For the past few weeks, the Almost There series has been focused on performances that won at Cannes. Tomorrow, the latest edition of Europe's most prestigious film festival begins, so it's time to end our journey through the Croisette's past. After Woodward, Duvall, and Whitaker, it's time to take a look at Tim Robbins' work in Robert Altman's The Player. The flick marked its director's splashy comeback after a decade of minor works. Playing a venal big shot producer in a skewering of the movie business, Robbins won the Best Actor prize at Cannes, got terrific reviews, but failed to secure an Oscar nomination…
Adapted from a homonymous novel by Michael Tolkin, The Player tells the story of a Hollywood exec, Griffin Mill, who's been getting threatening missives from an unknown screenwriter. In the biosphere of the movie industry, as envisioned by this tale, writers and executives are mortal enemies, coexisting with the same acrimony as mongooses and snakes. This time around, however, one party trumps over the other, and, in a perfect satirical fashion, the killer gets away with murder. Under Robert Altman's direction, The Player becomes a star-studded mural of Tinsel Town degradation scored to the syncopated sound of Thomas Newman's most dissonant jazzy score. At the center of the insidious narrative, Tim Robbins plays Griffin Mill.
Altman's restless camera rarely stays on Robbins' face for long and tends to make him share the frame with fellow cast members. This deliberate lack of focus on the picture's leading man is especially apparent during its early passages, and it further informs how Robbins approaches the role. All indolent smiles and greasy insincerity, Mill's a man who doesn't let others perceive what's going on inside his head, hiding behind a mask of empty pleasantries. In the various wide shots during business lunches and industry parties, Robbins plays up the surface-level vacuity while peppering in little dissonant notes of distraction, anxiety, even fear.
It's hard to concentrate on these aspects amidst all the visual and sonic information, but they're there. A switch at the end of the first act makes them more prominent. Mill's rendezvous with a mysterious writer is a spectacle of nervous flop sweat. The movie exec is out of his depth, and Robbins delineates the situation with the spoiled mirth of a sad clown. His eyes drift, not knowing where to stay, his mouth opens witlessly, like a fish out of water gasping for breath. This comedy of humiliation gradually sours into something more dangerous, animalistic, monstrous. Drunk with fury, Robbins' Mill explodes. It's sudden and short-lived for, the moment he realizes what happened, the frightened reality of the titular player is back.
Throughout the movie's emotionally fraught later acts, Robbins and Altman allow these dark sentiments to overwhelm both Mill and The Player. As the camera becomes more traditionally reverent to the leading actor, his mask cracks. The oily goo of paranoia spews forth, pungent and nasty, redefining Robbins' performance into a caricature of ill-will in a double-breasted suit. That is until the bliss of a Hollywood ending paints a varnish of peaceful evil over the whole affair. Still, even then, Robbins is excellent at allowing the light of joy to be shadowed by a villain's petty malevolence. He may be putatively out of danger, but the camera and the audience can sense the putridness of his being.
Watching him is like observing a corpse rot, skin stretched by astringent gases, flesh disintegrating in a pool of brown liquid. It's not like Griffin Mill's a good person at the start of The Player, but the constant pressure of fear, terror at the idea of persecution, worsens him. The macro arc of the performance is about decay - soul, spirit, mind, and business acumen simmering and reducing into a cadaverous mush. By the end, he's like a dead man walking, possessed by some unknown demon and smiling while he's at it. One almost expects to see him foaming at the mouth, though the actor never goes that far into kitsch.
What most fascinates is how small Robbins allows the performance to be. It makes sense for Hollywood satire to eschew conventional movie archetypes and codified tropes. Consequently, Tim Robbins doesn't give Griffin Mill the star treatment, playing him more like a character actor than a protagonist. One almost gets the impression that he's a supporting character in someone else's story, a lateral note of sleaziness suddenly thrown into the eye of the storm that is a motion picture. He doesn't feel like he belongs there, fractious friction always manifesting between character and structure, actor and role. This dysfunction could be harmful, but it proves to be more of a feature than a bug in The Player.
Altman sure liked to explore such disconnections. Even during such elaborate set pieces as The Player's opening shot, his insistence on unpredictable improvisation makes sure that his cast's playing without a net. In Tim Robbins' case, the work is primarily one of reaction. Whether listening to ridiculous movie pitches or balking at Whoopi Goldberg's tampon-twirling intimidation, Robbins' discomfort is a product of character and genuine surprise at whatever Altman and company are throwing at him this time around. It's a remarkable high-wire act that the performer handles with aplomb. In fact, as one of movie history's great Hollywood douchebags, Robbins delivers a perfectly minor-key tour de force that's probably the best work of his career.
After his victory at Cannes, Tim Robbins went on to score Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. Indeed, he won the HFPA prize for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical. Nonetheless, AMPAS ignored him despite honoring The Player with three major nods for its directing, writing, and editing. That year, the Academy's Best Actor lineup was comprised of Robert Downey Jr. in Chaplin, Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, Stephen Rea in The Crying Game, and Denzel Washington in Malcolm X. After many near-victories over the 70s, Pacino finally won the Oscar. Tim Robbins would get his own acting trophy a few years later when he won Best Supporting Actor for his work in Mystic River.
The Player is currently streaming on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel. You can also rent it on Amazon, Google Play, and Youtube.