If I Picked the Winners: Best Actor 2004

     As time goes on, I don't look at the early 2000's kindly in terms of cinematic output. Not to say there wasn't some great films from the era (and there have definitely been time periods with more dismal films than the early 2000's), but on average, movies from this time just didn't pack a punch. It is hard to say why exactly, but I think the industry might have been in a transitional period in terms of artistic leadership. The directors from the previous generation seemed to be running out of creative steam, while some of the younger talent (the Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, and Darren Aronofskys' of the world) were still finding their feet and hadn't broken through enough to demand the respect of the studios. Since actors are at least somewhat dependent on good roles, no matter how talented they are as thespians, this means acting as a craft was not at a high point either at the time. The 2004 Best Actor race is a perfect example of this fact, because while the category is filled with star-studded names of capable actors, with the exception of a few, most of the performances are not the actor's best work (even if they are decent performances).

     How about performances that missed being nominated though? Well there was one great performance that has since gained pop culture status through parodies on Youtube: Bruno Ganz as Adolph Hitler in the German film "Downfall". Playing THE villain of the 20th century, Ganz finally brings a level of humanity to the Nazi leader who had previously only been portrayed as a cartoony super-villain. While Ganz would walk away with the Oscar, no contest, in a meritocracy, unfortunately, with the Academy's inane rules about foreign actors' eligibility, I'm not sure if the performance was ever eligible for any awards. Other than this stand-out performance, while I might have substituted this for that here and there (Tom Hanks in "The Ladykillers", Bill Murray in "The Life Aquatic", Jim Caviezel in "The Passion of the Christ", and if considered lead, David Carradine in "Kill Bill Part 2" would all be possible replacements), nothing jumps out as an awful blunder on the Academy's part. As fun of a pastime as Academy-bashing is then, aside from their xenophobia, I can't really criticize them in this category, which means it is time to get to the ranking.

5. Johnny Depp in "Finding Neverland"

     This has been on my mind for quite some time now, and like the guilt felt over a nefarious deed, it just won't go away, continually getting louder in my head over time. Johnny Depp is not that good an actor. Phew, it feels so much better now that I have said it. Let me clarify though. At one time, Johnny Depp deserved all the praise in the world. His iconic performance as Edward Scissorhands is a unique turn that no other actor may have been able to pull off, and is the best "silent" performance since Charlie Chaplin's Tramp in his last role in "Modern Times". His performance as history's worst director in Tim Burton's other Ed movie, "Ed Wood", is another spectacular performance that is still under-appreciated to this day. Even after this, promise for Depp's career was still present, but then a Disney film by the name of "Pirates of the Caribbean" came along and changed everything. The ironic part is his performance in the film is legitimately good, but the amount of money and fame that came along with the role had Depp seeing green, which put him into two different roles. One role was to bank off of his shtick quirky characters in Burton's film and others. The other role was to continue to do "serious" roles, but his quirkiness still seemed to seep into these roles as well. Case and point: "Finding Neverland". Playing James Matthew Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, the film explored Barrie's life before Peter Pan, in particular his friendship with a woman and her children which helped inspire him to wrote Peter Pan. Much like the film though, Depp's performance is forgettable, low-key to a fault. Without any discernible    
emotions outside a vague curiosity with the children's imagination, Depp's Barrie is hard to relate to. Why does a grown man take such interest in children? Even if it is not sexual, it has to be something more interesting than "the magic of a child's mind" that the film and Depp's performance seem to suggest. This schmaltzy answer just falls flat, which in turn lead Depp's performance to do the same. It had potential, but just as Depp's career in the last decade, ultimately the performance goes nowhere.

4. Clint Eastwood in "Million Dollar Baby"

     Clint Eastwood plays a gruff man, who grunts more than he speaks. Sounds familiar right? Not much of a stretch for the veteran actor who made his career more from his steely gaze than his oratory abilities, but before I dive headfirst into a pool of cynicism, I'm going to knock down this straw man argument. Too often people judge someone's acting skills by degree of difficulty, as if acting were like Olympic diving or figure skating. Film is art though, not sport, so whether or not any Joe Blow could pull-off the performance is beside the point. What matters is how much the performance contributes to furthering the overall goals of the movie, and this is the criteria the performance should be judged by. This is why, despite his lack of long-winded emotional monologues, Eastwood's no-nonsense, man-of-few-words, tough guy act in films such as "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" are perfect. They serve to make those movies the classics that they are, and Clint deserves a lot of credit for that. By the same token though, if those characteristics serve to weaken the film, than the actor deserves criticism, and sadly, for the most part, that is the situation we have with Eastwood's role as Frankie Dunn in "Million Dollar Baby". Playing the owner of a small boxing gym who very reluctantly agrees to train Hillary Swank's Maggie Fitzgerald, his saturnine old-man act only sets up the film to be the stereo-typical melodrama that it is. From the first moments where he resists Maggie's efforts to get him to become her trainer, we can already tell that Frankie secretly has a heart of gold inside, and that this will set him up for a hard emotional fall towards the end of the film. In other words, very early on in the film, the plot becomes an exercise in completion, a total waste of time, as we know exactly where we're going. Now why a heavy amount of the blame for this should go to screenwriter Paul Haggis, Eastwood's performance does not do him any favors. Had he added something unique to the character, even something really small, it might have throw the audience enough off-guard to at least suspect that we might not know what the future stored, but alas we get nothing new. Of course watching Eastwood be Eastwood is always slightly entertaining, but Oscar worthy I think it is not.

