For this list we're gonna do something a little different.
Instead of looking at each pick and
category individually we're going to take them two by two, picking
each scent from either end of a particular spectrum in the hopes of finding something
in between because sometimes it's easier to trace a topic by it's boundaries.
And also because when you're been doing the same thing for for years,
sometimes you gotta shake things up.
These are our picks for the 10 best performances of all time.
(Music)
Let's start it off nice and simple, to get our two by two bearings about us.
For our first picks, we're looking at the most obvious axis of all, comedy to drama.
>From the absolute zaniest of silliness, to the heart-wrenchingist of tragedy.
>From the legendary comic turns of Leslie Nielsen in Airplane, Jack Lemmon in
Some Like it Hot, Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.
To these serious masterworks of Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood,
Betty Davis in All About Eve, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in Like Everything, Ever.
However, for our picks, we think you can slot pretty much anything between
Steve Martin's Nevin and Meryl Streep's Sophie from The Jerk and Sophie's Choice.
- God bless us Everyone.
- I need you like death.
You hear me.
- No, not death.
- He hates these cans (Noise).
Stay away from the cans.
- (Foreign).
- On the scale of patently absurd to life ruiningly real,
these two flicks pretty much make up the logical end points.
Both absolutely incredible works by all time greats at their best.
One is a highly controlled study in voice, emotion, expressions, subtlety and
suffering while the other is a treatise on timing, incongruity, and
staying just the right side of the line with histrionics.
To our eye the main differences appear to be twofold.
How deeply they commit to their role, and how they appear to experience pain.
Meryl Streep absolutely disappears into Sophie with some of the most honest,
vulnerable, and chameleon-like work she's delivered to date.
Whereas Steve Martin's performance is more of a thinly veiled mask.
And as far as pain goes, we watched Streep faced with probably the worst
pain imaginable, and see her appeared to actually experience that torment while
Martin is either hysterically exaggerating his pain or totally oblivious to it.
You might even combine these two factors into a single metric of comedy
dramaticness.
How genuinely an actor's performance manages to express pain from
Steve Martin to Meryl Streep to everyone else in the middle showing us how actors
manage one of the most human of emotions.
(Music)
For our next two slots we wanna look at the performances that
actually inspired this list.
Musing about the current best actor and best supporting actress races,
we were struck by both how incredible the competing roles in Fences and
Manchester by the Sea were.
And how incredibly different they still seem to be.
They are both dramatic, both deeply affecting.
Both grappling with immense pain that really seems to get down to their cores,
but Denzel's Troy is played nothing like Afleck's Lee,
just like William's Randy is worlds from Davy's Rose.
And upon a little reflection one of the biggest differences here is what
we might call the volume of their expression.
Denzel and Viola fill the theater with their acting,
projecting it to the back wall with full fledged voice and physicalization.
While you have to almost lean in and search for Affleck and
Williams to portray what's really going on in every scene but one.
Fence's acting is found in the swing of a bat whereas Manchester's is in the bat of
an eye, take a look.
- You talking about Jackie Robinson, Jackie Robinson wasn't nobody.
- I'm sorry Lee, he passed away about an hour ago.
- I been right here with you, Troy.
I got a life too.
I gave 18 years of my life to stand in the same spot as you.
- I don't have anything big to say.
- That's okay.
- Now do we really think two movies that came out last year are the capital B,
best versions of performances, both big and small.
I mean hell, instead of Denzel and Viola, we could have gone with Pacino in
Dog Day Afternoon, Tom Cruise in Magnolia, or Lee J Cobb in 12 Angry Men.
And instead of Affleck and Williams,
we could have picked Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary Married People, Holly Hunter in
The Piano, Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies or Emmanuelle Riva in Amour.
But if you haven't figured out by now that objective top
10s are the patently absurd lie we built our whole show on in order to try and
show you interesting ways to look at movies we love,
you're probably down there calling us names in the comment section already.
So we're talking about Fences and Manchester by the sea Okay.
One has a wash in the emotion of the scene,
while the other has a scrutinizing and impenetrable visage.
And what it comes down to is the size of the choices.
One has actors making choices that you can see from down the block while the other,
you need a map and a microscope to catch a trace.
But good performances to either or
both as long as they give us some incredible characters onto the screen.
(Noise) Another big difference in acting comes from the approach to script.
Some films and filmmakers allow their actors to deviate freely,
while others demand an almost biblical adherence to the text.
Some of the best improvisational performances, think Brando in
Apocalypse Now, and Gosling and Williams in Blue Valentine, and Bill Murray in
Caddyshack, tend to outline the goals and intentions of the actors while
letting them sketch out the specifics of how that is going to take place.
Where as the best script focused performances like Christoph Walz
in Inglourious Bastards, Jesse Eisenberg in the Social Network,
Rosalind Russel in His Girl Friday, and Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter
lock in the words that the actors say while providing them
room to play with what they really mean by those words, the subtext as it were.
And for our respective five and six picks,
we think some of the best examples of either end belong to Brenda Blevin
in Secrets and Lies and Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf.
- Shifty looking bleeder.
Walks like a crab.
Your tea's there.
- Ta. - Do you want a sandwich.
- And she walks into the modest living
room of a modest cottage modest Joseph Cotten set her up in.
- Are they married.
- Yes, they're married, to each other, Clark.
