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Richard Brody on the Best Performances of the Twenty-First Century
The New Yorker
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8/18/2023
The film critic discusses his five favorite American performances of the century.
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00:00
I'm Richard Brody, I'm a film critic at The New Yorker,
00:02
and today I'm gonna talk about
00:04
the best performances of the 21st century.
00:06
I'm gonna highlight American performances today.
00:10
Maybe the chance will come up soon
00:11
to talk about international ones.
00:14
Number five is Mahershala Ali in "Moonlight."
00:18
What he does with his character
00:20
and with his bearing in embodying this character
00:24
sets the tone for the entire film.
00:28
- Right there, you're in the middle of the world.
00:33
- Ali plays the role with a wry, sarcastic,
00:36
yet involuntarily vulnerable undertone.
00:40
It's almost as if he's whispering,
00:41
murmuring the role of Juan.
00:43
- She do drugs, right?
00:47
- Yeah.
00:54
(birds chirping)
00:56
Yet at the same time,
01:07
Ali's very presence is commanding, decisive.
01:11
It's as if throughout the entire film,
01:13
not just the first sequence,
01:14
even when he's absent,
01:16
his power dominates the entire movie.
01:21
Number four is Miranda July in "The Future."
01:25
She actually plays two roles in her movie.
01:27
In one of them,
01:28
she lends her voice to the character of a talking cat.
01:31
But what I'm most enthusiastic about
01:32
is her performance as Sophie,
01:34
a 35-year-old dancer who feels that her best creative years
01:38
are on the verge of slipping away
01:40
and that she needs to seize the day,
01:42
take control of her life.
01:44
- Wow, 40 is basically 50.
01:46
And then after 50, the rest is just loose change.
01:51
- Loose change?
01:53
- Like not quite enough to get anything you really want.
01:57
- Oh God.
02:00
- As a dancer and even more as an essentially creative
02:03
and imaginative person,
02:04
Sophie has a kind of obsession with a shirt she calls shirty
02:07
and when she has an affair with a man,
02:10
she meets by a strange series of coincidences.
02:13
She creates a dance with, for, and because of shirty.
02:18
That is, for me, one of the most profound
02:21
and moving moments in the modern cinema.
02:24
Miranda July, well, she's a great writer,
02:35
but it's her balletic grace,
02:37
it's her performance as a dancer in her own movie,
02:39
playing the role of a dancer,
02:41
that for me makes this movie transcendent.
02:45
Number three is Anna Paquin in "Margaret."
02:49
Paquin stars as Lisa Cohen, an Upper West Side teenager.
02:53
Lisa inadvertently causes a bus accident
02:55
in which a woman is killed.
02:57
And soon this case takes over her life.
03:05
- The entire point of the lawsuit was to get the guy fired
03:07
so he doesn't kill somebody else.
03:09
- Lonergan writes and directs the movie as a city symphony,
03:13
filling it with the grand passions of urban life.
03:16
And Paquin handles the intricate dialogue
03:19
that Lonergan crafts for her with a deft,
03:23
almost a rope dance-like precision
03:25
that nonetheless is filled with the energy
03:27
that expands to fill the city as the images do.
03:30
- I think you're very young.
03:31
- What does that have to do with anything?
03:33
If anything, I think it means I care more
03:34
than someone who's older because this kind of thing
03:36
has never happened to me before.
03:38
- No, it means you care more easily.
03:41
There's a big difference.
03:43
- And Paquin invests this character
03:44
with a precocious authority
03:46
and a preternatural sense of command
03:48
that makes it one of the great teen performances
03:51
in the history of cinema.
03:52
Number two is Helena Howard in "Madeline's Madeline."
03:58
The character of Madeline is a theater prodigy
04:02
who has a significant role
04:04
in a major theater company in Manhattan.
04:08
Yet this very advanced young actress
04:09
is also dealing with the regular problems of a teenager.
04:13
(cars driving)
04:15
- Oh my God.
04:17
- Where are you going?
04:18
- Good night.
04:20
- Are you going home?
04:21
I mean, can I get a kiss without the hair in it?
04:25
The movie pivots on the relationship between art and life,
04:28
between creative drive and personal problems.
04:31
It's as if the continuity between Helena Howard
04:34
as a teenager off screen
04:36
and Helena Howard as a prodigious young actress on screen
04:40
is itself the essence of the dynamic
04:42
that Decker captures in the movie.
04:43
- Evangeline is gonna-
04:46
- And what Howard does as an actress
04:50
in the life of Madeline
04:52
and in the stage presence of Madeline
04:55
reminds me of the great Jenna Rollins
04:57
who in John Cassavetes' film "Opening Night"
05:00
delivers the most remarkable performance of acting
05:04
on stage in a movie that I've ever seen.
05:06
(screaming)
05:08
(crying)
05:10
- This troubling, unsettling, ambiguous dynamic
05:28
between life on stage and life off stage,
05:31
between family life and creative life
05:33
gives the movie and above all,
05:36
gives Howard's performance a terrifying power.
05:39
The best performance of the century
05:42
is by Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Wolf of Wall Street,"
05:46
which for my money is also the best film
05:48
of the century so far.
05:49
Do I look like the cat who caught the canary?
05:52
(laughing)
05:54
When Scorsese won his best directing Oscar
05:57
for "The Departed," his 2006 film,
05:59
I felt that it liberated something in him,
06:02
that some of the crazies that came out in "Shutter Island"
06:06
went on full blast in "The Wolf of Wall Street."
06:09
(footsteps)
06:11
It's one of the great outpourings of creative energy
06:19
from a director and from an actor in the history of cinema.
06:23
It's a story of greed as essentially
06:25
a form of original sin.
06:27
And Jordan Belfort has the unique skillset
06:31
to make that greed seem eminently desirable.
06:35
- Excuse me.
06:36
- Yeah.
06:38
- Is that your car on the lot?
06:40
- Yeah.
06:41
- Is it Jag? - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
06:42
- How much money you make?
06:42
- I don't know, 72,000 last month.
06:45
- You show me a pay stuff for $72,000 on it,
06:48
I quit my job right now and I work for you.
06:50
(door slams)
06:53
Hey, Paulie, what's up?
06:57
No, yeah, yeah, no, everything's fine.
06:58
Hey, listen, I quit.
06:59
What's more, the two sides of his character,
07:02
hedonism and a kind of consummate, slick professionalism,
07:06
come together in an absolute fury of destructive,
07:10
yet completely appealing energy.
07:12
And it's that very appeal that lends the movie
07:15
its heart of emotional and intellectual
07:18
and even religious authority.
07:21
(upbeat music)
07:24
(music fades)
07:26
[MUSIC]
Recommended
4:55
|
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