3. Jaime Foxx in "Ray"

     After initial viewing, I was as impressed as anyone with Jaime Foxx's performance as early rock n' roll pioneer Ray Charles in the Taylor Hackford film "Ray". As time went on though, questions started to pop into the my head about how much of Foxx's performance was simple mimicry and how much was true-to-life acting. Critics of the performance started to point out, with some legitimacy, that Foxx's uncanny vocal and physical impersonation of rock god Ray Charles was not much more than a parlor trick, as the performance failed to give the audience any real insight to the man's motivation or emotional inspiration. What we get from "Ray" (as illustrated in the parody film "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story") is a laundry list of achievements and scandals of the life of a stereo-typical rock star, without ever getting to know Ray Charles the artist, or Ray Charles the human being. How much of this though falls on Jaime Foxx? Clearly it is first and foremost the responsibility of the writers to portray the characters of a film as fully-developed individuals, but as I have stated in other editions of this article before, actors must take some responsibility for the roles they play and the choices they make. What's the final verdict then on Mr. Foxx's Oscar-winning role? Despite the fact that he leans heavily on imitation, I can't help but to be impressed with the turn. The movie itself has many flaws, and while Jaime Foxx shares some of the blame for this, in this case, I just can't help but feel strongly that the stereo-typical "rock star bio-pic" format that the film follows is the sole responsibility of the film's co-writer and director, Taylor Hackford (whose name may be not be coincidental). Seven years later, some of the luster to Foxx's performance has been worn away, but despite the naysayers and their cogent arguments, I can't help but thinking fondly of Jaime Foxx's Oscar-winning performance.

2. Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Aviator"

      When Leonardo DiCaprio became "king of the world" and the heart-throb of pre-teen and teenage girls across the world with the mega-success of "Titanic", I really took a strong disliking to the young actor. It wasn't just all the celebrity and fame of his pretty boy image that made despise the object of young female obsession, but I genuinely questioned his proficiency as an actor. Today, DiCaprio is probably my favorite actor currently working, so what changed? It was a slow process, that took time and multiple good performances as reassurance that he was the real deal, but a key piece of this puzzle was his performance as Howard Hughes in "The Aviator", his second collaboration with famed auteur Martin Scorsese. Now my hardline anti-DiCaprio stance had already softened a bit due to DiCaprio's underrated performance in Steven Spielberg's most underrated film, "Catch Me If You Can", but one performance does not make a trend. For all I knew, Spielberg may had worked his black magic voodoo on DiCaprio to pull out one great performance. These fears were put to rest with a second great performance in a row in "The Aviator". Howard Hughes had one of the more interesting lives of any human beings in the early 20th century. While never quite amassing the same level of power as the industrialists tycoons of the generation before him (people like J.P Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockerfeller), Howard Hughes had the same entrepreneurial spirit as his innovative predecessors, and what he lacked in business savvy, he made up for with perseverance and a love of glamor, as his attraction to hollywood starlets showed. This spirit, of a man who can conquer anything and anyone, and then later a man who is ironically conquered by his own unique eccentricities, is what makes DiCaprio's performance so strong. These were giant men with larger-than-life personalities in the early days of modern corporations, and to capture this without walking over the edge of typical histrionics is no small feat. To be fair, like Jamie Foxx, there are scenes in the movie that feel like simple mimicry and imitation, to prove that DiCaprio can play the part, but the exact reason that I ranked DiCaprio ahead of Foxx, is he is able to breakthrough these weaknesses to get us to some meaningful spot in the characters development. Having Martin Scorsese as your guide I am sure is a big help, but it was still on DiCaprio's shoulders to get the job done, and while he didn't quite make it to the level to have me put him at the number 1 spot, he still passed the test with flying colors.

1. Don Cheadle in "Hotel Rwanda"

     Like the previous two actors, Don Cheadle had the strategically Oscar-advantageous fortune to play a non-fictional character, one Paul Rusesabagina, the real life manager of Sabena Hotel des Mille Collines during the genocide in Rwanda during the mid-1990s. For Cheadle though, unlike DiCaprio and Foxx, very few people actually knew the man he was playing, so the responsibility and temptation on both Cheadle and director Terry George to get down the semantics of the character was much diminished compared to some of their competition. The result is a sort of creative freedom that does not speak to the trivial facts of a human beings life, but to the man himself, which in turn reaches all of our shared humanity. As a whole, this is what the film does well. For a message film, it manages surprisingly to not focus on all the broader political implications, wisely deciding to put the audience in the position of a man trying to all he can to save his family and friends. Cheadle does this with stunning deftness, as he rarely goes off into morally indignant tangents. And why is this? Because in a disastrous situation such as the Rwandan genocide, you don't have time to think about something as abstract as morality. The only thing you can think about is how I can survive, and it is this laser like focus on survival that makes Cheadle's performance shine. Whether through his words or a simple glance from his eyes, Cheadle maintains Paul Rusesabagina throughout the film, never once deviating from the center of his character. We never see Cheadle thinking as an actor. There are no self-conscious decisions about taking the character in this direction or that direction, he simply exists in the world given to him. In fact, there are really only one or two moments of self-reflection for the character in the film, and even calling these moments "self-reflection" is a bit of a stretch. They're more moments where the emotional weight of the situation is just too much for any one man to bear, even one as strong as the film's Paul Rusesabagina. In these brutally honest "moments of weakness" (for lack of a better term), Cheadle again does not call attention to himself, but plays it straight to a powerful reaction. I wish the film and Cheadle's performance had received more kudos from awards bodies around the industry, but it is slights like this that make it fun writing these articles. If it were up to me, Cheadle would have won the Oscar, but I can guarantee 2004 will not be the last time that a Jaime Foxx as Ray Charles beats a Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina. It's just in the Academy's blood.

     Until next week's article, where we will explore yet another category of Oscar history, as always you can leave your comments below.