The Ringer - Make the Case: Impassioned Arguments for the 2021 Oscar Winners We Want 2022-03-18T08:11:44-04:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/221475702022-03-18T08:11:44-04:002022-03-18T08:11:44-04:00Penélope Cruz Carries ‘Parallel Mothers.’ Give Her the Oscar.
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<p>‘Parallel Mothers’ is a crowning achievement after years of collaboration between Cruz and Pedro Almodóvar. Now she just needs the crown.</p> <p id="3Axn9k">Some actors never live down a single line reading. In 1981, Faye Dunaway won the second-ever Golden Raspberry award for Worst Actress for her portrayal of Joan Crawford in <em>Mommie Dearest </em>largely because of her unexpectedly camp delivery of the not-at-all-funny-in-context cry “no wire hangers—ever!” Stranded in the middle of Norman Mailer’s critically reviled crime thriller <em>Tough Guys Don’t Dance</em>,<em> </em>a flustered Ryan O’Neal threw his hat in the ring. And even as he bears the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2YHPZMj8r4">Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent</a>, Nicolas Cage entered bad-acting Valhalla while pleading with his captors to spare him in <em>The Wicker Man</em>.<em> </em>Say it with me now: <em>“Not the bees!” </em></p>
<p id="cn0FWE">Personally, it’s been hard to take Penélope Cruz totally seriously since the moment in Cameron Crowe’s <em>Vanilla Sky </em>when her Sofia rebuffs a question from an artificially disfigured Tom Cruise by promising, “I will tell you in another life, when we are both cats.” “That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard,” responds Cruise, as if sarcastically annotating the scene on behalf of the audience. Whether Crowe was scoring points off of the whimsy of Cruz’s character or the cruelty of Cruise’s, the line lands with a brutal thud. It’s hard to blame Cruz, who was reprising a role she played to perfection in Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar’s excellent sci-fi thriller </p>
<p id="FRBBqB"><em>Abre los Ojos</em>;<em> Vanilla Sky </em>sprinkles way too much manic-pixie dust on its star, insisting on Sofia’s lucid dream-girl qualities instead of letting the actress evoke them naturally. But even if the new-age cringe of the dialogue is basically undeliverable, Cruz doesn’t help matters with her smirky, sing-song delivery. </p>
<p id="Yh2M8U">Twenty years later—long after she transcended the exotic newcomer status seized on by Hollywood casting directors and exacerbated by a much-publicized romance with her <em>Vanilla Sky </em>costar—the 47-year-old Cruz has long since begun another life on-screen as a reliably great actress. Forget about <em>Vanilla Sky</em>, or <em>Sahara</em>,<em> </em>or <em>Captain Corelli’s Mandolin</em>,<em> </em>or all the other movies that wasted her gifts. As Cruz has gotten older, and balanced her work in U.S. movies with regular forays in her native Spain, she’s developed a formidable skill set as a relaxed comedienne who doesn’t so much play against her otherworldly beauty as find ways to integrate it into wry, multilayered characterizations.<em> </em>Pedro Almodóvar was one of the first filmmakers to recognize Cruz’s talent and ability to play against type, casting her to hilarious, memorably harrowing effect as a sex worker giving birth on a bus in 1997’s <em>Live Flesh</em>, and has continued to use her as his muse at regular intervals. “I think that when I work with Penelope now, I’m a better director thanks to Penelope,” Almodóvar <a href="https://damonwise.blogspot.com/2011/04/old-interview-with-pedro-almodovar.html?view=flipcard&m=1">told <em>Empire</em></a> in 2011. “And [she’s] probably a better actress thanks to me.”</p>
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<p id="fjINTf"><br>Cruz received her first Academy Award nomination in 2007 for Almodóvar’s black comedy <em>Volver</em>,<em> </em>in which she played an abused wife whose daughter kills her husband en route to opening up a catering business; interrupted by a neighbor while mopping up the gory crime scene, her Raimunda glances down at the crimson fleck on her neck and says, “Women troubles”—a wonderfully double-edged line that the actress gives wicked top spin. At Cannes in 2006, Cruz shared an ensemble prize with several other actresses from the film, but she carries <em>Volver </em>on her shoulders. </p>
<p id="pFKidc">The same goes for Almodóvar’s new and terrifically twisty comedy <em>Parallel Mothers</em>.<em> </em>Once again, Cruz is up for Best Actress, and sadly, she isn’t likely to win: Currently, the odds-on favorite is Jessica Chastain for her performance as Tammy Faye Bakker in <em>The Eyes of Tammy Faye</em>. But considering that Cruz has always been at her best working with Almodóvar, there’d be poetic justice in recognizing her for a film that arguably represents their crowning achievement together, just as it would have been <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2020/2/5/21123182/antonio-banderas-oscars-best-actor-pain-and-glory">wonderfully right for Antonio Banderas to win in 2020</a> for his work with the same filmmaker in <em>Pain and Glory</em>.<a href="https://www.theringer.com/2020/2/5/21123182/antonio-banderas-oscars-best-actor-pain-and-glory"><em> </em></a></p>
<p id="hptGmr">The premise of <em>Parallel Mothers </em>is sociologically loaded, juxtaposing the pregnancy of Cruz’s character, a middle-aged magazine photographer named Janis, with that of teenager Ana (Milena Smit). They’re two women at different ends of the age and class spectrum, united by a shared hospital room and the unexpected circumstances resulting in their delicate conditions. For Janis, an inheritor of a libertine late-’60s counterculture (her name is a reference to the late, great Ms. Joplin), motherhood is an experiment in self-sufficiency. The opening scenes show her engaging in an extended fling with a man whom she has no desire to settle down with, scenes that hearken back to the liberated sexuality of Cruz’s early roles; even while shooting subjects for work, Janis has an uninhibited allure. </p>
<p id="1Ft0xK">After learning that she’s expecting, Janis refuses an abortion, telling the father that he has no responsibility since she possesses the resolve (and finances, and support system) to succeed on her own terms as a single mom. For Ana, things are less triumphant; there are other, terrible reasons that the father isn’t in the picture, and the impending delivery is a source of anxious uncertainty. </p>
<p id="WeBwAE">One of Almodóvar’s great talents as a writer is that his characters all speak in distinctly different voices: Janis embraces maturity without sacrificing her freedom, while Ana copes with being forced to grow up too fast. The generational interplay also works because Cruz is so generous to her younger costar, raising Smit’s game through perfectly calibrated reaction shots. Bound together by exhaustion, adrenaline, and mutual affection, the two women watch their babies together through glass and resolve to stay in touch. </p>
<p id="BZnvpd">This being an Almodóvar movie, though, the best-laid plans go awry, and the vectors of the pair’s ensuing lives as mothers don’t just run parallel, but converge and intertwine in patterns encompassing every imaginable form of love, empathy, betrayal, and solidarity. </p>
