. The best thing about Lawrence’s work is that she always seems to be
having fun while entertaining her audience.
Third time’s a charm for Michael Fassbender and director
Steve McQueen. The Shame and Hunger star scores another bravura
performance with his chilling incarnation of evil as slave driver Edwin Epps.
Mixing a perverse cocktail of desire and self-loathing, Fassbender shows Epps
to be a brutal spawn of a cruel system. To watch Fassbender take his character
through flickers of both pain and pleasure as Epps flail whips Lupita Nyong’o’s
Patsey during the film’s climactic whipping scene is to witness an unnerving
incarnation of a sadistic system.
August: Osage County
could have filled the list of top supporting performances in its entirety, but
the stand-out of the film’s ensemble, Margo Martindale, wins the title of “best
in show” among the support actors of the film. She’s a hoot (as always) as
Meryl Streep’s onscreen sister, Mattie Fae, dropping candid invitations to feel
her sweaty back or trading quips with her husband, Charles (Chris Cooper) as she
pours a stiff glass of booze. Mattie seems to offer the lone ally to lighten
the mood for the audience until she reveals her own set of mean genes with full
force. However, Martindale shows Mattie Fae’s humour as a kind of defense
mechanism that she used to survive her sister’s wickedness.
It’s hard to say much about Marie Brassard’s playfully
mesmerizing performance in Vic + Flo Saw
a Bear without revealing too much about the film. She gives a beguiling
enigmatic turn as the mysterious character that stumbles in to Vic and Flo’s
quiet country getaway and then bares her teeth in a delightfully sinister
reversal of character. Like Tom Hollander’s effeminate whistling muscle man in Joe
Wright’s Hanna, Marie Brassard’s
Jackie is the best kind of baddie, for we never quite know who she is or what
she is capable of doing.
What happened to What
Maisie Knew? Maisie, a highlight
at TIFF 2012, was virtually dumped by distributors for no good reason. It’s a
shame, since Julianne Moore offers one of her better performances as Maisie’s
messed-up mommy, Susanna. Susanna is the novel’s most ingenious infidelity to
the novel by Henry James, as Moore’s sympathetic performance as the troubled
mother radically shifts the dynamics of the family drama. She’s a
one-dimensional monster in the book; however, Moore’s Susanna is ultimately a
touching portrait of a woman who loves her daughter desperately, yet simply has
no idea how to be mother.
Hat’s off to Keith Stanfield for his captivating turn as
Markus in Short Term 12. His performance
of “So You Know What It’s Like” is a bravura rap number that brings the film to
another level during its first act. Stanfield’s performance of the song is a
spot-on realization for expression the unsayable as Markus becomes more
agitated and involved as the song reaches its angry crescendo.
Special Citation – Best Supporting Cat-tor:
Cats have a notorious reputation for being un-directable
actors. They’re not like dogs, which can bark and roll over while a trainer
dangles hot dogs behind the camera. Ulysses therefore takes cat acting to its finest as the cat of Inside Llewyn Davis offers an
infectiously humorous side kick to Oscar Isaac’s wayfaring folk singer. This
cat has a true personality, whether he’s lapping up milk or looking through the
glass of the subway window with a curious gaze. There’s a kind of
soul-searching to this cat for which the Coen Brothers can take credit.
Honourable mentions
(in alphabetical order): Veerle Baetens in The Broken Circle Breakdown, Sandra Bullock in Gravity, Rosemarie DeWitt in Touchy
Feely, Adele Exarchopoulos in Blue is the Warmest Color, Gheorghiu in Child’s
Pose, Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn
Davis, Brie Larson in Short Term 12, Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Enough
Said, Fabrice Luchini in In the House, Rooney Mara in Side Effects,
Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club, Sarah Paulson in 12 Years a Slave, Jennifer Podemski, Empire of Dirt, Julia Roberts in August: Osage County, Kristin Scott Thomas in Only God Forgives, Emma
Thompson in Saving Mr. Banks.
What are your favourite performances of 2013?
Also in the Year in
Review:
Part 1: The Worst Films of 2013
Part 2: The Best Canadian Films of 2013
Up next: The Best Films of 2013!