- Here are two examples of brilliant actors with wildly different source
materials, both crafting deeply complex, nuanced, and effecting results.
Blethyn's is a Mike Lee performance at it's best.
Best known for outlining a rough scenario and
then working with his actors to improvise it gradually into a final product.
And this sort of acting that finds brilliance in even the small
banal words of the natural and every day.
But on the far other hand, we have the virtuoso
Taylor wrestling with the highly precise language of Edward Albee.
Her lines are razor sharp and yet the way she wheels them is somehow sharper.
She managed to delve into the script to suss out all the complex layers put
there by the playwrite, and even add some that came from herself and
explore them inside each highly mannered syllable.
It's the difference between performances that focus on innovation of the way and
innovations of the how.
Between the two of them,
they span the entire realm of an actor's relationship to language while
already revealing that good performances can focus on it loosely or intently alike.
Next up at number four and three respectively.
We are looking at the scope of the role.
>From performances that glide along in easy terrain only to explode in to a singular
moment of brilliance,
to others that have been most impressive when considered as a whole.
Shifting and turning and
transforming internally to expose every possible facet of a single character.
It's the difference between Peter Lorre in M and Keaton in Annie Hall,
between Robert Shaw in Jaws'and Jessica Chastain in 'Zero Dark Thirty.
Between Peter Finch in Network and Jacob Tremblay in 'Room'.
One set let's out a burst of depth, like the breaking of a dam,
while the other takes a long and very journey down a every changing river.
And for these picks we're gonna with Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for
a Dream and Bobby Deniro in Raging Bull.
- Though I much, though I rather he would cheer when you dealt-
- Shut up.
Shut up.
I'll (Sound) take care of you later.
Shut up. - What have I got Harry, Hm.
Why should I even make the bed or wash the dishes.
I do them.
But why should I.
I'm alone.
- This one's a little bit of a fudge because there's no denying
both that Deniro's LaMotta has some incredibly explosive moments and
that Ellen Burstyn transforms herself in her role.
But their performances are each astonishing for different reasons.
Dinero is not just a red-blooded, hotshot he's a washed up,
sad shell of his own performance's former glory.
Compare that to Berstan's term,
which certainly tracks her falling into the depths of addiction, but
it's at its best for just three short real time minutes in a simple close-up,
when she gives a monologue about the dream she holds onto and the loneliness.
The comparative brilliance of these two performances is
an excellent reminder about the acting craft.
It can be about the forest or just individual tree there
is unforgettable work to be done at the macro and the micro scales.
And finally for our last couplet, we're looking at the spectrum of approaches to
acting, of acting strategies, of methodologies, of methods, you might say.
And one of these methods is the method.
Now when someone says method acting.
It usually calls to mind being crazy life imitating art tactics of overly
publicised and underly hobbied actors who starve themselves and
learn a new trade and send used prophylactics to their co-stars.
And in attempt do actually become the character But
the defining feature of method acting as we're looking at it is what we're going to
refer to as representational acting, internal acting, inside out acting.
Where an actor draws upon their imagination, or experience, or memory,
or preparation to create in themselves the emotional landscape of the character.
In order that this emotion will of its own accord express itself in the actor's
external performance.
By thinking and wanting and feeling like a character the actor will
believably seem to behave like the character.
As in performance like Jack Nicholson's in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest,
Adrian Brody's in The Pianist, Daniel Day Lewis's in My Left Foot, and
Angelina Jolie's in Girl, Interrupted.
This is as opposed to presentational acting, of outside in acting.
This older style emphasizes nailing the externals of a performance of getting
the what it looks like to be right.
In hopes that the emotional reality will spring from the physical reality.
Faking it till you make it.
Smiling until you're happy.
Crying until you're sad.
Most examples here tend to be either a little older or a little more British.
Bogart in Casablanca,
Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, Ian McKellen in Lord Of The Rings.
However, for our final picks we're giving it to Sir Laurence Olivier for
Richard III and Marlon Brando for A Streetcar Named Desire.
- I can add colors to the chameleon.
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, and set the murderous Machiavel to school.
- You must be Stanley.
I'm Blanche.
- You're Stella's sister.
(Music)
- Yes.
(Music)
- Hiya. (Music)
Where's the woman.
- I think there'll be six Richmond's in the field.
Five have I slain today instead of him.
(Music)
The horse.
Bella.
- Olivia's performance here is at the pinnacle of his work.
- Himself a master of the classical method, and
skeptical of the method method.
On Marathon Man, when Dustin Hoffman complained about staying up for three
nights in a row to prepare for a scene where his character was similarly sleep
deprived, Olivia famously replied, my dear boy, why don't you just try acting.
And while in lesser hands his style might seem dated or
affected, there is no denying its power and skill here.
And then, of course, there's Brando, student of Stanislavski's ideas by
way of Adler, he burst into the spotlight with his smoldering Stanley Kowalski.
Rough and unrefined and raw in all of the ways Olivier and
his contemporaries weren't.
He was improvisational jazz compared to a classical concerto, allowing his
instrument to express itself in whatever way felt natural in the moment.
Well Olivier dance virtuoso arpeggios up and down the carefully selected scale.
They couldn't be better or more different which is why there our picks for
the best performances of all time.
So what do you think.
Do you disagree with any of our picks.
Did we leave out any of your favorite performances.
Of course we did.
Otherwise this video would have been like eight hours long.
Let us know in the comments below and
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