<p id="HbrjSk">Few directors are as good as Almodóvar at using costumes, props, and and other matters of decor and design as storytelling tools—a shot of Janis in a T-shirt that reads “We Should All Be Feminists” underlines the theme of distaff empowerment even as it clashes with the character’s cozy domesticity and luxury-class surroundings. The idea of Janis as a kind of bougie Yummy Mummy luxuriating in a mix of progressive rhetoric and designer aesthetics (all her baby gear is high-end and color coordinated) lurks affectionately at the edges of her characterization, with its sly evocations of entitlement. Cruz has always held the camera—even in <em>Vanilla Sky</em>,<em> </em>with its mesmerized, point-of-view close-ups—and her self-assurance works perfectly for a character who’s determined to and capable of having it all. But then Janis’s bubble is burst by a bizarre medical test result that suggests her daughter isn’t actually hers—that somehow, there was a switch at the hospital, and she and Ana have been raising the wrong daughters all along. </p>
<p id="tRzRHD">This is potentially the stuff of screwball comedy, but Almodóvar quickly lowers the boom. Reconnecting with Ana, Janis learns that Ana’s daughter, Anita, has died tragically from crib death—a piece of news that widens the gap between the two women while drawing them closer in a mix of good and bad faith. When Janis subsequently hires Ana as a live-in nanny at a lavish salary, is it to let the heartbroken girl stay (unknowingly) close to her accidentally estranged infant? Or is it to mitigate her own guilt? Does Janis see the hapless Ana as a surrogate daughter, or a mirror of her younger self whom she could mold in her own image? Is she looking for an apprentice? A caregiver? A charity case? A lover? And how long can a woman with a keen sense of her country’s repressive history—who as the film opens is attempting, in tandem with Spain’s Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, to investigate the fate of a group of murdered anti-Franco freedom fighters—allow herself to keep a secret?</p>
<p id="AkvcK6">The personal is political in <em>Parallel Mothers</em>,<em> </em>and the unfolding relationship between the central melodrama, with its shifting power dynamics and whiplash-swift oscillations in tone, and the second, buried narrative of fascist violence and revolutionary resistance, is the work of a master storyteller—one who’s increasingly unshy about his subtextual agendas. In his early, irrepressible ’80s comedies, Almodóvar defied Spain’s history of authoritarianism by throwing taboos on-screen like confetti. As he’s gotten older, he hasn’t so much lost his edge as refined it, so that his movies draw little streaks of blood instead of explosive geysers, and Cruz matches his approach with a supremely controlled performance style.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="HIfoxg">There are two sequences in particular that showcase Cruz’s precise, devastating subtlety. In the first, Janis asks to see a cellphone video of Anita, whose status as her own flesh and blood can’t be disclosed; in the space of one short reaction shot, Cruz distills at least three kinds of heartbreak—for herself, for Ana, and for the baby—all of which Janis must modulate carefully in the moment lest she give herself (and her secret) away. In the second, she observes an open grave and registers the contents within not with surprise but a recognition that stops short of acceptance; the film closes by taking in her expression of fulfillment and defiance. In the end, <em>Parallel Mothers </em>is a film about the hard, necessary process of excavation—of things unburied and brought into the light. As ever, Almodóvar digs deep, and in Cruz he has a star who he can keep pulling from without ever reaching the bottom—an actress who has not only lived down her early foibles but crafted a body of work that her peers are hard-pressed to live up to.</p>
<p id="FVINbc"><a href="https://twitter.com/brofromanother"><em>Adam Nayman</em></a><em> is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book </em>The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together<em> is available now from Abrams.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2022/3/18/22983675/penelope-cruz-parallel-mothers-oscars-best-actressAdam Nayman2021-04-16T06:00:00-04:002021-04-16T06:00:00-04:00Make the Case: Viola Davis for Best Actress
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<p>‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ touches on many themes, but because of its star actress and character, it is, at its core, a story about the act of anticipation</p> <p id="DVloYb">From her very first strut in <em>Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom</em>, Viola Davis’s vision of the eponymous blues singer can see nearly anything and everything coming from a mile away. Are those prying eyes aimed at Ma and her lover, Dussie May (Taylour Paige), as she exits a pious and affluent Black Chicago inn? Why, of course. And her white manager, Irv, could he be colluding with her (also white) label executive, Sturdyvant, to control and extract all but the fibrous husk of the vibrant performer? There is, simply, no doubt. What, then, of her band’s prodigious trumpeter, Levee (Chadwick Boseman); are his attempts to usurp her bound to doom all within his reach? The answer is not a matter of if, but when. On each occasion, Ma Rainey is right, and on each occasion, she could prove as much from the start.</p>
<p id="MyXzXw">So goes the life of a woman conditioned to know better, an outlook Davis endeavors meticulously to bring to the film. An adaptation of the dramatist August Wilson’s play, <em>Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom</em> touches on many themes—the exploitation of Black artists in the music industry, pre-Depression America, the blues—but because of its star actress and character, it is, at its core, a story about the act of anticipation. What does it mean when certain people learn to expect the world to move in a certain direction because they must? What does it say if they are almost always right? Whether or not the Academy Awards fully recognizes the depth and skill of Davis’s performance, the nature and worth of the portrayal is uncontestable. </p>
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<p id="T7uSvT"><br>Davis always has been transparent about what she hopes to bring to her characters. “Not a lot of narratives are also invested in our humanity. They’re invested in the idea of what it means to be Black,” she <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/07/cover-story-viola-davis">told <em>Vanity Fair</em></a> in December. “The white audience at the most can sit and get an academic lesson into how we are. Then they leave the movie theater and they talk about what it meant. They’re not moved by who we were.” She wants her characters to be real, to convey real lives and real thoughts. </p>
<p id="LvA13w">She did as much in 2008’s <em>Doubt</em>, with Meryl Streep, in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThsZ8wfhJpk">less than eight minutes</a>. In the brief appearance as the mother of a boy who may be the victim of abuse by a priest at an exclusive majority white Catholic school, Davis’s character chooses to bury the revelation out of fear that it will unmask another secret, her son’s budding homosexuality. The boy’s father beats him and would, she professes, take his life if word of the potential crime leaked. “My husband will kill that child over a thing like this,” she says, in a moment of stunning clarity. The scene is horrific and wrenching and cruel and calculating. And the character’s pain, because of Davis’s portrayal, is all the more true.</p>
