>> Speaker 1: A good character is one that changes.
But what makes a hero develop and how does he or she grow?
Let's take a look at some of cinema's best emotional journeys with our picks for
the top ten best character arcs of all time.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: [NOISE] Let's
take a look at one of the most basic character arcs there is, becoming a hero.
Wherein a decidedly non hero person grows to unleash their inner hero.
Then when faced with difficulty and evil an inner light shines through.
Like Luke Skywalker and Sarah Conner and Ellen Ripley and Neo.
Characters who made like
that Hercules song you're about to have stuck in your head.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: However we'll feed our need for complexity by
handing this slot to Kikuchiyo from Seven Samurai.
[SOUND] [FOREIGN]
Kikuchio begins as a false samurai,
a tag along with an oversized sword and a forged family tree,
a triangle on a banner of circles.
He's rejected by the samurai but won't be shaken off.
But by the end of their mission Kikuchiyo has proven himself their peer,
and earned an honorable burial.
And the arc to get there is fantastic.
There's a pitting of pridefulness versus self sacrifice,
of noble dreams versus their difficult realities.
All set against the backdrop of a peasant's orphan past.
And while his lack of discipline costs lives,
his eventual self sacrifice redeems him.
Tragically, as the samurai he always wanted to be.
Next up at number nine,
we wanna honor films that put their characters through the wringer.
And force them to learn lessons about how to be better.
This is the moral art.
The journey that turns a scoundrel into a saint or
at least something a little closer.
This founded on the assumptions that deep down human nature is essentially good.
And then if a character fails morally enough and
is punished by the world in the process, they will learn a better, happier way.
Think Phil Connors from Groundhog Day.
Ed Norton in American History X.
A little bit of Oscar Schindler from Schindler's List and
Terry Malloy from On the Water Front.
Darth Vader makes a big turnaround in Return of the Jedi, but
for our number nine, we preferred Jules' arc from Pulp Fiction.
>> Jules Winnfield: Do you read the Bible, gringo?
>> Ringo: Not lately no.
>> Jules Winnfield: Well there's this passage I got memorized, Ezekiel 25:17.
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by
the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.
Maybe it means you're the evil man and I'm the righteous man.
And Mr. Nine Millimeter here,
he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness.
Or it could mean you're the righteous man and
I'm the shepherd, and it's the world that's evil and selfish.
Now, I'd like that, but that shit ain't the truth.
The truth is
you're the weak and I am the tyranny of evil men.
But I'm trying Ringo,
I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd.
>> Speaker 1: In a movie that is so popularly non linear it is perhaps
the straight forwardness of Jules' arc that is so surprising.
Chronicling a number of his encounters with violence that serves to
convince him to give it up.
First he murders, then he's miraculously spared,
then his partner accidentally kills an innocent man.
Then two robbers hold him at gunpoint and
force him to decide between killing them and sparing them.
He chooses the later and perhaps it is divine intervention or
a moment of clarity.
But Pulp Fiction does a wonderful job of walking us quietly through his
revelation by parts on his way to becoming a righteous man.
Somewhere half way between becoming a hero and
growing in moral character is the reluctant hero.
They don't want to be a hero, they don't want to sacrifice.
They'd rather look out for themselves, and their self interests.
But their self interest is eventually confronted by an inflexible inner moral
strength.
And it is the moral strength that prevails because they were a hero inside all along.
This is Han Solo and Jake Gittes, it's Private Trip from Glory,
Wiesler from The Lives of Others and our number eight pick,
could it be anyone other than Rick Blaine from Casablanca.
>> Rick Blaine: I just sometimes wonder if it's worth all this.
I mean, what's your fighting for?
>> Speaker 5: You might as well question while we breathe.
If we stop breathing we'll die.
If we stop fighting our enemies the world will die.
>> Rick Blaine: And what of it?
It'll be out of its misery.
>> Speaker 5: You know how you sound, Mr. Blain?
Like a man who's trying to convince himself of
something he doesn't believe in his heart.
>> Speaker 1: When we first meet Rick, he wants nothing less than to be a hero.
He'll settle for businessman or loner or hell, even a drunkard but not a hero.
However, it's not in the cards for him.
And as time goes by, we learn that he wasn't always this way.
He used to be a patriot, a freedom fighter, risking his neck for the cause.
But he got his heart broken and decided the world might not be worth saving.
But it takes the same woman who broke his heart to soften it.
And we get to watch gleefully as he reveals himself to be the hero he tried so
hard not to be.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: Sometimes it's not so much something that needs to be learned or
gained or taught as something a character is holding onto that they need to let go.
Kevin Spacey builds to a breaking point in American Beauty, Gene Dealman has had
enough in that movie we talked about last time that I couldn't pronounce.
And Adam Sandler overcomes something big in Punch Drunk Love.
Joaquin Phoenix in The Master, Fassbender in Shame and Micky Rourke in the Wrestler
all set out to change their nature and seek redemption of some sort.
But for our number seven, we think that Jack Nicholson as Bobby Dupea in
Five Easy Pieces takes the proverbial cake.
>> Bobby Dupea: I don't know if you'd be particularly interested in hearing
anything about me.
My life, most of it doesn't add up
to much that I could relate as a way of life that you'd approve of.
I move around a lot, not because I'm looking for anything really but
cuz I'm getting away from things that get bad if I stay.
>> Speaker 1: The role that proved Jack Nicholson was a star,
Bobby Dupea is a fantastic character portrait of an upper class-born
classical pianist who has given it up for a life of oil work and slumming.
But when his sister tells him his father has had a stroke he heads back home,
resentfully dragging along his girlfriend before hiding her in a motel.
