For Your Consideration: My Best Supporting Actors of 2011 (and By That I Mean Actresses Too--Well, One of Them)

Like much of the world, I think the Oscars are absurd but feel pain if I miss a minute of them. Among their absurdities (shared with the endless award season that now takes a third of a year itself) is that of the great variety of skilled and fascinating supporting performances every year, somehow the conventional consensus builds around just a few, to the point that around a billion of the planet's people already know what only PriceWaterhouseCoopers is supposed to know: that Christopher Plummer will win Best Supporting Actor on Sunday.

So to balance the scales just a bit, here is a very short tribute to five (actually six) memorable and unnominated supporting 2011 performances from my spotty moviegoing:

• Hunter McCracken, The Tree of Life: Maybe the only one of these that might have received actual Academy votes, McCracken carries more than anyone else the weight of this portentious (and glorious) movie on his skinny shoulders, playing the boy that would grow into Sean Penn with more lived-in intensity than Penn can muster. What of the performance is his art, and what is the genius of Malick's editorial curation? I don't know, but what's left on the screen of his brooding, flinching observation, his arms bent awkwardly from hands stuck only halfway down his jeans pockets, is beautiful.
• Nicole Beharie, Shame: Speaking of bearing the weight of a portentious but, to my mind, successful movie, I've already written a bit on how Beharie's subtle but deeply felt reactions to Michael Fassbender's main character provide the hinge for the story's impact. She's the sole resting place of reason in a film populated by madmen, and so, like McCracken, she channels the force of our own observation through her. Therefore, when she's carried for a moment into the madness as well, she brings us, curious and aghast, along with her.
• Babak Karimi, A Separation: I guess you could say that Karimi's character, an examining magistrate in Asghar Farhadi's domestic drama, is a stand-in for the audience like the previous two, a voice of reason in a relentlessly subjective dispute, but the brilliant note of Karimi's performance is that he makes his judge seem both reasonable and as subjective as anyone else, swayed by irritation and special pleading but still attempting to work decently within a legal system that to a Western eye might look capricious and casual. His offhand authority in the role makes you think Karimi might be an actual judge drafted into this drama, so I loved finding out he's actually a longtime film editor in Italy making just his fourth onscreen appearance.
• Jurgen Klodt, The Woman with the 5 Elephants: I've also mentioned Herr Klodt with affection before (though not by name) as the gruff friend the translator Svetlana Gaier (the "woman" of the title of this documentary) brings in to test the music of her Dostoyevsky translations against. Obviously, this is a documentary, but what actor could top the deadpan comedy of his stubborn failure to budge the even more stubborn Gaier in their debates about word choice and sentence rhythms. His final shrug of defeat--"I capitulate"--may be the great laugh line of the year not spoken by a bridesmaid.
• Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method, and Adrien Brody, Midnight in Paris: Imitations of real and famous people are given undue weight in Oscar consideration, but in these cases well-known actors brought new life to overly familiar cultural celebrities. Mortensen's Freud, elbowed to the side in a story of psychoanalytic history that puts Jung at the center, is thrillingly alive with a combination of intelligence, virility, and bourgeois ambition that makes you realize once again both the riskiness and the carefully accumulated cultural capital of his ideas, while Brody, in just a few minutes onscreen and with just one repeated word--"Dali!" (well, also "rhinoceros!")--gives Allen's hit confection an edge of giddy weirdness that for a moment makes Paris in the '20s actually seem strange and present.

Comments

[LA NOR]

Agreed. at least insofar as the movies I saw too. Hoping you get to see Bullhead when you get back stateside; would be curious how it ranks against A Separation, which I have not seen. Bullhead has some good supporting staff too... Tim just got tickets to be at the Oscars; am going to go check out his new tux shirt this afternoon.

[Tom Nissley]

Can't he just wear what he wore to your wedding?