<p id="XiGSCW">In <em>Fences</em>, another Wilson play adapted to the big screen, Davis portrays the dutiful and observant Rose Maxson. Her husband, Troy (Denzel Washington), cheats on her, spurred by an unquenchable bitterness with his station in midcentury American life. She is, eventually, informed of the affair and its progeny. She surveys the landscape and, after weighing her options, formulates a way to make the relationship work for her. She stays, but is no longer truly Troy’s wife. She decides it is her preferred path forward in a dearth of options. And, because of Davis, her choice is all the more true. </p>
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<p id="0I2AM7">Both of these roles earned Davis Oscar nominations, and her win in <em>Fences</em> served as the eighth victory for a Black actress in the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (Regina King raised that total to nine in 2019 with her Best Supporting Actress award for her role in <em>If Beale Street Could Talk.</em>) Davis is one of only 21 Black women who’ve ever been nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, and only seven (including her) have won it. Only one Black woman (Halle Berry in 2002) has ever claimed the title of Best Actress in a Lead Role. The Academy is not an institution that tends to recognize artists like Davis, particularly in its biggest categories. The significance of the Oscars in American entertainment is <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/oscars-academy-awards-rigged-best-picture-nominations-win-2019-2">well-trodden ground</a>, and what it has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/01/16/oscars-long-history-getting-called-out-lack-diversity/">failed</a>—or, from a different vantage point, succeeded—in doing is similarly established. Davis’s performance in <em>Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom</em> is the latest work to challenge this legacy; that certain stories contain little grandeur and certain artists channel little glory.</p>
<p id="S8QiX5">The beauty in these works is that they never, really, concern themselves with adhering to Hollywood’s rigid orthodoxy. This fact is central to why the Academy so rarely gives them their due. A restrictive club may sometimes invite an outsider. It almost never opens its doors to one who cares nothing of the establishment itself. Some art can escape this trap, focus only on its contents, and eschew thoughts of its perception without limiting its institutional standing. Other art just can’t. Call it the burden of precarity: Work created on the margins often must decide whether it aspires for mainstream acceptance, or whether it seeks existence on its own merits; it can rarely have both. A win for Davis would mean that, at least in the present, this calculus is not ironclad. Her performance is good enough to do it. </p>
<p id="Ik8zch">In <em>Fences</em>, Davis embodied the burden and belief required of domesticity, but in <em>Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom </em>she acts as a protector. Early in the film, Irv attempts to dictate when the band will start to record. Rainey refuses to bend. “We’ll be ready to go when Madam says we’re ready to go,” she reminds him, ”and that’s the way it go around here.” She insists that her employers feature her nephew, Sylvester, on the roll call for the hit track “Black Bottom,” even though he has a speech impediment. When the men in the studio fail to provide her with a bottle of Coca-Cola, she shuts down the entire recording session. Even after their work finally ceases, she keenly refuses to sign away any song rights until she’s fully compensated. Rainey is rough, commandeering, and careful because, in this world, there are only so many ways to endure. She lives and moves with the knowledge of where and how she fits best. No one can shield her but herself, and even then it is a tenuous bet. </p>
<p id="RXMfS0">Davis’s eyes do most of the work to sell this vision: She rolls them in disgust, closes them in ecstasy, glares with them disparagingly, and rests them in exhaustion. It is not an accident that the last full face to appear in the film is Rainey’s, contemplatively staring ahead as she journeys back to the South. The actress’s portrayal of Rainey was not merely a matter of adhering to Wilson’s text—Davis committed to staying true to a set of lives that she could not divorce herself from. “[My] way in was by really relying on what I know about Black women who look like that,” she said of <a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/ny-viola-davis-ma-raineys-black-bottom-20201214-35lhd26gmrfcdgny5cuj6ycrli-story.html">preparing for the role</a>, “Not from what I’ve seen before in the media.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="zBNhNJ">Before she even thought to portray the songstress, Davis knew Rainey’s essence. The truth is that there are bits of her in every corner of the world. Davis knew where to look and how to bring them out. It’s this symbiosis, between the nature of the character and the expertise needed to transmit it, that gives her performance its weight. It would be a shame if the Academy pondered that marvel only to look askance once more. Then again, a savant like Ma would likely see it coming. And could prove it from the start, too.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/4/16/22386668/viola-davis-best-actress-ma-rainey-black-bottomLex Pryor2021-04-15T06:15:00-04:002021-04-15T06:15:00-04:00Make the Case: Anthony Hopkins for Best Actor
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<p>In Florian Zeller’s elegiac ‘The Father,’ Hopkins gives one of the strongest performances in his storied career, playing a character grappling with his own mortality</p> <p id="54wUf8">In <em>The Father, </em>Anthony Hopkins plays Anthony, a man who’s trying to figure out how his life fits together. He’s become the missing piece in his own private jigsaw puzzle. Stalking around his spacious flat in London, the 80-something widower tells anybody who’ll listen—mostly his adult daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), who drops in and out on regular visits that test her nerves—that he’s fine, and that his mind is like a steel trap. But there’s rust around the edges. </p>
<p id="GMXuiE">Anthony forgets names and dates and loses track of time; he hides valuables in a secret spot and later thinks that they’ve been lost or stolen; he’s plagued by hallucinations of strangers and loved ones, living and dead. The word “dementia” is never spoken aloud, but it hangs there in the apartment like a ghost. “I can look after myself,” Anthony insists. It’s as if he’s trying to convince himself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The surest sign that Anthony is terrified is that he’s putting on such a brave face. </p>
