Weekly Reel, January 18
The Golden Globes, Pixar and Disney, 2021 Box Office, "The Power of the Dog" Review, and Method Acting from Dustin Hoffman to Jeremy Strong.
News:
The Golden Globes gave out their awards privately via Twitter after NBC refused to host the ceremony amid its fake controversy. The big winners included “The Power of the Dog,” “Succession,” and “West Side Story”; and although we’re all winners in not having to bear a red-carpet of the wealthiest people on the planet virtue signalling their causes, we’re also losers in missing Ricky Gervais again calling them out, being friends with Epstein, etc.
Once again, Pixar employees are upset at their parental overlords in Disney for sending their third feature animation, Turning Red, in a row straight to Disney + without any meaningful theatrical distribution. While in pure business terms putting the latest Pixar release on Disney + to compete directly with Netflix is correct, Disney fails to take into account their relationship with Pixar (including the incentive structure of releasing $100+ million films theatrically) and the ability for a children’s movie to bring in much needed box office receipts for theaters.
Needless to say that 2021 was a strange year at the box office. While nothing was making enough money back to justify its existence, Spider-Man: No Way Home came in big and is currently the eighth (*unadjusted to inflation) most profitable movie of all time. Since the film hasn’t passed the Chinese censors for its release there, it will likely end up further up the list, maybe to sixth. Lesson learned: males between 18-34 are going to the theaters and nobody else.
The Power of the Dog (2021, Jane Campion, Australia/New Zealand/UK/Canada)
When John Ford directed John Wayne into his coffin for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), sharing space in that coffin was also the traditional Western film and its attendant myths and legends. By decade’s end the genre was spliced apart with its entrails found in either Italy or among the young New Hollywood cadre. Thomas Savage wrote Westerns beginning in the nineteen-forties based on his experiences growing up on a Montana cattle ranch. He was a sensitive misfit that found a way out by writing about what he knew. In the inaugural year of the New Hollywood era and months after Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Savage published his critically acclaimed The Power of the Dog, a story about two brothers living and working on a Montana cattle ranch in the nineteen-twenties. Although reviewed well in national publications, sales of the book slumped and eventually the book was forgotten by many.
In 2001 a new edition of the book appeared with an afterword by writer Annie Proulx, who published the short story Brokeback Mountain four years prior and was inspired by the “literary artwork” of The Power of the Dog. The New Zealand director/screenwriter Jane Campion was also inspired by Savage’s novel. So much so that she held off retirement and optioned the film rights for the book, which had already been optioned a few times in the past—one time by Paul Newman. To reach a better understanding of the decades old story, Campion visited the Savage family ranch in Montana and talked with them about turning the story into a feature film. Originally set to film in that same Montana landscape, budget issues led to the production shooting in Campion’s native New Zealand, which after halting production in March 2020 finished shooting in July. Transmission Films won the distribution rights for The Power of the Dog in Australia and New Zealand while Netflix got everything else. At the Venice Film Festival Campion won the Silver Lion for Best Direction and the film will likely be a strong contender for top marks at the upcoming Oscars.
The plot of the story is about the Burbank brothers that run an inherited cattle ranch. All is well until George (Jesse Plemons) marries an inn owner Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), who comes to live on the ranch with her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) much to the chagrin of George’s brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). Phil is openly weary of Peter’s boyish sensitivity and effeminacy, even burning Peter’s beautifully handmade paper flower. Phil is also openly hostile towards his new sister-in-law, thinking that she only married his brother for the money. The unpleasant atmosphere created by this rift and Phil’s loyal crew unnerves Rose to the point of alcoholism. Whether it’s to further spite Rose or because Peter happened upon Phil’s secret stash of nude male magazines, Phil takes Peter under his wing and teaches him how to ride a horse and create a lasso from cowhide. In a climactic moment, Rose gives away all of Phil’s cowhides. Phil is livid because he can’t finish Peter’s lasso and is fortunately calmed down by George before he can get to Rose. Peter solves the problem by giving Phil a cowhide taken from a diseased cow—we’re unsure whether it was completely intentional or not. Phil is grateful for their friendship and continues working on the lasso into the dark hours of the night while Phil opens up about more personal, intimate details. Overnight the disease infected an open-wound on Phil’s hand from which he soon couldn’t recover. The film ends with Phil’s funeral and Peter receiving the finished lasso.
In the film, everything is implied. Phil’s genius, his homosexuality, etc. is all hinted at but never explicitly told. Campion’s expert direction subtly compels the viewer’s body an inch further on the seat with each beat, leaving one wondering by the end why they’re teetering on the edge. At every moment we expect the tension to be released, which is paradoxically satisfying when it never happens. During their final discussion, Phil tells Peter the time he cuddled with his late mentor during a storm, with Phil not responding to Peter’s question of whether they were naked or not. That and Phil holding onto his late mentor’s kerchief are about as explicit as the film goes in the direction of queer expressions, even downplaying Peter’s own queerness to the form of his aesthetics and sigmatism.
Apparently, Campion sticked close to Savage’s story except from one background detail that when missing, further creates an ambiguity of events. Before George and Rose married, Rose was married to a doctor (Peter’s father), who hanged himself after being physically and psychologically abused by Phil and his crew. With this crucially missing detail, Peter would have more of an avenging motivation for killing Phil. Instead, Peter subtly, maybe, killed Phil because of how he was treating his mother, but we’re still left with questions.
