Take Three: Catherine Keener

Craig from Dark Eye Socket here with this week's Take Three. Today: Catherine Keener

Take One: Being John Malkovich (1999)
Do you think it’s possible to admire an actress’ immense talent yet still be somewhat immune to her overall allure or effectiveness? Or perhaps it’s fair to acknowledge their greatness, but have issues with many of their performances? It’s been this way with me and Cathy K for eleven years. It was very likely Being John Malkovich that kick-started my general viewer/star incompatibility with Keener. I did, however, enjoy her sarcastically dry, bolshy, personality-destroying task master Maxine Lund in Spike Jonze’s breakthrough film a great deal. But in the film – and in many things since – she’s baffled, transfixed, annoyed and intrigued me in equal measure. Watching one of her films is a tug-of-war, filled with both appreciation and irritation.

Objectively I can see just how good a performance Keener gives here (evident to anyone watching). She has her eye on the ball at all times. Maxine’s never less than alert to her surroundings and ready to manipulate any sad interlopers who infiltrate them to her advantage. While sympathetic to protagonist John Cusack’s plight, I didn’t blame Maxine for maneuvering every event to her betterment. But Malkovich was the key film in how I came to view Keener as an oddly awkward yet undeniably captivating screen presence. Maybe her interpretation of this adversely egoistical role was too successful and the character and actress detrimentally intertwined in my mind.

Keener herself apparently didn’t originally think she was right for the part because of her dislike of Maxine. Regardless, her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod was well deserved. Unlike her second one...

Take Two: The 40-Year-Old-Virgin (2005)
...or should I say her second Oscar nomination was misplaced?

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Take Three: Danny Glover

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Danny Glover

Over the last decade Glover hasn’t seen the prolonged exposure that he once enjoyed, yet mostly still deserves. But he’s been doing good work in a vast array of projects, both mainstream and arthouse none the less. In a quintet of artful independents The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Manderlay (2005), Bamako (2006), Honeydripper (2007) and Blindness (2008) he gave strong, varied turns. Barnyard, The Shaggy Dog (both 2006) and Alpha and Omega added family fare to his résumé. A couple of pay-the-rent Saws (first and fifth) and a thankless turn in Death at a Funeral (2010) didn’t harm his career. A couple of presidential engagements, Battle for Terra (2006) and 2012 (2009), kept him afloat. And finally some bona fide solid gold support in Dreamgirls (2006) and Shooter (2007) reminded multiplex audiences just how good he is.

Take One: Be Kind Rewind (2008)
But the most recent role in which he’s perhaps been most memorable was as the ageing, single, Fats Waller-loving video-shop owner Mr. Fletcher in Michel Gondry’s 2008 comic throwback Be Kind Rewind. He starts out like a kind of reluctant, but good-hearted curmudgeon unwilling to embrace DVD, but he ends up an accidental impresario of both old-school values and new ventures by joining the ranks of the neighbourhood “sweders” to make a community doc on Fats Waller. He typifies both the film’s antiquated side (VHS), but also its embracing of new technologies (DVD, digital) and social connection (people + cinema = growth). The scenes of him trotting off to memorialise Fats and snoop on his rivals would make an endearing film of its own. If Danny Glover could “swede” a film of himself doing just that, I’d be happy.

Two more takes after the jump including the Angry film for which we hope he will be remembered...

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Take Three: Barbara Hershey

Craig (from Dark Eye Socket) here with this week's Take Three. Today: Barbara Hershey

Take One: Beaches (1988)
Whilst Bette Midler played the brash let-it-all-hang-out role in Beaches, Hershey was required to provide the flipside, a more fragile, buttoned-up role. Of course, in Garry Marshall’s timeless, weepy but somehow sickeningly enjoyable sorrowthon emotional barriers are royally broken down. As a solidly played, and, at times (all times, in fact), downright sentimentally treacly showcase of female solidarity, it works, and works very well indeed. (The late ‘80s was a fruitful time for the re-animation of such “woman’s” pictures; see also Steel Magnolias, Working Girl et al.) Beaches was a classic two-hander: one performance perfectly complemented the other. As the luxuriously-named San Franciscan heiress Hillary Whitney Essex, Hershey exuded just the right kind of well-turned-out class.