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<p id="HUNwra">Florian Zeller’s film adaptation of his award-winning 2014 play, <em>Le Père</em>,<em> </em>represents a noble attempt to transform and transcend the material’s theatrical roots. It mostly succeeds. The staginess of the original script (coadapted and translated into English by Christopher Hampton) is extremely deliberate, because Anthony (called Andre in the French version) finds himself unexpectedly in a position where he is forced to perform. He’s impersonating a well-functioning version of himself, and scrutinizing his audience for responses. For his film-directorial debut, Zeller has employed a shooting style that draws out the play’s themes of psychological dislocation. “I wanted to play with broken memory by constantly changing the space,” he told <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/adawson/2021/03/30/florian-zeller-takes-viewers-into-the-labyrinth-of-dementia-with-the-father/?sh=6d1c1ccb3a45"><em>Forbes</em></a>. Watch carefully, and the layout and architecture of Anthony’s flat keeps changing around him, from scene to scene and sometimes even shot to shot. (Once you catch the trick, you never stop looking for it.) With its slow, steady tracking shots and labyrinthine single-location set—all long corridors and doors hanging ominously ajar—<em>The Father </em>plays with the language of horror films. Like Michael Haneke’s 2012 Palme d’Or winner, <em>Amour</em>,<em> </em>its scariness is directly proportional to its relatability. </p>
<p id="3ArvOA">What really elevates <em>The</em> <em>Father </em>and cinches its subtexts of psychic and emotional fragility are the performances of Hopkins and Colman, who are both deservedly Oscar-nominated but unlikely to win owing to past triumphs. (Hopkins, who at 83 is the oldest Best Actor nominee ever, also copped a BAFTA over the weekend.) Colman earned her statuette in 2019 for playing another, more imperious Anne—the 18th-century monarch made infamous by multiple stillbirths and miscarriages—in Yorgos Lanthimos’s <em>The Favourite</em>. She was great in that role (and gave the decade’s best acceptance speech after upsetting Glenn Close) but her work here is subtler and more rewarding. Zeller and Hampton’s choice to open up the script and give Anne more scenes—instead of simply being seen from her father’s compromised perspective—yields a fine, sympathetic portrait of love tested. At this point it seems that Colman can do anything; she’s never had a false moment as an actress. </p>
<p id="bIAgGy">Hopkins, meanwhile, was feted three decades ago for<em> The Silence of the Lambs, </em>a choice that was at once inevitable <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftUGtsdSXeU">(as evidenced by a truly enthusiastic standing ovation)</a> and felt a bit like category fraud considering that Hannibal Lecter has only about 20 minutes of screen time. </p>
<p id="Djh1uY">A little lip-smacking goes a long way, of course, and <em>The Silence of the Lambs </em>was not only a landmark in the history of the serial killer movie but also a turning point in the career of a great stage actor who had to that point been a bit of a cinematic underachiever. In his autobiography, <em>Confessions of an Actor</em>,<em> </em>no less than Sir Laurence Olivier recalls watching a 29-year-old Hopkins perform as his understudy in a 1967 production of August Strindberg’s <em>The Dance of Death </em>and marveling at the technique of the potential Next Big Thing. (“He walked away with [the part] like a cat with a mouse between his teeth.”) By the mid-1970s, Hopkins was being touted as the heir to his fellow Welshman Richard Burton, whose commanding stage presence had translated into big-screen stardom and celebrity. The sky was the limit: After directing Hopkins in 1977’s <em>A Bridge Too Far, </em>Richard Attenborough called him “the best actor of his generation.” </p>
<p id="QdpCcX">Hopkins made movies regularly in the 1980s in the U.S. and the UK and continued setting a high standard on the stage. But with the exception of his deeply humane turn as Dr. Frederick Treves in <em>The Elephant Man</em>—a role defined by a series of astonishing, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gADayU4DP9U">empathetic reaction shots</a> in the presence of the disfigured title character—none of his featured film roles were particularly iconic. In <em>The Bounty, </em>as the mad Captain Bligh (a part originally played to perfection by Charles Laughton) he acted the young Mel Gibson to a draw; elsewhere, memorable roles were hard to come by.</p>
<p id="ZDMSHw">Hopkins was, at best, a long shot for the part of Dr. Lecter, which was earmarked for Gene Hackman. He ended up being the beneficiary of Jonathan Demme’s brilliantly counterintuitive casting instincts. In a recent interview with <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/02/dr-lecter-my-name-is-clarice-starling"><em>Vanity Fair</em>,</a><em> </em>Hopkins revealed that Demme told him he wanted him for <em>The Silence of the Lambs </em>based on his work in <em>The Elephant Man. </em>“I said, ‘Why would that resonate with you?’” Hopkins recalled. “[Demme] said, ‘Well, because Treves is a really good man.’ And I said, ‘OK. Well, what about Hannibal Lecter?’ He said, ‘I think he’s a good man, he’s a very bright man. He’s trapped in an insane brain.’” </p>
<p id="fWzwni">With Lecter, insanity is a state of grace, and in Hopkins’s best performances—<em>The Father </em>included—you get the sense of an extreme intelligence rattling around behind those sapphire-blue eyes. Even when Hopkins’s characters aren’t explicitly cerebral (or sociopathic), they’re always thinking. With his sharp, crystalline diction, he’s ideally cast as orators, as in Steven Spielberg’s 19th-century drama <em>Amistad, </em>in which he inhabited the eloquent anti-slavery rhetoric of ex-president John Quincy Adams (and put the movie over the top with a quietly blistering speech about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb3txlrBZaE">“the natural state of mankind</a>”). <em>The Silence of the Lambs </em>raised Hopkins’s profile to the point that he was everywhere in the 1990s, emerging as the stoic, soulful center in a series of prestige pictures and even becoming the art-house version of a box-office draw. As a straitlaced butler in the Merchant Ivory hit <em>The Remains of the Day, </em>Hopkins succeeded in burying his character’s feelings so deeply beneath a fastidious exterior of servitude that any flashes of emotion registered as a seismic event: It’s the the kind of acting that draws the camera toward it and gives microscopic subtlety a good name. </p>
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<p id="vRI8sT">More spectacularly, Hopkins impersonated Richard Nixon for Oliver Stone with a richly Shakespearean intensity, evoking Richard III in the White House, or maybe King Lear; throwing subtlety to the wind, he turned the apparent miscasting of a Brit as the most malevolent American president of the 20th century into a masterstroke. His Nixon is never comfortable in his own snaky skin. Elsewhere, Hopkins masticated David Mamet’s razor-blade dialogue in <em>The Edge </em>(and also killed a Grizzly Bear while he was at it); classed up several franchise blockbusters (<em>The Mask of Zorro</em>,<em> Mission: Impossible 2</em>,<em> </em>and, much later on, <em>Thor</em>) and cashed in nicely on the Lecter legacy, vamping it up in <em>Hannibal </em>and <em>Red Dragon </em>like the lead singer of an arena-rock band on a reunion tour. (Whether it was fun or depressing to see Hopkins playing the hits was what the Good Doctor might call a matter of taste.)</p>
<p id="dQR5Ao">Like his fellow master thespian Michael Caine—with whom he costarred in <em>A Bridge Too Far</em>—Hopkins evidently likes to work more than he cares about the work itself. His quality-control filter malfunctions more than most other actors of his stature. What’s exciting about <em>The Father </em>is the opportunity to see an actor with a dizzyingly high ceiling being forced by a well-written role to raise his game, and watching him reconfigure his trademark precision into a fugue of confusion. Early in the film, Anthony hears the door open and is confronted by a woman claiming to be Anne but who’s played by a different actress (Olivia Williams), and his effort to take this non sequitur in stride—to make it seem like his bewilderment is something that’s being done to him instead of a trick of his own fragmenting consciousness—is palpable. </p>
