In preparation for the next Smackdown Team Experience is traveling back to 2000.
More than two decades after the fact, it's interesting to look back at a specific artist's career and denote the exact moment when their trajectory changed. In the moment you can sometimes see that a turning point is happening, but it's only when looking retroactively that the true magnitude of some events becomes apparent. In 2000 one actor's meteoric rise to stardom shines brighter than all others. It's fair to say that it was the year of Joaquin Phoenix's ascension…
Like his brother, River, Joaquin started acting from a young age. His first theatrically released feature was 1986's SpaceCamp, when the actor was still credited as Leaf. Upset at his given name for not following his siblings' naming norms - River, Rain, Liberty, Summer – the young boy had fashioned himself a new moniker. Regardless of such bouts of insecurity, brotherly love, or youthful folly, Joaquin Phoenix was, from the very start, a remarkable performer. I, for one, find him positively awards-worthy in Ron Howard's 1989 Parenthood. There's searing honesty to his portrayal of a mercurial pre-teen, a shot of naturalism that bounces off Dianne Wiest's Oscar-nominated work as his mother with remarkable potency.
Watching them together is glimpsing a calcinating family farce that's unlike anything else in that movie's tapestry of facile humor. That wasn't the only outstanding performance he delivered in youth. While the 90s saw a general decrease in the actor's work for a variety of sad reasons, there was still much to admire. Just look at his corrupted innocence in Gus Van Sant's To Die For. Part of why Nicole Kidman's Suzanne Stone pops so much is that we can see her maniacal nature contrast with Phoenix's bruised youth. Adding a note of astringent naturalism, mumbling authenticity, to arch fare was something of a Joaquin Phoenix specialty during these early years
Still, these were all roles easily eclipsed by the great thespians showboating alongside them in the same films. Furthermore, the foul taste of tragedy, the shadow of a fallen brother's greatness, tended to dim the actor's prospects as a star. That changed when, in 2000, a trifecta of psychosexually charged roles allowed Joaquin Phoenix to win the attention of critics and audiences alike. By the end of that awards season, he was an Oscar nominee and the male muse of a rising American auteur. From then on, the aughts were a decade of growing prestige, escalating popularity, artistic challenges met with fearless commitment. He didn't always succeed, but it's interesting to see him try, nonetheless.
The film tryptic that changed Phoenix's fates is exemplary of that erratic quality as well. The first 2000 title to premier would be the actor's best achievement of the year, his first of many collaborations with director James Gray. The Yards concerns itself with a tale of criminal life in a corrupt world, telling the story of a recently released convict who finds himself tied to a web of lies, murder, and financial manipulation in contemporary Queens. It's one of Gray's many resurrections of 70s style American dramas about urban despair - stories of men who give in to the darkness and the women they drag along with them, kicking and screaming into oblivion.
Phoenix plays Willie Gutierrez, the protagonist's old buddy, an almost fraternal figure whose choleric gloom spreads over the film like a virulent infection. In some ways, he's been broken by this criminal cosmos long before we ever set eyes on him, making the character something of a shadow, a dark storm of inarticulate angst that's as foreboding as it is pathetic. There's a wild threat to his introspective presence, a whisper of incoming violence that, once manifested, results in The Yards' most affecting passages. The pairing of Gray and Phoenix would go on to make much better films, but there's already an admirable grandeur to what they achieve here.
The actors' other 2000 characters share Gutierrez's malignancy, gloomy disposition, and lack of emotional literacy. However, the performances that result from such similar models are very different, representing antagonistic approaches to the same self-destructive type. By far his biggest financial, famous, and awards-y triumph up to that point, Gladiator finds Phoenix interpreting Emperor Commodus with campy abandonment. Despite some excellent performances spread throughout his filmography, Ridley Scott isn't what one would call a great director of actors, and that's obvious while watching Gladiator, where every actor feels like they're working on an incompatible wavelength, tone, and dramatic solution.
If Russell Crowe achieves Oscar-winning glory by tapping into the scenario's po-faced seriousness, Phoenix does the opposite. Viperous to the core, his Commodus is a villain who wouldn't be out-of-place in the 50s Sword and Sandal epics that strongly influenced Gladiator. It feels weird and wrong for this movie, though it's not necessarily a bad performance by itself. AMPAS certainly thought he was great, nominating him in the Best Supporting Actor category. I was not too fond of Phoenix's first brush with the Academy Awards for years, but recent re-watches made me appreciate his inchoate venom more. If anything, Gladiator might have benefitted from following its villain's example, embracing the self-indulgent melodrama of the premise instead of squelching it under an inconsistent pretense of historical realism.
Suppose The Yards is an example of Phoenix finding his footing with an inspired director, and Gladiator is an uncompromising mismatch of performer and project. In that case, Philip Kaufman's Quills is a bit of both. The actor is miscast as a pious clergyman trying to rule over an insane asylum in post-Revolution France, feeling way too haunted from minute one. Following the text of Doug Wright's play, Phoenix's Abbé de Coulmier must go through a violent transformation, both corroded and viciously liberated by repressed desires and a society shaped by oppression. Incapable of telegraphing this arc, the actor feels like he's already at the endpoint of his character's evolution when we first see him. Sanity, order, serenity come off as puerile masks rather than a edifice that's brought down by the Marquis de Sade's influence and the church's cruelty.
Unlike Gladiator, Quills sees Phoenix trying to make himself fit into an inappropriate role. The particulars of the character's dilemmas may be hard to parse out in the performance, mixed to the point of abstraction. Still, the interior turmoil is there, as brazen and lacerating as anything suggested by Wright's original play. As stated before, that's one of Phoenix's greatest assets as an actor. Even when he fails, there's usually something fascinating to observe. No wonder both directors, audiences, critics, and others were so besotted by Phoenix when he emerged as one of Hollywood's most promising young actors. That promise was fulfilled and, even though I can't say I love all of his recent work, I still consider myself a fan.
What's your opinion on the actor and his 2000's output?