Best Supporting Performances of 2014: The Women

Over the next couple weeks, I'm going to be posting lists of the best performances of 2014. I'm starting today with best supporting actress.

Honorable mentions (in no order):

Agata Kulesza, Ida

Emma Stone, Birdman

Katherine Waterston, Inherent Vice

Joaana Newsom, Inherent Vice

Patricia Arquette, Boyhood

5. Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer

Tilda Swinton has been one of the most consistently great actresses for years now, but she keeps proving that she has plenty of unused tricks up her sleeve. In 2014, she played a vampire lover, an AI therapist, and a wealthy 84-year-old woman who regularly had sex with Ralph Fiennes. Even among such tough competition, her performance in Snowpiercer is something special, and certainly among the most purely entertaining performances she’s ever given. As Mason, the spokesperson for the Snowpiercer train, she’s a weird combination of slimy politician, mad scientist, and rich snob. It’s a gloriously over the top performance that feels right at home in a gleefully genre-blending film.

4. Teyonah Parris, Dear White People

There’s not a single performance in Justin Simine’s Dear White People that I would consider anything less than great, but Teyonah Parris still manages to stand out. She plays Coco, a college student who hopes to become a reality star through a successful YouTube channel. She’s a sensitive young woman who desperately wants to be seen as indomitable. Throughout the film, Coco transforms herself to conform to desires of the society around, making herself more appealing to the audience she wants while denying the parts of her character that she considers less marketable. Parris inflects her performance with an agonized quality that makes her struggle that much more affecting.

3. Emily Blunt, Edge of Tomorrow

Few actresses working right now are as versatile as Emily Blunt, who somehow manages to bring humanity to roles you wouldn’t expect. Edge of Tomorrow is the perfect example of this. Blunt plays Sergeant Rita Vrataski, a soldier who once had the same power Tom Cruise’ character now possesses to relive the same battle over and over again, allowing her to perfect her skills and end up a war hero. However, this also forced her to witness the death of a loved one again and again, and the effects of this trauma can be seen on Blunt's face. It’s a poignant female performance in the last genre you’d expect there to be one, and only Blunt could pull it off.

2. Krysten Ritter, Listen Up Philip

Listen Up Philip is a deeply cynical portrait of the artistic ego, and not the sort of film that you’d expect to break your heart. Nor would you expect anything in the way of surprises from the character of Melanie (Krysten Ritter), the bitter daughter of the well-respected but incredibly self-absorbed author Ike, whose treatment of his daughter borders on hostile. We’ve seen this sort of character before, and we think we know where it’s going. But Ritter underscores all of Melanie’s bitter words with a pain, hinting at how much damage the years of neglect have caused. The resentment eventually transforms into a heartbreaking vulnerability when she confronts her father for the way he has treated her and her mother, only to be rejected and left worse off than she was before.

1. Elisabeth Moss, Listen Up Philip

For the majority of its running time, Listen Up Philip focuses on the arrogant and self-centered author Philip (Jason Schwartzman) and his equally arrogant and self-centered mentor Ike (Jonathan Pryce). Their narrow worldview frequently exhibits feelings of misogyny, with Ike in particular having hostile feelings toward the women he believes have only wanted to hurt and belittle him his entire life. When we first meet her, Philip’s girlfriend Ashley (Elizabeth Moss) seems destined fall victim to her boyfriend’s selfishness, but the genius of director Alex Ross Perry’s film and Moss’ performance in particular is the way it flips the script on our expectations. The film’s novelistic structure jumps around in time and between characters, devoting an entire section of the film to Ashely in the wake of her separation from Philip. She treats his departure not as an ending but as a new beginning, and Moss plays Ashley as a woman who has been freed of the oppressive atmosphere of an unfulfilling relationship and finally has time to focus on her own needs.  When Philip does finally attempt to return to Ashely and she denies him, Moss somehow manages to express eight different emotions on her at once in one of the mostly quietly powerful moments of 2014.

Foxcatcher and The Theory of Everything

A few notes:

- I have a new pet peeve: people who make their disapproval known in movie theaters. When a character does something you disapprove of, don’t sigh or go “tsk, tsk” or whatever. It’s obnoxious. 

- I failed at seeing all three Hunger Games films, but I did see the first two. By next week, I'll have seen the third. Maybe.

Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller) 

 

            Foxcatcher has been one of my most anticipated films of 2014 ever since it was announced. The story of the bizarre relationship between John Du Pont, a man born into the richest family in America, and Mark and Dave Schultz, two brothers who both won gold medals for wrestling in the 1984 Olympics, seemed ripe with possibilities, especially when considering its bizarre conclusion. The final product is unfortunately a disappointment, but only because I loved so much of it that its massive flaws were even more frustrating.