<p id="MJP1yV">These casting switches continue throughout the movie, and all the trickery would feel like a gimmick if not for Hopkins’s gravitas in the midst of it. Because Zeller insists on keeping his story in the present tense, never quite differentiating between memories, visions, and real events, we don’t really know much about Anthony, and Hopkins fills in the blanks with his physicality and behavior. We get the impression that Anthony hasn’t necessarily been changed by his condition, but that aspects of his personality have been heightened and crystalized: This is a man capable of great charm and cruelty, suddenly unable to choose and move between them. A scene when Anthony first dotes on and then attacks a potential caregiver played by Imogen Poots is devastating, unfolding as a series of agonizing, frozen smiles, pity mingled with humiliation.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="GTnNx5">And then there is the movie’s finale, which may be the single most impressive acting of Hopkins’s career, non-cannibal division. Here, everything that Anthony recognizes about his life gets stripped from him—all at once, and yet, as we come to understand, not for the first time. What’s left is at once blisteringly specific and hauntingly universal: a desire to be loved, to be comforted, to be told everything will be OK. To be lied to. Somehow, Hopkins turns the theme of memory back on the audience: He makes us forget who we’re watching. </p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/4/15/22384157/anthony-hopkins-best-actor-the-fatherAdam Nayman2021-04-14T06:10:00-04:002021-04-14T06:10:00-04:00Make the Case: Maria Bakalova for Best Supporting Actress
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<p>If there were ever a time for the Academy to abandon its traditional bias against comedy, it’s now</p> <p id="whVutB">As much as the Oscars strive to celebrate the best movies and the artists responsible for making them, the Academy is certainly susceptible to intense scrutiny—<em>Green Book</em> as Best Picture in the year of our lord 2019?!—and major blind spots. <em>Parasite</em>’s triumph at last year’s ceremony was <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/2/10/21131079/parasite-best-picture-oscars-2020-academy-awards-progress">objectively awesome</a>, but it also underlined the Oscars’ historic shortcomings: it took more than nine decades for a non-English-language film to nab Best Picture. Whether it’s broadening the types of films that can win top awards or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/movies/oscarssowhite-history.html">diversifying its membership</a>, progress within the Academy <em>can</em> happen, but it tends to be frustratingly incremental. </p>
<p id="OoAdUB">In addition to repeatedly delivering non-diverse nomination slates, the Oscars have also failed at evaluating what makes good acting outside of the typical conventions. For the Academy, that’s most apparent with the voting body’s long-standing aversion to comedy. Traditionally, acting nominees are overwhelmingly skewed in favor of dramatic work, in which a certain level of seriousness seems to be synonymous with prestige. Unfortunately, the Academy can’t retroactively give Tiffany Haddish the love she deserved for a fantastically bonkers performance in <em>Girls Trip</em>, but the Oscars are slowly beginning to recognize more work that defies the usual standards. It was only a couple of years ago that Olivia Colman won Best Actress for an unconventionally hilarious lead performance in <em>The Favourite</em> over presumptive front-runner Glenn Close, whose work in <em>The Wife</em>—[<em>whispers</em>] she was the wife—was more in the Academy’s wheelhouse. Still, you can count on one hand the number of actors nominated for full-on comedic performances at the Oscars this century: Melissa McCarthy (<em>Bridesmaids</em>), Robert Downey Jr. (<em>Tropic Thunder</em>), and Renée Zellweger (<em>Bridget Jones’s Diary</em>), all of whom went home empty-handed. </p>
<p id="aFz1Gb">Given how rarely the Academy honors comedy these days, the fact that Maria Bakalova even got a nomination this year feels like a victory in and of itself. After all, it’s not just that Bakalova was nominated within a customarily ignored genre—she was nominated for a crass mockumentary that required her to do everything from performing a “fertility dance” at a debutante ball with visible menstrual blood to sitting down for a now-infamous interview with a disgraced political figure. Rewarding Bakalova’s work, which flies in the face of what typically constitutes an “Oscar-worthy” performance, won’t fix the Academy’s bias against comedy overnight. Nevertheless, that kind of recognition would still be a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r13riaRKGo0"><em>great success</em></a><em>!</em> </p>
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<p id="PP7I6n">It was undeniably thrilling news when it was first announced that a <em>Borat</em> sequel had been stealthily shot, produced, and would be released on Amazon Prime in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, but it came with some important caveats. Living up to one of the best comedies of the aughts is one thing; for Sacha Baron Cohen to attempt the Borat schtick when his Kazakhstan reporter is almost universally recognized is another challenge entirely. The solution for <em>Borat Subsequent Moviefilm</em> wasn’t just to sideline the title character—Cohen is usually donning a disguise-within-a-disguise to keep unsuspecting victims of his pranks off the scent—but to center the film’s emotional arc on his teenage daughter. </p>
<p id="ImFbhF">A largely unknown Bulgarian actress prior to the film’s release, Bakalova first appears as Tutar before Borat departs for America to present a famous Kazakh monkey as a bribe to the Trump administration. (Fictional Kazakhstan has fallen on hard times.) Living in Borat’s barn, Tutar initially presents as a feral teenager with few, if any, social norms, whose narrow view of the world revolves around the prospect of finding a husband to house her in a cage. Unbeknownst to her father, Tutar sneaks into the monkey crate and eats the primate on their journey to the United States—shifting Borat’s plans to present his daughter as a child bride to any high-ranking member of Trump’s inner circle that will accept her. </p>
<p id="rpztmv">On screen, the narrative plays out as a journey of self-discovery for father and daughter. Borat learns to overcome the cruel and outdated practices of his home country to love his daughter as she is; Tutar, meanwhile, undergoes a feminist awakening to discover her worth while recognizing how much misogyny is embedded in society around her. In practice, that requires Bakalova to keep pace with Cohen, a uniquely gifted improvisational comic who appears most comfortable the more he commits to the bit. What’s most shocking about Bakalova’s performance isn’t that she handles everything her costar throws at her, but that she actually commandeers several of <em>Subsequent Moviefilm</em>’s best sequences. In one scene, Tutar accidentally puts a “baby” inside of her by swallowing a cupcake decoration. She and Borat then visit a women’s health center, where Bakalova’s infantile behavior to a pro-life pastor who believes she was impregnated by her father will make you want to cover your eyes in horror. </p>