Her performance really was consistently good, despite the stock genre mannerisms very likely insisted upon by the filmmakers. She amiably chipped away at the inherent brittleness of the role, made her character appropriately timid, unexpectedly fragile and actually a believable mess with many of the concerns that spoke to half the women watching. (The other half would’ve surely identified with Midler’s character – this is a large part of Beaches’ amiability.) As the requirements of the genre dictate, there are melodramatic turns aplenty – love rivalry, career diversions, terminal disease – and Hershey and co. revel in its cornball pleasures. In the process it gave Hershey her biggest exposure. It was a certified commercial platform on which she could do great work. She broke through the privileged whininess of the character and made such a prim, off-putting madam feel thoroughly deserving of our investment and sympathy. But didn’t Hershey look as if she wasn’t always best pleased to be the wind beneath Bette Midler’s wings?

Take Two: The Entity (1982)
Just recently Hershey’s made a bit of a re-emergence on the big screen in a couple of notable roles. Earlier this year we saw her add some major dramatic supporting greatness as the nervous-wreck mother in Black Swan (see below), for which she unfortunately missed out on a second Oscar nomination (her first and only so far was for Supporting Actress in 1996’s The Portrait of a Lady). She followed that as a nervous-wreck grandmother in haunted house person flick Insidious, too. But it’s not the first time Babs has battled apparitions from the afterlife. Her career has seen its fair share of paranormal activity: back in 1982 she caused a spooky stir as beleaguered Carla Moran in Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity; a role for which she should have earned her her first Oscar nomination.

Two years before the Ghostbusters zapped spooks left, right and centre, Hershey and her parapsychologists had to lure her spectres in with a fake house set-up and little more than a majorly unnerving atmosphere in order to trap the unnatural forces that have been pervading her home and her very being in frozen liquid helium. As you do.

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Take Three: Eddie Marsan

Craig from Dark Eye Socket here with this week's Take Three. Today: Eddie Marsan

Take One: The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2010)
Marsan is elusive and perplexing as ex-con and current kidnapper Vic in J Blakeson’s British thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed. It may be his best role to date. It’s certainly his most visible in terms of screen time and lasting impressions. Vic and Danny (Martin Compston) kidnap a girl called Alice (Gemma Arterton). We’re not initially certain why or what for, but surprising details emerge. It’s an intriguing, slow-burning three-hander, largely set in two rooms of one house, with a slippery plot that gets drip-fed to us with unsettling incremental unease. There’s a psychological and dramatic weight to Vic that Marsan smartly unearths. He utilises his familiar best attributes to expert effect, but twists them into something else. Vic spends much of the film in a desperate state. He gives orders to “assistant” Danny and threatens Alice. He’s in charge, but of what exactly is open to debate. But Marsan's expressive, layered acting style never lets caricature or over-indulgence creep in. Any more information will ruin the risk of ruining Alice Creed’s many wily turns; just know that both the film and Marsan are excellent.

Take Two: Heartless (2009)
In Philip Ridley’s spooky Brit flick Heartless things are often not what they seem. To rid his face of a heart-shaped birthmark, Jim Sturgess’ Jamie makes a pact with Papa B (the devil, by another name) to commit random acts of vandalism on his behalf. Not a great idea by any stretch, but he’s helped (or is it hindered?) in his pursuits by Marsan’s Weapon’s Man, a shifty, nameless visitor with a sly, blackly comic side. Heartless is an uneasy blend of grim humour and demonic horror but it's instantly more appealing during Marsan’s amusing one-scene appearance. Doing the devil’s legwork, he comes on like a dark salesman of the soul, using the over-practiced niceties and witticisms of a pushy middle man. Marsan's bite-sized performance is wickedly funny and unnerving, sending one or two shivers down the spine and a few along the funny bone. The last time an actor was this good in surrealistic character mode, with a snappy in-and-out turn, was Robert DeNiro in Brazil.