The film’s biggest issue is the same aspect that has been garnering the most Oscar buzz, and that’s the performance of Steve Carell as John Du Pont. I adore Steve Carell. His Michael Scott is one of my favorite characters from any medium, and I will always have be willing to give the man a chance. No single film will be able to change that. But his performance in Foxcatcher simply isn’t very good. Du Pont is a fascinating man, but Carell only plays him as a creepy, awkward mystery. He speaks with long pause, he walks almost as if in slow motion, and he’s always very still. This is incredibly effective in the early scenes, when it feels like the possibility of something deeper is being hinted at, but then we get scene after scene of the same weird ticks, and eventually it becomes clear that the only real purpose they serve is to make us thing, “man, this dude is strange.” It’s no coincidence that all of the film’s best scenes are the ones without Carell in them.

            Despite all of the Best Actor buzz for Steve Carell, the real lead performance in Foxcatcher, and the one that actually deserves the nomination, is Channing Tatum as Mark Schultz, the wrestler and Olympic gold-medalist. Tatum’s mostly taken roles that emphasize his natural charisma, so it’s a bit unnerving to watch him play a character who seems uncomfortable in his own skin. The film’s masterful opening depicts his lonely and heartbreaking existence, awkwardly speaking at an elementary school about his experience at the Olympics, and later a fantastic scene of him training with his brother Dave, which tells you everything you need to know about their relationship without a single line of dialogue.

Equally great is Mark Ruffalo as Mark Schultz brother and mentor Dave Schultz, who represents everything Mark is not. He’s charismatic and friendly and he’s got a family that he will do anything for. Everything seems to come naturally to him, while nothing comes naturally to Mark.

            Foxcatcher tries to depict the consequences of unearned privilege, but the film makes its points on this subject so half-heartedly that it’s hard to really care. Miller tries it into to a larger indictment of the idea of American exceptionalism, but even his exploration of that feels lazy, consisting of a few patriotic lines from Du Pont and some heavy-handed American iconography. Foxcatcher works far better as a portrait of two men who feel isolated from society and want desperately to prove their worth to the world and to themselves.

            Then there’s the ending. For those who don’t know how this real life story played out, I won’t spoilt it here, but I will say that the film struggles to match the story it wants to tell with the story it has to tell. The conclusion is certainly shocking, but it doesn’t feel earned.

Foxcatcher is the most frustrating film experience I’ve had all year. It can be a powerful and even haunting experience at times (when Carell is not on screen), and a complete mess at others. It comes so close to greatness that its massive missteps are all the more infuriating.

Rating: 3/5

The Theory of Everything (James Marsh)

            I wasn’t even going to write a review of this. I was going to find a nice .gif of a steaming pile of dog crap that would have done the job just fine, but I decided that would be in poor taste.

            Anyway, The Theory of Everything is the worst film I’ve seen in 2014. I’ll qualify that by saying I don’t see a lot of genuinely awful films (if you’re into that sort of thing, I'd recommend  this). That said, this is just unbearable.

            Stephen Hawking undoubtedly has lived an incredible life. He’s lived with motor neuron disease his entire adult life, but hasn’t let that prevent him trying to uncover the origins of the universe. It was only a matter of time until they made a film about him. Unfortunately, it was inevitable that Hollywood would concentrate less on his great achievement on his personal life. The film trivializes his work even further by putting the focus on his unremarkable relationship with his ex-wife, Jane Wilde Hawking.

            Eddie Redmayne does an excellent impression of Stephen Hawking, but the performance, by its very nature, can only remain on the surface. Instead of trying to overcome this, director James Marsh instead decides to give equal attention to Hawking’s ex-wife Jane. As played by Felicity Jones, she’s a strong, devoted, and completely uninteresting woman. As their completely generic love affair plays out, Hawking’s ground-breaking theoretical research gets pushed to the side and is only occasionally acknowledged.

            Stephen and Jane Hawking divorced over two decades ago, and the film tries to acknowledge this while also trying to convince us their love is one for the ages. As they both drift in to new relationships, we’re asked to believe that they are still passionately in love with each other.

The Theory of Everything succeeds at turning the life of one of the most fascinating men of the last century into one of the most banal biopics in recent memory. This is about as tame as drama gets. Of course it’s going to be nominated for Best Picture.

Rating: 1/5