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<p id="0c20lb">Arguably even more impressive are several pranks in the film when the actress goes solo, including <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbVl8rmoWpE">telling a group of Republican women about the joys of masturbating</a>, underlining Bakalova’s own comedy chops when working on the fly. But Bakalova’s performance goes beyond nailing the general grotesqueries required to star in a <em>Borat</em> movie: Tutar also has moments of unexpected poignancy. Bakalova imbues her character with genuine warmth, and it radiates throughout the movie, whether in scripted scenes bonding with her father or interactions with real-life people, like a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNDBItTf2rw">saintly babysitter</a> worried about Tutar’s well-being. (Tutar describes Borat to the babysitter as “the smartest man in the whole flat world” and doesn’t believe women can learn how to drive.) </p>
<p id="U3InXf">The biggest challenge <em>Subsequent Moviefilm </em>faced was avoiding becoming a retread of the original film. While it’s unclear just how intentional the Tutar pivot ended up being from the onset—perhaps Cohen was emboldened by the exceptional work of his able sidekick—the character really does steal the show. Tutar is the sort of transformative role that the Oscars usually eat up—think Christian Bale slimming down in <em>The Fighter</em> or Leonardo DiCaprio devouring raw bison meat and generally having the worst time of his life for <em>The Revenant</em>—but in a much more unconventional setting. But just because Tutar doesn’t have the usual hallmarks of an Oscar-winning performance doesn’t make her any less Oscar worthy. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="q0tAlc">It’s not unusual for unknown performers to come out of the blue and win an Oscar to elevate their profile. (Think Kathy Bates for <em>Misery</em> or Lupita Nyong’o, fresh out of Yale School of Drama, for <em>12 Years a Slave</em>.) It would be a <em>little</em> more unusual were that Oscar presented to a virtually anonymous Bulgarian actress whose oddball performance began as an unkempt villager in a barn dreaming of a cage to live in and ended as something closer to Tomi Lahren cosplay that generated an entire news cycle about Rudy Giuliani. But the eccentricities of Bakalova’s performance do nothing to diminish what she accomplished, having lulled countless unsuspecting people into believing that Tutar might not be a fictional character. More than even a much-deserved Oscar, it’s a testament to Bakalova’s work that, much like Cohen’s Kazakh journalist, Tutar will be so ingrained into popular culture that she’d have a hard time duping folks ever again. </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/4/14/22382620/maria-bakalova-borat-deserves-best-actress-oscarMiles Surrey2021-04-13T06:00:00-04:002021-04-13T06:00:00-04:00Riz Ahmed’s Devastatingly Loud ‘Sound of Metal’ Performance
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<p>The ‘Sound of Metal’ star pours himself into his role as a drummer rapidly losing his hearing and turns a pretty good movie into something close to great with a punishing performance</p> <p id="rkRU86">And then, Riz Ahmed smashes the doughnut. Just pounds the hell out of it. Four quick crushing blows with his right fist: <em>WHAP. </em>Quick pause. <em>WHAP WHAP WHAP</em>. He is sitting at a small table in an otherwise empty room at 5 a.m. with a blank notebook, a pen, a cup of coffee that has now sloshed onto the table, and a doughnut that is now a pulverized heap of crumbs. He feels bad. He gathers up the crumbs and attempts to reassemble the wreckage into a doughnut shape, then smashes it again. <em>WHAP</em>. A few crumbs land on the blank notebook this time. He sweeps them back off. It’s all awfully fastidious, as quick outbursts of Oscar-worthy fury go. But it’s worthy nonetheless. </p>
<p id="XEZhxX">We are halfway through the alternately dead-silent and punishingly loud 2020 drama <em>Sound of Metal</em>, in which Ahmed plays Ruben, a tremulous, four-years-sober sludge-metal drummer who learns, 15 minutes into the film, that he’s losing his hearing, fast. The deal here, given that you’re watching a six-times-nominated Oscar darling—including Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Ahmed, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Sound—is that you’re waiting for Ruben to fly into a screaming and smashing Oscar-clip rage. Which he soon does: His bandmate and girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke), wakes up one morning to find him destroying all the musical gear in their Airstream RV. </p>
<aside id="yuBa3y"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Make the Case: The Restraint of Steven Yeun in ‘Minari’ ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/4/12/22379106/steven-yeun-minari-deserves-best-actor-oscar"}]}'></div></aside><p id="hyNB1t">Here we go. The screaming. The smashing. Lou with her hands covering her face, shuddering. You’ve seen this movie before. Lou’s pushing Ruben to go to a rural commune for deaf people in recovery, so he can avoid relapse and come to grips with his condition. He refuses. She insists. Cue the wrenching Oscar-clip scene when she gets in a cab and it drives away as he chokes back sobs. You’ve seen that movie, too. Ruben goes to the commune, run by the saintly Joe (Paul Raci, up for Best Supporting Actor), a deaf Vietnam vet who is recovering from alcoholism who pushes Ruben to learn American Sign Language, and also pushes Ruben to get up every morning at 5 and sit in an empty room with a pen and paper and coffee and a doughnut. The pen and paper is just a distraction, if a distraction is required. “There’s nothing that needs to be accomplished in this room,” Joe says, in sign language and also out loud, with a computer monitor glowing between them, displaying the words to Ruben. “All I want you to do is just … sit.”</p>
<p id="uslFCU">And then, the next morning, Ruben smashes the doughnut. Which is where I finally bought in—bought into the movie, and more importantly bought into him. </p>
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<p id="NEKNIU"><em>Sound of Metal</em>—directed by Darius Marder, who cowrote the screenplay with his brother, Abraham—is not quite greater than the sum of its parts, which is no slight to the parts. As nearly all the <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sound_of_metal">near-entirely glowing reviews</a> note, the sound design—which plunges us into Ruben’s head with a harrowing mix of piercing feedback, muffled voices, total silence, and even more upsetting noise collages once doctors get involved—is extraordinary, and perhaps the Oscar this movie is most likely to win. Raci, a septuagenarian character actor who IRL performs in a Black Sabbath tribute band called <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2020/12/sound-of-metal-paul-raci-1234598013/">Hands of Doom ASL ROCK</a>, is a fount of ferocious dignity whose patience and tenderness fracture only when Ruben starts treating his hearing loss as an affliction to be cured. The editing sure beats the hell out of <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2019/03/bohemian-rhapsody-bad-editing-video-essay-watch-1202051342/"><em>Bohemian Rhapsody</em>’s</a>. </p>
