Take Three: Viola Davis

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Viola Davis

Take One: Far from Heaven (2002)
Davis, currently elevating The Help as a long-suffering maid, had already supplied some hard home graft back in Todd Haynes’ 2002 race-and-homosexuality Sirkian pastiche Far from Heaven. Davis quietly excelled as Sybil, Cathy’s (Julianne Moore) full-time housekeeper and part-time confidant. She does a lot with a little. Ever present she curiously lingers within its most emotionally fraught scenes and makes a subtle impression in more incidental ones. Sybil maintains a watchful eye on proceedings, on how Cathy and Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) play out their furtive longing and on the arguments between Cathy and husband Frank (Dennis Quaid).

Whilst Moore is delicately cracking up due to wifely duties and illicit romance, Davis is on hand to help keep her together. “I don’t know how on earth I’d ever manage...” Cathy begins, cautiously trailing off. She knows her words reveal volumes about the very issues facing her, Raymond and indeed Sybil herself. Davis gets to assert her character as the narrative becomes more sweepingly emotional. She lets on to Cathy more about her life away from the Whitakers and, in her best moment, finally allows herself to tell Cathy about Raymond’s injured daughter. Davis plays the scene with a minor requisite guardedness. I can only imagine that had Haynes opted to fold more of another Sirk film, Imitation of Life, into his emotive meta-study, Davis may well have come front and centre.

Take Two: Eat, Pray, Love (2010)
Davis isn’t often, if at all, mentioned in synopses of Eat Pray Love. Her character Delia Shiraz, Julia Roberts’ best friend, isn’t significant enough to the overall narrative, apparently. This is a shame, as although she’s only in the first thirty minutes she’s its most resonant performer. In fact, I’d rather it had been about happily-married yet realistically cynical new mother Delia. There’s ample reason, given in a handful of scenes, that she would’ve made a far better lead character. Davis gets to flex her acting chops and be delightful regardless. But the best evidence of why she should’ve been the one doing the global traipsing is to be found in the lesser-seen only-six-minutes-longer director’s cut.

Before Roberts’ Liz jets off to vainly find herself across three continents, a rightfully sceptical Delia sees her off. It’s the first time Delia does more than provide mere friendly solace for Liz. "You know why I was giving you such a hard time?” Delia reluctantly says. 

I love my job, my guy and my kid, but... I wish I could go."

Instead of coming across as lightly bemused or content, as in earlier scenes, Delia is starkly honest. Imagine the resounding emotional tug the film could’ve pulled for Delia’s plight (and with more at stake) had her and Liz traded places. Through Davis’ well-balanced turn, Delia exhibits a better understanding of life in one line of dialogue what takes Roberts’ Liz 133 minutes to grasp. Evidence, if any were required, that top-tier character actors are most often the ones doing the best work. With simplicity, Davis intriguingly suggests why Eat, Pray, Love should’ve been Let, Viola, Shine.

Take Three: Doubt (2008)
If anyone’s going to make mighty Mezzer Streep question her certainty it may as well be Viola Davis. In Doubt, her one-scene, barely twelve-minute role as Mrs. Miller, mother to a troubled boy at a Bronx Catholic school, was of course performed entirely alongside Meryl’s sister act. An hour in, Davis’ brittle, quietly astonishing and astutely underplayed performance causes a major Nunquake measuring 9.5 on the actressing scale. She totters along in dowdy beige coat, armed with pre-work accoutrement (she never lets go of brolly or handbag – she “only has half an hour” before work) and, with pin-point concision, razes the film’s emotional territory. And all before a noon shift cleaning floors!

Davis’ performance is open-wound acting of the rawest kind. It seeps through the celluloid, embedding within it a strain of desperate, matchless emotion. She steals the film outright from its trio of big hitters.

Mrs. Miller’s baffling, questionable revelations reverberate through the remainder of Doubt. Sister Aloysius (Streep) is understandably perplexed at her reactions, but defiant Mrs Miller seemingly overlooks her son’s current well-being in favour of his future betterment. The undertow of this sad, richly dramatic exchange displays a vivid understanding of 1960s race issues. Davis’ succinct performance allows valuable in-roads into Mrs. Miller’s life; she clearly deserved the highest accolades. If the Academy gave Judi Dench a statue for six minutes in Shakespeare in Love – ditto Beatrice Straight in Network – then they really should’ve given one to Davis for twice their time and quadruple their quality. But 11 other award nominations and six wins point to it being a lasting portrait of bleak determination none the less.

Three more key roles for the taking: Solaris (2002), State of Play (2009), It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2010)

Take Three: Max von Sydow

Craig (from Dark Eye Socket) here with another Take Three. Today: Max von Sydow

Take One: Hour of the Wolf (1968)
It goes without saying, of course, that a von Sydow Take Three wouldn’t feel right unless one of them was an Ingmar Bergman film. All three could’ve been, but the aim is to err on the side of variety whenever possible. They made 11 films together: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, Shame and The Passion of Anna are all classics. But Hour of the Wolf, in which von Sydow plays a painter losing his grip on his sanity, doesn’t always get the high mention it deserves. It contains some of von Sydow’s best work in any film, for any director.