Take Three: Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)
It’s quite possible that Marsan has one of the best, or luckiest, or most deftly-managed careers in the movies. He's had some enviable bosses: J.J. Abrams (Mission: Impossible III), Alejandro González Iñárritu, (21 Grams), Terence Malick (The New World), Michael Mann, (Miami Vice), Richard Linklater (Me and Orson Welles), Guy Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes) and Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York) among others. (War Horse, with Spielberg, and a Bryan Singer film are incoming). And this lot – Tom Cruise, Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Cameron Diaz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Colin Farrell, Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Jamie Foxx, Will Smith and Charlize Theron – have all made for dependable work colleagues. But his best collaborator, with 2003’s Vera Drake and, especially, in 2008 with Happy-Go-Lucky, has been Mike Leigh.

To say that Scott, Poppy's (Sally Hawkins) temperamental driving instructor, had issues is like saying time is infinite. Marsan makes him feel like a pitiable, wrong-headed individual, sucked up into the throes of modern existence, instead of an easily discardable nutjob to be vilified. You could have parked a car in the gaping chasm of his social conscience, but he’s still very much part of the fabric that binds Poppy to her life of whimsical decency.

The neatly-trimmed goatee, ill-judged earring, generic dress sense and “En-Ra-Ha!” mantra are integral embellishments, and his misanthropic tendencies -- that defiantly ugly disdain for others -- are crucial characteristics. Marsan's control fully grounds this caustic character.  I bet nobody passes their driving test the first time, if at all, with Scott.

Three more  for the taking: Sherlock Holmes (2008), V for Vendetta (2006), Red Riding trilogy (2009)

Take Three: Brooke Smith

Craig here (from Dark Eye Socket) with Take Three. Today: Brooke Smith

Take One: Series 7: The Contenders (2001)
Smith's performance as Dawn “Bloody mama” Lagarto in Daniel Minahan’s Series 7: The Contenders is a goldmine of maternal aggression. Dawn is a risk-taking, self-serving, take-no-prisoners single pregnant woman with a gun and a hit list of new Contenders to wipe out. It's as far from life-affirming as it gets making Dawn the kind of caustically fantastic role that most A-list actresses would give their right arm... to steer clear of. Thank the gods of indie cinema that they gave us Brooke Smith, then. We first see her enter a convenience store to shoot an old guy in the back. “You got any bean dip?” she asks the cashier. The humour is black and she dishes it dry. In one of the film’s sickest/funniest TV-montage parodies we see Dawn slit someone’s throat in a lift, kick a guy downstairs, drown someone else in a toilet and strangle a woman in a car à la Halloween’s Michael Myers, all whilst with a bun in the oven. This is not a rom-com.

Smith exudes confidence as an actress and is completely believable even within the outre satiric prophecies of Series 7. I’d like to see her trade fiery, meaty dialogue with some of today’s cinematic greats; this may not have happened yet because she may somewhat show them up. With its sly undercurrent of political commentary, Series 7 (and, to a lesser extent, its closest imitator, 2005’s Live!) is the kind of film that prods the dark funny bone of anyone who finds the ongoing fad for “reality” TV (now more hatefully extreme then ever) dispiriting and ripe for incisive satire. Ten years on the film retains its grim, acidic bite. In my view, Smith’s performance is one of 2001's very best. Shame Oscar wouldn’t go near it with a barge pole.

Take Two: Melinda and Melinda (2005)
In Woody Allen’s double-plotted Melinda and Melinda Smith gives a supporting turn as friend and confidant of both lead Radha Mitchell’s Melinda and Chloë Sevigny’s Laurel. (She was at it again earlier this year in Fair Game, where she had one group dinner scene and a brief chat with Naomi Watts and was still the best thing about it.) Smith played pregnant Cassie, the only female role (barring bit parts) without her own (sub)plotline. This is a shame as there are mild hints (thanks to Smith) that Cassie has a sly, playful side that would’ve dazzled in a fun, stand-alone narrative strand. Sevigny and Mitchell, both ordinarily very good actresses, give strained, overdramatic performances. That left Smith to bring the goods.

More on Melinda² and, you guessed it, "The Girl in the Pit" after the jump.

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