<p id="Dp3m1U">But this is Ahmed’s movie, and Ahmed’s triumph even when the pace falters or the melodrama crescendos or the plot beats that arrive as expected (like the pre-doughnut freakouts) rub up uneasily against the expected plot beats that don’t arrive at all (he is no threat to relapse). One great performance can make a bad movie bearable, but it takes one extraordinary performance to make a pretty good movie something close to great. </p>
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<p id="5Hl1x5">In an industry with a more progressive and logical definition of the word <em>movie</em>, Ahmed would already have a Best Actor Oscar nomination, if not an outright win, for the feature-length pilot episode of the 2016 HBO limited series <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2017/9/13/16303092/emmys-2017-revisiting-night-of-pilot-hbo"><em>The Night Of</em></a>, in which he played Naz, a mild-mannered Queens striver who borrows his father’s cab and soon finds himself accused of murder after a harrowing series of bad decisions and even worst twists of fate. Naz can only softly tremble as this noose tightens around him, and it’s excruciating how well Ahmed plays that screaming-in-silence helplessness. (He settled for <a href="https://www.emmys.com/video/69th-emmy-awards-riz-ahmed-wins-outstanding-lead-actor-limited-series-or-movie">winning an Emmy</a>.) What I’ll say is that <em>Sound of Metal </em>comes way closer to sticking its landing than (<a href="https://www.theringer.com/2016/8/2/16045768/the-night-of-has-a-foot-fetish-and-it-stinks-349a27ea16bb">lotta foot stuff</a>) <em>The Night Of </em>did. Ruben screams out loud a lot more than Naz did, it’s true, but Ahmed has only gotten better at conveying constant inner turmoil while keeping the award-bait outbursts to a minimum. </p>
<p id="tRpkJo">Ruben favors bright-blond hair dye and sophomoric tattoos (from the underwear to the giant clown) and a dazzling array of hardcore-punk T-shirts. (He <a href="https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2559903/sound-of-metal-breaking-down-riz-ahmeds-band-shirts-in-the-movie">reps G.I.S.M.</a> during his first American Sign Language lesson with some awestruck grade schoolers.) Ahmed, shirtless and wild-eyed, is entirely convincing as a metal drummer for the 10 minutes or so in which he gets to play one. (Ruben and Lou’s band, Blackgammon, is based on the real-life husband-and-wife duo <a href="https://www.slashfilm.com/sound-of-metal-director-interview/">Jucifer</a>, who I’ve seen live and can confirm are stupendously loud; my only note on the music stuff overall is that Blackgammon is a terrible band name.) Beyond that, Ruben is a classic Oscar-bait role, volcanic yet repressed, devastated yet determined. </p>
<p id="QJZ48g">Ahmed elevates that inherent cliché, though, by somehow making you <em>feel</em> his hopeless struggle to hear the way he used to hear, eyes bugging just so, jaw clenching just so, shoulders slumped just so. <em>Sound of Metal</em>’s pace is somehow too slow and too fast simultaneously: Post-doughnut, Ahmed’s adaptation to the commune, and to sign language, is almost frictionless, but it takes him far too long to realize the pricey cochlear implants he covets won’t bring him anything resembling peace. So the movie mostly just … sits with him. It is a great mercy that Ahmed is such a compelling person to sit with. He forces you into stillness, but a rich and infinitely varied stillness that Joe later describes as “the kingdom of God.” </p>
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<p id="BSYueD">I’d love for Raci to win his Oscar too, while we’re at it. As an actor, Ahmed is magnetic but also generous, content to let the increasingly nightmarish sound design carry the emotional weight, and let his fellow actors shine. The other award-bait cliché you’re braced for is the tear-stained, bittersweet reunion of Ruben and Lou, who has transformed in Ruben’s absence in a way that’s heartbreaking enough on its own. But Ahmed and Cooke deftly underplay that scene, too, with a shared stillness this time, and a well-deployed “It’s OK” or two. There is crying, yes: theirs and mine. I keep replaying this scene to study Ahmed for signs of capital-A Acting, for contrived pauses and forced facial contortions, but all I see is a guy I’ve already gladly watched desperately brood for hours, and whom I nonetheless hope to watch desperately brood for hours in a great many movies to come. </p>
<p id="pdRcRL">About that: Ahmed’s not going to win. Chadwick Boseman will, posthumously of course, for <em>Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom</em>, and nobody can be mad at this, beyond the righteous anger that the Academy failed to honor Boseman while he was alive. The final cliché that <em>Sound of Metal </em>expertly subverts is that if you’ve watched enough movies like this, you’re braced for this one to end with Ruben, in strident voice-over, reading the stuff he wrote in that otherwise-empty room, bloodied but unbowed, full of fear but also suffused with voter-friendly hope. Not so. Thank goodness. We never find out what he wrote, because he doesn’t care, and neither should we. Instead, we leave Ahmed in a state of not-unblissful silence. The pen and paper were just if he needed a distraction. The smashed (and restored, and re-smashed) doughnut told us all we needed to know. </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/4/13/22381213/riz-ahmed-best-actor-sound-of-metalRob Harvilla2021-04-12T09:00:31-04:002021-04-12T09:00:31-04:00Make the Case: The Restraint of Steven Yeun in ‘Minari’
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<p>He’s one of Hollywood’s most charming actors. What makes his performance as a struggling patriarch Oscar-worthy, then, is the way he rejects that innate talent.</p> <p id="zBEXjj">Lee Isaac Chung’s <em>Minari</em> is an ensemble film, with every member of the Yi family (and each actor portraying them) participating in and creating the complex dynamic that evolves inside the house-on-wheels they all come to share. The movie flows between the different perspectives of the characters with ease and dramatic precision; Chung’s writing, too, is subtle yet clear, with tonal shifts that always feel both natural and intelligent. The film’s beauty truly results from all its different parts working together in harmony. </p>
<p id="Zwzv0z">But within this delicate film about familial love and hope, Steven Yeun has a difficult job to do, one that he executes expertly. He is the movie’s tough core, its cold and hard dimension. After his first role in Korean in Lee Chang-dong’s critically acclaimed <em>Burning</em>, where he played a potential psychopath who could <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/10/23/18014116/steven-yeun-burning-lee-chang-dong-korean-film">hide behind his smiles</a>, here Yeun steps into the shoes of a man who acts distant but does have a heart. Jacob is a Korean father and husband who’s been taking his family around 1980s America trying to make it, and when we meet the Yis, he’s driving them to Arkansas, where he hopes to grow a successful agricultural business. His wife, Monica (Yeri Han), is highly skeptical; tensions rise. Jacob seems to be neglecting her opinion, and even the well-being of their two young children who haven’t had a chance at a stable childhood. Yeun appears selfish, stubborn, and almost cruel. His character seems to be doing all of this just for himself.</p>
