One moment during this year’s Golden Globes left me misty-eyed. It was when an actor, long overlooked, took home a prize. Clearly, others in that glitzy hall felt the same, for they gave the actor a standing ovation. Everyone seemed happy he’d finally won. I refer, of course, to Sylvester Stallone, who took home his first Golden Globe: Best Supporting Actor for playing Rocky Balboa in Creed . He’s the reason I’ll be watching the Oscars on February 28 — he’s nominated, again, for Best Supporting Actor. Don’t ask me to explain it. It’s a generational thing. You have to have been around when the Rocky movies meant a big deal; you have to have that Bill Conti theme ringing in your head every time you decide to start gymming again. I feel an… affection for Stallone that I don’t for the other Supporting Actor nominees, whom I merely respect: Christian Bale ( The Big Short ), Tom Hardy ( The Revenant ), Mark Ruffalo ( Spotlight ), Mark Rylance ( Bridge of Spies ). If you tell me Stallone cannot do what the superb Rylance did in Bridge of Spies , then I’m just going to say, “And vice versa”. Besides, these award ceremonies aren’t always about who deserves to win. They’re also about whom you’d like to see win.
There’s another actor this year everyone would like to see win: Leonardo DiCaprio. I hope he does. I like watching him on screen. He isn’t a Great in my book, but he’s good and he’s consistent, as he’s proved in many films, even in ones like J. Edgar where he’s been hilariously miscast. My only major complaint with this actor is that he doesn’t act his age very often. For someone who’s just stepped into his 40s, his resumé is remarkably light on... light roles. Watch him cut loose in Django Unchained and you get a full measure of why he’s such a major star. He’s magnetic, he’s feral, he’s fun — he’s what people are when they’re the one per cent of the one per cent. DiCaprio is most inspired when indulging in some kind of caddishness. The Wolf of Wall Street . Catch Me If You Can . The Great Gatsby . Even Titanic, the movie that made Leo Le-ohhh!, had him play a grown-up version of the Artful Dodger. But in the heavy stuff ( Blood Diamond , Inception , Shutter Island ), his range shrinks, boxed between two settings: “earnest” and “worried.” He keeps frowning like he’s carrying the fate of mankind in that frown.
These aren’t bad performances at all, but you sense a sameness — and you sense the strain.
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But in Olivier’s time, one could still treat the cinema screen as an extension of the stage. The theatre/ opera director Richard Eyre, beautifully summed up Olivier’s performing style as “marked by high energy, a bravura romanticism and more than a touch of camp”. Hoffman, on the other hand, was a product of the post-Brando era, where it wasn’t just enough to put on a sad face; you had to remember the time you were five and your stepfather snatched your ice-cream cone away and your stepmother cackled as she squelched it in the mud. Suddenly, acting had transformed from embodying to…
But can you really blame actors, DiCaprio included, for wanting to externalise so internal a process? If you portray a writer who’s thinking, most people are going to think you’re just sitting there. But stick a cigarette in the corner of the mouth, keep a glass of whiskey at hand, clack away furiously at a typewriter — now you have something people can point to as a performance .
Matt Damon gave a superb performance in
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(The writer is The Hindu ’s cinema critic.)