With his handsomely regal face, von Sydow boldly dominates the film. His sinisterly unhinged stillness and almost unreadable presence cement the notion that he’s a tormented artist uncertain of his place in the world. He's visited by people, possibly demons in human disguise, who embody his trauma, his shame. In a possibly imagined, probably symbolic, but definitely surreal dinner scene von Sydow’s deathly wan countenance crumples in extreme close-up. His mind seems to deteriorate due to the inane banter of the chattering souls surrounding him. (No one said Bergman’s personal parables were cheery.) Von Sydow masters depression and disgust like breathing and underplays his scenes like a covert pro. With complete skill von Sydow does as much as an actor can to attempt to place the viewer inside his character’s brain.

Take Two: The Exorcist (1973)
I don’t think it’s via Jeez himself, but, Christ!, the power of character acting compels me... to write about Father Lankester Merrin in The Exorcist for this Take.

Demonic Possession and Demonic Behavior after the jump

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Take Three: Judy Davis

Craig here, from Dark Eye Socket, with Take Three. Today: Judy Davis

Judy Davis as "Joan Lee" and Judy Davis as "Joan Frost" in NAKED LUNCH

Take One: Naked Lunch (1991)
The early nineties were extra literary times for Davis. She appeared in an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, played novelist George Sand in Impromptu, supported John Mahoney’s Faulkner-esque Southern writer in Barton Fink and performed dual role duties in David Cronenberg’s controversial adaptation of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Initially, as Joan Lee, she instigates a curious urgency within Peter Weller’s Burroughs avatar William Lee. She gets a “very literary high – a Kafka high” in a 1950s NY flophouse by injecting bug powder into her right boob. As you do. Then, as Joan Frost, the wife of eloping novelist Ian Holm, she flits and flirts around a North African port town, futilely arousing Weller to stray from his budding homosexual leanings.

Davis’ roles could be entirely different entities or the very same woman or some weirdly unfeasible concoction of both. The sarcastic boredom she expresses as junk-plugged Joan #1 couldn’t be further from the deliciously fruity joie de vivre she exudes as Joan #2; the ever-present look on this Joan’s face suggests she’s either just remembered or recently repeated a particularly saucy joke  -- maybe the kind of thing she feverishly typed in Arabic on her bug-morphed, Burroughs-voiced typewrite? She's all darting eyes and red-lipped pouting under falsely prim attire. Davis lets slip enough sly telling hints that she knows who she is and isn’t playing: do we want one Joan or two? she’s inferring. Whether she’s fingering a fleshy writing implement, re-enacting her doomed part in one of two “William Tell routines” or taking notes on some Interzone agents “feeding” from a mass of strung-up jism-dispensing mugwumps (as you do), Davis yields exemplary acting and exterminates all rational thought.

Take Two: The Ref (1994)
Her comic work doesn’t always get the acclaim it deserves but when she broadens her comic scope even slightly, it’s a treat. 

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Take Three: Peter Sarsgaard

Craig here with Take Three. This week: Peter Sarsgaard

Take One: Garden State (2004)
Including Garden State as a Take Three take meant two things: watching one of Sarsgaard’s very best supporting performances again and watching the actual film again. The charm of the former outweighed the task of the latter. Despite essentially disliking the film, Sarsgaard makes it worth seeing. You get no sad, woe-is-me moping from him, nor do you get “original” moments of screechy-unique arm waving. His character, Mark, a grave digger, comes from the ‘insta-best friend’ vault of movie characters, but it’s what Sarsgaard does with it that makes all the difference. He’s essentially present to take a face full of Braff’s woefulness. During an abysmal rainy shout-a-thon into a large pit, he's on gooseberry duty, forced to awkwardly stand around whilst Braff and Portman snog each other’s faces off. But Sarsgaard lingers with style.

Mark still lives at home with his mother, parties hard with booze and pot and steals jewelry from dead people. Like everyone else in the film he has additional personality traits that, per Braff’s MO, make each and every character come across as utterly original. But Sarsgaard’s the only actor who doesn’t make a self-examining show of them. Instead he absorbs the quirks of character into performance and makes Mark both likeable and grounded. 

Take Two: Boys Don’t Cry (1999)
Boys Don’t Cry is the first taste many of us got of Sarsgaard’s acting prowess. He’d been in a few independent movies beforehand (including Another Day in Paradise and Desert Blue for example) and he had played a murdered teen in 1995’s Dead Man Walking but Kimberly Pierce’s film was his first real flag planted firmly in the movie map. He was rightly lauded for his part in the story of murdered transman Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank in Oscar-winning form). As John Lotter, the central hateful antagonist, he couldn’t have been more charismatically devious.

