Actors, Directors, and Suspension of Disbelief, Part One: Is Michael Caine There?
During a roundtable interview with Michael Caine, I watched the actor make a tent of his fingers, furrow his brow, and ponder this question: “Is there something that you wish moviegoers and filmcritics would learn to understand about movies, something we just don’t get?”
A rather open-ended question. But Caine, one of the more enthusiastic and approachable actors I’ve interviewed, responded with sincerity:
“If you are sitting there watching the film and thinking to yourself, That is Michael Caine giving a great performance!, then I have failed! My job as an actor is to make you forget you’re watching Michael Caine. You should be absorbed in the character and the story.”
I’ll bet any good actor would agree with him.
But really… this is Michael Caine we’re talking about.
Watching The Dark Knight, I sat there thinking: “Michael Caine is giving one of the best performances in this film.” And the posters for Caine’s new film, Is Anybody There? has a quote shouting out at me: “The marvelous Michael Caine gives one of the best performances of his career.”
Game over?
I’m conflicted about this. Movies shouldn’t be sports, should they? We shouldn’t be sitting there thinking “Look at Daniel Day-Lewis go!” But then, in that sense, Jack Nicholson’s career was over a long, long time ago. Who can see his characters and forget he’s Jack? I certainly couldn’t while I watched The Departed.
The more time I spend reading reviews, watching television, or — well — existing in this pop-culture saturated by celebrity news, the more I bring with me a brain full of trivia, gossip, and opinion about the actors in any given American movie.
When I heard that Matthew McCounaughey might the front-runner to play The Lone Ranger in an upcoming franchise, I was immediately disappointed, believing that it would be very difficult to find any kind of frivolous pleasure in watching the eventual movie. How could I hope to write a decent, fair assessment of it when the man’s record of romances and reckless behavior makes me want to scream at the sight of his grin?
Perhaps this is why I am finding so much satisfaction in watching foreign and independent films these days. Are these films really that much better, though? Or is my enjoyment coming from the experience of seeing unfamiliar faces, observing unfamiliar styles… faces and styles that will be all the more familiar, and distracting, next time?
Was I unable to actually see Rachel Getting Married clearly? I’d read gossip about what was happening in Anne Hathaway’s personal life around the time she starred in that film. When people talked about how un-glamorous she looked in the film, and how realistically she portrayed a woman in trouble, I was thinking, “Well, yeah… have you read about what was going on with her?”
I haven’t seen Two Lovers yet, primarily because I’m trying to forget the last few months of press on Joaquin Phoenix.
When actors and directors achieve celebrity status, is the show over?
I’ll be thinking about this as I watch Michael Caine star in Is Anybody There?
But I’ll be trying with all my might not to think about it. I want to believe that Michael Caine will be so good that I’ll forget he’s even there.
… To Be Continued …
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Question:
Are there any well-known actors so talented that, in spite of being famous, they make you forget who they are when they’re onscreen?
Can you name a directors who make you forget about the celebrities in their films, or — even better — who make you forget who’s directing?
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I think you are right — Jack Nicholson’s career was over decades ago. It’s easy to see only Jack when Jack isn’t playing a character, but rather just giving us Jack.
I have to lean with Caine on this one — the better actors are those that are looking at the script for their part; not reflecting the tabloids or their resumes for their performances. Scenic designer Robin Wagner tells of hanging out in the lobby on opening nights; if the crowd leaves cooing about the great sets, he goes home depressed. If they leave talking about the great play, he goes home happy — he succeeded.
Personally, I forgot that Frank Langella was in FROST/NIXON, or that Jamie Foxx had a part in RAY. And in both of those cases, I had a real life figure to distract me.
And despite the maelstrom of publicity, I happily did not see Heath Ledger in THE DARK KNIGHT. I hear he was great, but I wouldn’t know; I was too distracted by that Joker guy.
It is a two way attempt — the audience coming ready to suspend disbelief, and the artists working to keep us tethered to the imagination — at least until the lights come back up. And it isn’t just on the actor, as your question points out. The director, writer, editor et al must be in on the journey.
Rarer to come upon these days, but still attainable.
Well, I know that I, for one, will always look at Ikiru and Godzilla differently from now on, now that I know the star of the former film played one of the key figures in the latter film. I wonder if Akira Kurosawa ever thought of making a movie about a rampaging prehistoric monster …
Actors almost never “vanish” into their roles; even the really versatile ones, such as Jim Broadbent, tend to gravitate towards certain character types. This is why casting is so important when making a film. But for stars of Michael Caine’s age and calibre, there is the added fact that they bring with them the “baggage” of their previous roles; even if we know absolutely nothing about their private lives, we can often still detect a subtext or two just in the fact that their current roles seem to connect in some way with their earlier roles.
