Your Humble Commentator found himself, in the mid-1980s, at a party in Dinkytown, arguing with some guy about who was the greatest actor in Hollywood: Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Tootsie, Rainman) or Robert De Niro (The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, King of Comedy). Today, we think we’re blessed with an even wider array of choices – Kevin Spacey (whose film Beyond the Sea we’re screening tonight), Daniel Day-Lewis, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, and Don Cheadle all come to mind. In fact, we selected American Beauty, The Usual Suspects, and Beyond the Sea for inclusion in this year’s film series because of what Spacey in particular had made of them.
But is he the greatest? First, this begs the question of the criteria one uses to determine such irrelevancies. Allow us to suggest the following (and we’ll limit ourselves to male actors this time):
Losing oneself in a character – One of the most impressive aspects of watching a great actor is the amazement at seeing him or her completely morph from one role to the next, a “how’d he do that” moment. In 1985, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis made two movies, Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette and James Ivory's Room With a View. In one he played a gay punk London tough, in the other a pretentious uptight Edwardian aristocrat. And you could not tell it was the same actor. Wow.
Consistent greatness over time – this is hard. A lot of actors start well and then flame out or coast on their success (one might put Dustin Hoffman in this category). Others start out as two-dimensional and don’t mature into richer, more nuanced characters until later (Bill Murray comes to mind). Consistent greatness is a true achievement. Here Sean Penn is a great example, from his breakout role in Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to the complex characterization in Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking (1995) to his most recent tour de force in the biopic Gus Van Sant's Milk (2008). There may be occasional duds, but he’s still got it.
Not falling into type – This is a killer if you’re going to be considered great – you can’t be the same person every time (Tom Cruise, we’re looking at you). You can’t make every character into you; you have to make yourself into the character. And you have to take risks with your audience’s and fans’ expectations. Is there a more experimental actor in Hollywood than Johnny Depp? You might think that his consistent choice of idiosyncratic literary characters – Hunter S. Thompson, Willy Wonka, Jack Sparrow, Ichabod Crane, Don Juan, James Barrie, The Mad Hatter – amounts to self-typing, but he’s too adventurous to let any one of those resemble another. Nor does a concern about his star status seem to affect his choices. In 2010: Tonto?
Making a lot out of a little – We love it when an actor doesn’t have a starring or major role and still makes a quality impression. We would go see any movie with Don Cheadle even if he was only on screen for a matter of minutes; he brings so many smaller characters to life: overconfident ex-con Maurice Miller in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998), naively hopeful Buck Swope in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997), unintelligible Basher Tarr in Soderbergh's remake of Oceans 11 (2001), and corrupt Haitian official Henri Moore in Brett Ratner's otherwise forgettable heist film After the Sunset (2004).
So, given these criteria, how does Kevin Spacey stack up? Well, we’re going to leave that up to you. Suffice it to say, Spacey has assembled a body of work with which one can begin to make these sort of distinctions. He began his career with small but notable turns in films like Working Girl, Henry and June, and Glengarry Glen Ross. If you take Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995) as his first great film and run your finger down the list to what you consider his most recent superior work, do you cross into a second decade? Has he begun to coast? What about variety of roles? Are his characters distinct from one another? Does he take risks?
It’s hard to judge an actor on the basis of just three films, which is what Film Club limited itself to in selecting the stand-out works of Kevin Spacey, but we’re pretty impressed with the three we chose. And we leave it up to you, as you watch Spacey morph into 1950s and ‘60s singer and teen idol Bobby Darin in this musical biopic, to place Spacey in that pantheon of current great male actors. One more question: Does Spacey’s decision to use his own singing voice, as Joaquin Phoenix did in James Mangold's Walk the Line, move him up or down your list?
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
