3774. [PseudoErasmus] - Sep. 19, 1997 - 9:29 PM PST

Re: acting of 'behavioural extremism'

The most difficult thing for an actor is to enact an interior life, to convey to the audience the trajectory of a character's transformation in the course of the film/play. What is generally easier for him is to assume a collection of attributes, especially physical attributes, which spares him the burden of creating an inner life. Movie characters which I consider little more than ensemble of behavioural quirks and anomalies are found in such roles as Robert DeNiro's in Awakening, Daniel Day-Lewis's in My Left Foot, Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man and Tom Hanks's Forrest Gump, along with sundry madmen, eccentrics, retarded people, handicaps, etc. etc.. In these cases, the representational emphasis is usually not on the internal, but on the *external*. Therefore, they are quite simply lesser histrionic accomplishments than creating, say, Blanche du Bois, or Charles Foster Kane, or T E Lawrence, or even Nixon (let alone the great theaterical characters).

3775. [PseudoErasmus] - Sep. 19, 1997 - 9:54 PM PST

I think the disappointing career of Daniel Day-Lewis illustrates something about what I mean in Message #3374.

He is, of course, justly considered a chameleon of sorts. He has lost his own personality and resurfaced in many vastly different roles: the effete snob and suitor in A Room with a View, the gay cockney punk in My Beautiful Laundrette, the sedately outrageous rake in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the bittersweet victim of Lou Gehrig's disease in My Left Foot and the frontier hunk in The Last of the Mohicans. These roles were all workaday perfections, neat little feats of competence. But perhaps most of us were all too taken in by the sheer transformation he effected in each of these roles; bamboozled by the difference the one from the other. For each of these characters were actually quite shallow as representations, with little suggestions of complexity. So, in a sense, Day-Lewis had never been tested.

As far as I'm concerned, Day-Lewis's mettle as a serious actor was finally tested in Martin Scorsese's film of Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. I couldn't understand at first why I found the movie so unmoving, so faithful in every way though it was to the novel, which *is* moving. I then realised that, quite apartment from the defects of the screenplay, Daniel Day-Lewis utterly failed to enact Newland Archer.

Deprived of the opportunities to throw a facial tic, to flex a muscle, to scream in agony or to turn an impish smile, he went blank, wooden, nil. He simply failed to show us the drama of Newland Archer, which was completely internal. He simply coasted through the film, without personality. He didn't know how to construct personality, it seemed, for perhaps hitherto he had too often relied on tricks of feigning physical debility or changing accents.

3777. [MrSocko] - Sep. 19, 1997 - 10:10 PM PST

[Pseudo]:

The first two of the Day-Lewis films you mention were extrodinarily tedious. I fell asleep during Room With A View, and as for My Beautiful Laundrette -- I am only too well acquainted with this species of film whose only utility is to inveigh against the alleged spiritual

deficits of "Fatcher's" Britain.

The Last of the Mohicans existed mainly as a vehicle for showing Day-Lewis sprinting up hills in the America of yore. It was a beefcake flick in pioneer drag.

You also left out Danny Boy's In The Name of the Father, as well you should.

3780. [PseudoErasmus] - Sep. 19, 1997 - 10:27 PM PST

[Socko] (Message #3777)

You must realise that when I comment on a performance, it's not to be held as a verdict on the film itself.

I thought the first two films you castigate had modest merits.

And I didn't forget about In the Name of the Father. It was irrelevant to my illustration.

3787. coralreef - Sep. 20, 1997 - 4:16 AM PST

I thought Daniel Day Lewis successfully acted with an inner life in The Crucible, another film of failed ambition, but one with many interesting aspects. That film was full of very good acting but somehow just didn't come together, it didn't flow. The fact that the play was overly familiar (and not *all* that great) didn't help. I had a similar reaction to The Madness of King George - directed by the same man, Nicholas Hynter, as Crucible - which just didn't work for me no matter how much I admired the acting or the story.

I think Robocop may have been a turning point for many people, including myself, it was sickening. As for being unhip, I submit Terry Davey as someone more unhip than AK.

3792. [PseudoErasmus] - Sep. 20, 1997 - 5:40 AM PST

Coralreef (Message #3787)

I never saw the film of the Crucible, but I understand that most of the actors, including Daniel Day-Lewis, acquitted himself well.

I agree that the play isn't very good. But IMO it is the best of Arthur Miller's works, certainly better than that carpentered hokum, The Death of a Salesman.

I don't think there was anything to 'work' in the Madness of King George. The genre to which it belongs, The English Costume Drama of Not Before 1700, usually doesn't do much more than tell curious or dainty stories. The Madness of George III, which I saw on stage as well as on screen, was nothing more, really, than a vehicle for the main performance.