(I wish I could think of a subtler example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, but for some reason the first example I keep going to is Mia Farrow’s role as the satanic nanny in the remake of The Omen. It’s a hoot because, first, it’s an homage of sorts to her previous role as a woman who is impregnated by the Devil in Rosemary’s Baby; but also, second, because it’s a cheeky subversion of her real-life persona as a mother to several adopted children and a passionate advocate for human rights.)
At any rate, yes, Caine is right to say that, normally, we should be thinking of the character and not the actor during the movie … but after the movie, when we are processing the film and thinking about it critically, etc., it is perfectly acceptable to think of the actor in addition to the character.
And of course, sometimes movies can be sports. Plus, in a somewhat different vein, I find myself thinking of that scene in Waking Life where two characters discuss how the Hollywood star system kind of fits with Bazin’s “ontology of film”. To quote from one online transcript of that scene:
“And like the whole Hollywood thing is just taking film and trying to make it like the storytelling medium where you take these books or stories, and then you like, you know, and then you have the script, and you try to find a person who sort of fits the thing. But it’s ridiculous, because it’s not, it shouldn’t be based on the script. It should be based on the person, you know, or the thing. And in that sense, they are almost right to have this whole star system, because then it’s about that person, you know, instead of, like, the story.”
As for Matthew McConaughey, I think the bigger problem with him is not his private life, whatever that may be, but the reckless string of romantic comedies that he has starred in. Has he established the sort of big-screen persona that lends itself to a Lone Ranger remake? I doubt it.
As for directors who leave no discernible personal stamp on their films … will Ron Howard do?
I think that Russel Crowe’s performance in The Insider was one of those where you lose the actor in the character. Even now, when I talk about the movie with friends, most of them don’t know that he was the one who played the protagonist.
I look at this from the perspective of theatre. When working for a small to medium-sized theatre company in Vancouver, I knew many of our company of actors – some of them rather well. And each time they took the stage, I forgot who they were and saw their characters, well played. I think it’s not so much the celebrity of the actor, it’s the skill. If you see Michael Caine, then I agree with Michael Caine, he’s not giving his best performance. Sean, Frost / Nixon was a great example.
However, there is something to be said for those who watch theatre or film with an educated eye. Those who sat through rehearsal after rehearsal, who fought with the director and design about the cost of the set, etc. Those who study film for the minutiae of character development and paradoxical images. We might tend to forget we’re watching a story and begin to catalog what we’re learning while we watch.
Perhaps the questions should be asked of hog farmers or Canadian loggers. I bet they don’t debate the merits of Matthew McConaughey in romantic comedies versus westerns. Of course, they also probably wouldn’t go see “Is Anybody There?”
What, Peter, you didn’t like McConaughey in Reign of Fire? There’s a noncomedic role for you (or, perhaps, an all-too-comedic role, failing to be realistic/dramatic).
For, me the actors in The Godfather are simply Vito, Sonny, Tom, Fredo and Michael. In most other (and later) movies I often see Marlon, James, Robert, John and Al.
Well, the obvious example that jumps to mind would be Billy Bob Thornton in Slingblade. Of course, he made that before anybody knew him, so does that count? I say it does because re-watching now, one forgets that it’s him.
I also forget it’s Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. This may be because I don’t know many of his roles. But, I also feel like P.T. Anderson tends to do that with big actors. Magnolia is FULL of superstar actors, but when I think of that movie, I think more about the characters than I think about how well the actors did.
I think that many people are responsible for the suspension of disbelief in an actor’s performance. The script must ring true. The DP and director must ensure that the actor is not framed in a “wow-look-at-tom-cruise-in-a-nazi-uniform-doesn’t-he-look-great/realistic/ridiculous” manner that is not vital to the story. And yes, the more we know about the production before actually seeing the film, the harder it is for us to fulfill our responsibility to participate as an audience. What do you think, Jeffrey, of films with no beginning credits?
…and I do forget that Warren Schmidt is Jack Nicholson…
For what it’s worth, it just dawned on me that one book worth checking out in connection with these themes might be Alexander Nemerov’s Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures.
Nemerov shows how Lewton’s films, produced in the 1940s, often make significant use of minor characters, and how these minor characters are often played by actors who are cast against type; the difficulty in appreciating this, for us, is that most of us don’t know anything about 1940s film culture except for the handful of classics, like Lewton’s films, that still get shown and talked about. But presumably these actors would have been fairly well-known to audiences of that era, in the same way that certain actors often pop up in supporting roles in today’s films and TV shows, thus causing us to say, “Oh, hey, it’s that guy…”
And so, for example, Nemerov draws a contrast between the stillness of Darby Jones in I Walked with a Zombie and the frantic, gravity-defying moves that Jones displayed in other films at that time. Nobody watches those other films any more, and so a lot of us might not appreciate, as fully as we could, just what Lewton is up to when he casts Jones as the titular zombie of that film.