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Take Three: Alice Braga

Craig here (from Dark Eye Socket) with Take Three. Today: Alice Braga

 Take One: Blindness (2008)

As per the José Saramago novel that Blindness is based on, no characters have names in the film, thus Braga is known only as ‘Woman with Dark Glasses’. (Julianne Moore is ‘Doctor’s Wife’; Danny Glover is ‘Man with Black Eye Patch’ etc.) She’s one of a gathering of randomly afflicted people who succumb to a mysterious blindness epidemic. All the cast, however big or small the role, collaboratively convey the exact amount of conviction in their roles. They remain true to their characters’ physical, psychological and emotional positions each step of the way. There’s a defiant ‘all in it together’ aspect, in which each actor instinctively plays off one another in rewarding ways, not least when it comes to Braga.

Two prominent scenes stand out. Both speak volumes about who WwDG is and include intimate exchanges with the two leading characters. The first sees her closeness with Mark Ruffalo’s Doctor take an urgently sensual turn in front of Moore’s seeing Doctor’s Wife (unbeknownst to them). The desperate connection conveyed in both her face and body language suggests a longed for yet sad release; the moment Doctor’s Wife consoles WwDG instead of Doctor is tender and unexpected – and both actresses excel. The second, much later scene sees her *spoiler alert* showering with Doctor’s Wife and First Blind Man's Wife (Yoshino Kimura) after they find their way back to civilised life at the end of the film. The togetherness they experience in this act is vital, joyous, and for WwDG and DW it’s a sensuous embracing of womanhood that, put alongside the above scene, tells us a lot about connection born out of despair. *end spoilers* It’s a lovely moment of closure for the characters, especially Braga’s. Again, she conveys more through her use of minimal expressiveness. It’s a subtle, impressive supporting performance deserving of some praise.

Take Two: City of God/Cidade de Deus (2002)

She’s the niece of cinema’s Lady Braga, Sonia (and her mother is actress Ana Braga), so it’s no wonder Alice here entered the acting arena: she debuted in 1998 with the short Trampolim, and then came a role in one of 2002’s most adored and impacting films, City of God. She’s Angélica, a local girl who falls for two friends: firstly Rocket/Buscapé (Alexandre Rodrigues), a photographer; and then Benny/Bené (Phellipe Haagensen), who’s involved in the drugs trade in violently troubled Rio de Janeiro. Her character arc is minimal, subdued in comparison to the main thrust of the narrative, but she makes each one of her scenes count with joyful vibrancy.

In her brief early appearances in the film – where she lazily hangs out on the beach with Rocket – she’s carefree yet all too aware of, and unaffected by, the criminal events within the city. But later on, leading up to one of the film’s key dramatic moments, she exerts her influence and very nearly gets Bené out of his crime loop with her insistence on them leaving the city to run a farm. A shot of Braga’s despondent face, as Bené moves away from her at his leaving party (and, sadly, toward his fate), works in melancholic opposition to the sunnier countenance she exhibited earlier, in the beach scenes. Her strobe-lit sobbing at the unfortunate turns events take is both disturbing and saddening. Braga’s knowing, brightly memorable turn is affecting enough despite being piecemeal. She justly deserved her supporting nomination for the Cinema Brazil Grand Prize.

Take Three: I Am Legend (2007)

We find out roughly two-thirds of the way in that Will Smith isn’t actually the last person on earth in I Am Legend when Braga, as Anna, pops her head through the smashed window of his crashed truck at South Street Seaport; she does, however, save him from becoming the latest person killed on earth via a horde of ill-conceived and unconvincing CGI vampzomsters, sorry, darkseekers. Anna and her son have followed his radio broadcasts in the hope of finding him and heading on up to Vermont to a maybe- fable survivor settlement.

Although Will Smith gives a heartfelt portrayal of Robert Neville, his character can be referenced in the original text, Richard Matheson’s source novel. Braga doesn’t have an identifiable correlative character, however. (Her equivalent character in the book is Ruth, an uninfected wanderer who Anna bares scant resemblance to.) She has to shoehorn Anna into the world that Francis Lawrence’s film chooses to half-replace the book with. In the many conversation-heavy scenes with Smith (he’s only had his dog and a city full of mannequins to talk to for years – he’s gonna wanna chat) she performs with flair. When he challenges her assumptions, she has an eloquent way of quietly facing off his ranting. And her calmness in the oncoming storm of apocalyptic pale-faced pixel-creatures makes for a nice balance with the fretful panic elsewhere in the film. She brings an unexpected composure and adds a touch of hopeful determination to the film. It’s all-round solid character work.

Three more films for the taking: Lower City (2005), Predators (2010), Repo Men (2010)