One must admit when they were wrong. For the past decade, I've come to dismiss Benedict Cumberbatch as a limited and repetitive actor with very few exciting works. Someone who'd received undue acclaim, rising to fame in such meteoric fashion that it boggles the mind. In other words, I wasn't a fan of his take on Sherlock Holmes and quickly grew tired of his shtick as he graduated from TV stardom to a prestige movie juggernaut. Some performances made me rethink my distaste throughout the years, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Parade's End, and, to a lesser extent, War Horse. But, of course, even a stopped watch is right twice a day, or so I told myself.
Well, it's 2021, and Benedict Cumberbatch is both on his way to an Oscar nomination and into my cinephile's heart. He gives three of the year's best performances in a slew of fascinating pictures that range from loony portraiture to a study in venomous masculinity…
The first Benedict Cumberbatch movie in 2021 didn't augur great new heights for the actor's career. While The Mauritanian's a somewhat decent flick with one exceptional performance, the British thespian isn't one of its qualities. Indeed, he's more of a liability than anything, forcing an unconvincing Southern accent out of his mouth while playing the principled American prosecution lawyer Stuart Crouch. It's a dispiriting supporting turn that's perfectly in line with a myriad of other disappointing performances in the actor's filmography.
Cumberbatch's inability to believably duplicate any North American cadence is especially notorious, featuring in a panoply of his projects. Thankfully, before the year ends, at least one director found a way to weaponize that characteristic, turning a fault into a feature. Before that, though, we have two British historical dramas to consider.
Originally titled Ironbark, Dominic Cooke's The Courier dramatizes the real story of Greville Wynne, a civilian salesman recruited by the CIA and MI6 to be a spy during the Cold War. If one expects some Ian Fleming adventure or a hit of Le Carré's cerebral writing, this movie's not for you. There's no glamour to be found and no complex machinations either. Rather than playing a mastermind, Cumberbatch is tasked with acting up Wynne's utter banality. He does it exquisitely well, indulging in a fair bit of self-amused parody on midcentury English stuffiness.
There's an almost brittle quality to his cheery politeness, a permeable façade that's ready to give in under the camera's watchful gaze and the plot's mounting tension. All that and he's fun too, negotiating beats of comedy within the suspenseful trappings of a spy thriller. Slowly, that everyman persona gets corroded. Shedding the layers of social performance, of middle-class pomposity, he reveals the frightened man that lies beneath. Transforming his physicality, Cumberbatch also delineates gradations of exhaustion, both physical and mental. It culminates in a soul-crushing conversation, so raw it made me want to stand up and applaud.
It's possible that, sometime in its production, The Courier was meant to be an awards player. However, the final result feels denuded of importance, unpretentious, and deliberately minor-key. Perhaps because of that, Benedict Cumberbatch appears looser than usual, mayhap unencumbered by Oscar-y expectations. The same could be said of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, though a TIFF premiere may indicate otherwise. In any case, the film's gotten no promotion from Amazon and will likely be a non-factor all season. More's the pity, I might add.
After all, we need more genuinely weird and loopy biopics out there, giving a good name to a type of film easily associated with the stodgiest drudgery modern cinema has to offer. Will Sharpe's first go as a solo feature director is an artist biopic that pertains to tell the story of its titular painter through a psychedelic style drunk on its own lunacy. Louis Wain was a strange fellow, rising to prominence at the end of the Victorian era by painting kitschy cat pictures. Wain's illustrations reflected the painter's inner turmoil as grief took over his existence and mental health issues overwhelmed all other aspects of mundane life.
Like in The Courier, Cumberbatch performs a stark character arc. Though, here, the portrayal is informed by an essential quirkiness. Nevertheless, the whimsy isn't simply there to be a cute affectation. He's got plenty of charm, but this Louis Wain is also anxious, a tremulous ball of tension ready to explode at any given moment before the fire within is extinguished by loss. At its heart, the movie's surprisingly melancholic and Cumberbatch's performance matches it beat for beat, reaching into recesses of profound sadness that contrast mightily with all the adorable felines on screen.
Part of its triumph comes from a reluctance to idealize Wain beyond humanity or flatten his idiosyncrasies into an expression of Hollywoodized genius. It's not against-type casting, per se, but a performance willing to deepen a well-trodden archetype. In contrast, Benedict Cumberbatch's presence in The Power of the Dog is very much a case of against-type casting. Weirdly enough, the biggest reason for the performance's success is just how wrong the actor is for the role. Only, Jane Campion's ninth feature is, in many ways, a study of masculinity, its most toxic extremes, and performative nature.
Personifying the intolerable cruelty of Phil Burbank, the actor gets to play around with another marble-mouthed accent. He turns the cowboy's boisterous words on their head, revealing their secret falsity, their inherent artifice. Moreover, under Campion's direction, Cumberbatch experiments with anti-charisma sublimated to a state of pure menace. By putting up such a ferocious monument, he gets to elicit shocks as the picture's last act demolishes it thoroughly. The inhuman monster gives way to an open wound of vulnerability, torn open by the violence of desire.
The Courier might feature Benedict Cumberbatch's most well-rounded and technically virtuosic work to date. Following a similar train of thought, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain showcases him at his most charming. Nonetheless, The Power of the Dog is the most fascinating of these three mighty turns. As we reach the end of Cumberbatch's 2021 on-screen journey, one might conclude that he's truly a character actor who got trapped in a niche of super-genius clichés and stolid prestige fare from directors with little to no interest in challenging their leading man. Unencumbered by such limitations, he rises to the top.
As a final thought, here comes another confession. I'm not yet a Cumberbitch, but I might be on my way there.
The Power of the Dog hits Netflix on December 1st. As for The Courier, it's streaming on Amazon Prime Video along with The Electrical Life of Louis Wain.