Much can be said about whether the largeness of a Western film ought to be viewed at the theater or streamed on Netflix at home. The latter possibly taking away the dusty realness of the setting and reducing the film into a social drama without the need of a cattle-ranch background. Surely the same story can work in other places and eras, but since the film is making comments on Western masculinity and myths, it would do one good by going out of their way and into a theater for this viewing. Moreso because the power comes from the shadow of the dog on the mountains, which on any non-theatrical screen reduces the image to a puffy Pomeranian.
Essay: Lady Gaga, be warned – method acting may bag you an Oscar, but where does it end? by Rebecca Root
In order to capitalize on the attention surrounding the final episodes of HBO’s Succession late last year, Michael Schulman wrote a “critical” piece on Jeremy Strong. In the title Schulman writes that Strong “doesn’t get the joke,” meaning that during their interview, Strong was claiming that he doesn’t think the dramatic-satirical show is a comedy. Schulman goes further in pointing out Strong’s bizarre off-set acting methods because even while at home, Strong still feels and lives in his role to a degree. While Schulman clearly isn’t slamming/destroying/calling out Strong’s character, as Strong’s defenders like to claim, the timing and tone of the piece was clearly meant to illicit that reaction. (Besides, Schulman’s profile was just a longer, snarkier version of Kyle McGovern’s GQ profile from 2019.)
Method acting is a famous acting trick in which the actor tries to subjectively embody the character as close as possible. Brando made it famous in the past and Daniel Day-Lewis is its living, but not working?, King today. Many confuse method acting with how Day-Lewis and others perform as their characters off the set, which supposedly irritates people around them (as can be found in Schulman’s piece).
Writing an opinion article for The Guardian, actor Rebecca Root criticizes fellow actors that follow method acting methods. Although the article is about Lady Gaga, I entirely omit those parts for the more interesting comments on method acting/actors from the perspective of a supposed actor. First with a short story:
There’s an old showbiz anecdote that sums up the differences between two distinct acting techniques, which I will call simply “method” and “not method”.
In 1976, on the set of the spy thriller Marathon Man, Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, the film’s two stars, are apparently not getting along. Hoffman hasn’t slept for 72 hours in order to bring verisimilitude to his portrayal of a man being interrogated under sleep deprivation. Seeing his colleague turn up ragged before the cameras roll, Olivier drily remarks: “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?”
There was an ocean between these method and not-method actors. Olivier, steeped in the worlds of the theatre and Shakespeare and classical poise; and Hoffman, no less a craftsman, but with his training grounded in realism and the “method”, as propounded by his teachers at the Actors Studio in New York.
How about we re-name this method acting debate as the Olivier-Hoffman debate?
The difference between these two approaches – the Hoffman and the Olivier – lies in what goes into a performance to make it believable. Olivier would work from the outside in, using external influences to simulate emotion (he once supposedly said, “I just turn upstage and pull a nose hair out” when asked how to cry on stage). Method actors work from the inside out in a relentless search for the “truth” of the character, learning everything they can about them and attempting to embody that information with every fibre. The practice of “staying in character”, during rehearsals, between takes and on and off set brings, they feel, authenticity to the performance – but it can be extreme.
Is this feeling of “but it can be extreme” only a projection by those feeling insecure about their own deficiencies? I’m skeptical that these not-method, Olivier actors don’t also work from the inside out but are better at reaching these moments when on-set versus off. The question is to what extent the actors retain the character the further away from the production they are. More fun anecdotes:
Film and television history is filled with stories of actors taking the method to extremes: Sylvester Stallone ending up in intensive care for eight days after wanting to be knocked unconscious by a co-star in Rocky IV. Nicolas Cage spending five whole weeks with his face covered in bandages and having his teeth pulled out for Birdy. Daniel Day-Lewis – one of the modern masters of the method – catching pneumonia while walking around New York without a proper coat when preparing for his role in Gangs of New York, or spending the entire filming period for My Left Foot in a wheelchair, being fed by crew members. Halle Berry not showering for eight weeks while filming Jungle Fever. And Jamie Foxx having his eyelids glued shut to play blind musician Ray Charles.
Then the hammer drops:
Authenticity delights audiences. But where does it end? If you’re playing Macbeth, must you commit regicide? If you’re performing Romeo do you have to fall in love with the actor playing Juliet (and do you even have to fancy her)? Well, no. Yet while all acting is a form of pretence, you should have a sense of what that person could be like “in real life”. For me, and most actors I know, doing background research is an essential part of “finding a character”. We study the character’s education and social experience, their likes, dislikes and places they have lived. How they speak, and so on. What we can’t discover, we simply invent: the imagination is as powerful a muscle as biceps, glutes or abdominals for an actor.
But clearly the method works. For many who adhere to it, glory at the Oscars seems inevitable; Joaquin’s performance in Joker won him an Academy Award. Maybe that’s why it remains the most esoteric and mysterious of acting techniques: it produces such endlessly startling, award-winning results, I’m tempted to try it myself.
Amazing acting performance isn’t only for the Oscars. While Strong may not “get the joke,” Schulman, Root, and others certainly don’t get the art.
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