<p id="Y2vR0d">Actors are trained to feel—they learn to recognize both their own and other people’s emotions and, more importantly, to allow themselves to experience even the most difficult ones. The challenge for Yeun in <em>Minari</em> is to resist his feelings, because that’s what Jacob does, often to an extreme degree. Early on, the couple fights about their new living conditions, and Jacob screams at his wife until she turns her back on him to say, in a shaky murmur, that their relationship may be doomed after all. Yeun flinches a little, but almost immediately looks away, as though he were unable to really accept what Han has told him. Refusing to take in this threat, Jacob is a wall, and won’t even try to reassure Monica. He recognizes her distress, but can’t bring himself to confront it head on. We get the sense that it isn’t the first time Monica has had to say such a thing to get her husband to listen to her, nor the first time that his response was denial. The following morning, when Monica tells the children that she and Dad have found an agreement and Grandma is moving in, Yeun appears only briefly and skips breakfast, unwilling to expose himself to questions from his children about the night before. </p>
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<p id="9Npadn"><br>This isn’t to say that Jacob is unfeeling—his off-screen discussion with his wife after the fight makes that clear. He is connected to his children, in particular to David (Alan S. Kim), to whom he tries to teach his strong principles of independence and logic. Yeun becomes playful when he talks to Kim about his great plans for their Korean vegetable farm, reacting to the boy’s natural childish charm with the abandon of a proud father. Jacob also accepts the help of Paul (Will Patton), a man pushed to the brink by loneliness and religion who perhaps needs the work more than the farm needs him. But with this warm stranger, Jacob is awkward and uncomfortable; Patton lays all of his feelings out at all times (he often turns to the sky to scream thanks to God), while Yeun seems to be fighting to keep all his in. When the first crops arrive, he makes a point of congratulating Paul for his hard work, to the man’s utter delight, but he lets himself smile for only a second before saying “OK, enough!” and returning to his task. </p>
<p id="xfke1H">That task is the very reason why Jacob doesn’t spend much time in his feelings, or considering those of others: The success of his farm is his priority. Like many driven immigrants (here’s looking at you, Dad), but also like any fiercely ambitious person, he is willing to sacrifice his and his family’s immediate comfort for the sake of potential happiness in the long run. Portraying Jacob therefore requires Yeun to believe in that enterprise with extreme fervor. But Yeun, a naturally sensitive actor, makes Jacob’s stubborn determination especially hard to accept. He brings his warmth and his ability to connect to others to the role, only to obstruct it, or rather to deviate it toward that ambition. While Yeun leaned into his sensibility to appear creepy in <em>Burning</em>, here he resists it, letting it only seep through occasionally and almost accidentally, like when Jacob offers Monica that they go to church so that she can make new friends. She herself is surprised by his sudden care for her loneliness, and by his willingness to go to Sunday service despite his more pragmatic view of life. She’s learned not to expect him to be too concerned for her feelings.</p>
<p id="zzMnAi">It <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/2/17/22286185/minari-review-asian-american-representation">would be simplistic</a> to call <em>Minari</em> a film about that elusive American Dream. The tribulations that the family faces slowly shift the focus from the crops to the couple itself, and how they handle those challenges. For Monica, the basis of all their hard work and sacrifices needs to be the family: They have to stick together no matter what and be as happy as possible while they try to reach for financial stability. But Jacob has things in the reverse order: The farm needs to work for the Yis to be fulfilled. As problems pile up, the film becomes more personal, with Yeun and Han’s dynamic veering closer and closer to an irreparable rupture even as Jacob and Monica learn more and more about each other’s sense of priorities. </p>
<p id="lSZEfM">One night, Jacob suddenly and affectionately turns to Monica and tries to reassure her, promising to take care of their family. But in the same beat, with calm resignation, he also tells her that if his latest endeavor fails, she’ll be free to leave him and take the kids. Yeun’s behavior here is more caring and self-effacing than ever: He looks down, unable to look at her, like a knight laying down all his defenses and accepting the painful consequences of his bold, perhaps reckless actions. Yet in Monica’s eyes—and maybe in ours, depending on where we stand—he also comes off as incredibly selfish and cowardly. Even as Jacob recognizes that Monica doesn’t share his fixation on his business, his solution to this disagreement goes against everything she believes in: He is willing to abandon her. Han’s reaction is subtle as she collects her thoughts, and she doesn’t reply. Yeun remains silent and doesn’t look at her. From his point of view, he’s opened his heart and has said all he had to say; now, the ball is in her court. </p>
<p id="piw5Em">Chung’s writing manages to show the two different timelines that Monica and Jacob follow. The ambitious husband lives on borrowed time—he sees the present as the future’s courageous slave, and patience and resilience are all that matters. But Monica feels the strain that living for hypotheticals puts on her life. She knows that all they know for sure is the present, and that placing all their bets on the future is equivalent to not having any faith at all. The future is unknown and full of surprises and pain; it can’t be trusted. And therefore, neither can Jacob: No amount of money could ever make their family safe from his abandonment, because a bad crop could always be around the corner. When Monica confronts Jacob with these truths, Yeun’s eyes get watery, but no tears can form and he can only acquiesce. Jacob’s blunt facade is only cracked, perhaps because he knows his wife is right. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="tpIaZZ">Amusingly, while Yeun’s character in <em>Burning</em> was a suspected pyromaniac, Jacob eventually finds answers in fire. All the fantasies that he relied on to place himself above everything—his family, his own feelings—are destroyed and his heart is laid bare, pure and clear. Time stops, with the future now impossible to fathom, and Yeun’s instincts are finally freed. His vulnerability expresses itself directly, without avoidance or fear, as Jacob holds Monica with all the gratefulness he forgot—or denied—he had for her. As Jacob, Yeun takes on a deeper role, one where the qualities that make him endlessly watchable are constrained, only to be released in a beautiful yet bittersweet ending. He creates a character who isn’t simply and reductively likeable, but rather complex, imperfect and still endearingly human. </p>
<p id="FNOIe9"><em>Manuela Lazic is a French writer based in London who primarily covers film.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/4/12/22379106/steven-yeun-minari-deserves-best-actor-oscarManuela Lazic