He gets home, falls in love, gets rejected, gets in a fight, and
tries to talk with his father who can't say a word or won't.
So he does the only thing that's left, he walks away.
We're not quite sure where he's going but he's reached his breaking point and
decided to leave it all behind.
Whatever life he had before he's given it up now and
is no longer the same person for it.
Sometimes arcs happen in tandem.
Two characters grow and change and evolve not just in a vacuum but with respect for
each other in their relationship.
We're not talking about the traditional rom com part where love blossoms and
we realize the other person was all we ever wanted anyways.
No for this slot we're more interested in films like Blue Valentine,
Scenes From a Marriage and the Before trilogy.
But we're sticking with Linklater and
his portrait of an entire family through time with Boyhood for our number six pick.
>> Speaker 7: You know what I'm realizing, my life is just gonna go like that.
There's series of milestones, getting married, having kids, getting divorced.
The time that we thought you were dyslexic.
>> Speaker 1: We missed the train on when Boyhood became so popular to hate upon.
But don't worry, we picked up on it when we let you know it was one of our 50
favorite films in a recent list.
And let's set aside whether it's a good film or a great film or
an unwelcome dog turd of a gimmick on the front lawn of cinema for just a minute so
we can look at how its characters evolve.
For all the emotional growth an actor can do on screen in a typical
three month span, there's nothing like actual time to really kick it up a notch.
And when you put four of them together, pinging off each other and
changing in response, you watch as parents wound each other, build households in
their own ways and re-marry, affecting their kids who react themselves.
Grow up, test their independence, and force their parents to change in turn.
And you end up with a living, breathing, dynamic picture of a family unit.
But character arcs aren't always quite so arc-y.
Sometimes they look a little more like an unwavering line.
One of the fun things about the expectation that all characters will
grow is that it can be immensely powerful to subvert the expectation and
serve up a character that doesn't.
Think Young Adult, or American Psycho.
Or Taxi Driver or The Searchers or Memento.
No, for our number five, we're going with Alex De Large from A Clockwork Orange.
>> Alex: I was cured, all right.
>> Speaker 1: A Clockwork Orange's central question is one of change.
Can a violent nature be changed through forceful means, and
if it can, should it be?
And after torturing Alex with the Ludovico technique, until he's sick at the thought
of violence, Kubrick seems to think it might not matter so much.
Because while the entire plot is focused around getting this violent
criminal to change his ways, in the end he ends up exactly where he started.
With the same impulses, thoughts and mischievous grin,
arced full circle, right back to the beginning.
At a certain point we must all face our mortality.
Films have put characters through this last and
hardest of tests to many different results.
It's a Wonderful Life and Persona track characters deciding
that they don't want to face death, while Amore, Grave of the Fireflies and
Schenetady, New York all watched their protags either shrink or
grow when faced with this slowly diminishing day.
However, for our number five,
we think that Wild Strawberries is an absolute
masterpiece of character in the face of death.
>> Speaker 9: [FOREIGN]
>> Speaker 1: Wild Strawberries is a road trip film in more ways than one.
In the literal sense, an aging doctor,
Isak Borg takes a trip with his daughter in law to accept an honorary degree.
But along the way, the journey leads him on a tour through his dreams and
memories and an untangling of who he really is and how he came to be that way.
And in so doing, to confront his impending death.
It is the psychological journey of a man in his self reckoning in his final act.
Beginning in a place of guilt and resolving itself in some small amount of
solace and acceptance, Wild Strawberries is as brutal, painful, beautiful and
honest a portrait of the twilight hours of life as was ever shot.
Closing in at number three, we have the rise to power.
The journey a character takes from average, content man or
woman to the great heights of strength and power.
And often the corruption and violence that comes with it.
Zero Dark Thirty does this subtly, A Prophet does it beautifully, and
Rise of the Planet of the Apes does it animal-y.
But for our number three, it would be criminal not to recognize
Michael Corleone for his ascent to the family throne in The Godfather.
>> Michael Corleone: What are you gonna do?
Nice college boy?
They wanna get mixed up in the family business?
Now you wanna gun down a police captain, what,
cuz he slapped you in the face a little bit?
What do you think this is, the army where you shoot him a mile away?
You gotta get up close like this, badda bing,
you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.
>> Speaker 1: From saintly war hero to family leader of quiet cruelty,
Michael's transformation is a cinema legend.
It is the slow, seductive corruption of a moral man.
Dragged to his father's bedside by an assassination attempt and
into the family business in the process, his story is the opposite of Jules'.
Attempt after attempt at the lives of him and his family wear away at his moral
fiber until what's left is the most ruthless and powerful man in organized
crime and probably the greatest rise to power put on film.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: [NOISE] Counting down to number two is our last pick's Jungian
shadow, the descent into madness, depravity and death.
The characters following this arc show us our greatest fears about ourselves.
That we may fall and fall and fall and
learn that there is no rock bottom on which to land.
These character arcs come from Amadeus, Eight Millimeter, the Deer Hunter, and
Chronicle.
>From Black Narcissis, I Live in Fear, and the takes on Macbeth from Polanski and
Kurosawa.
Kubrick's The Shining is this arc to a T.
But we've already got a Nicholson on our list, and
besides we'd rather spend this slot talking about Gena Rowlands,
Mabel Longhetti from A Woman Under the Influence.
>> Speaker 11: She's climbing walls and breaking dishes, screams.
Mabel's a delicate, sensitive woman.
>> Speaker 12: Mabel's not crazy.
She's unusual.
She is not crazy so don't say she's crazy.
>> Speaker 1: Gena Rowlands was nominated for Best Actress for her role here and
more than deserved it.
Her performance is one for the ages.
In the beginning, Mabel is perhaps just a little strange but what follows
is one of the most brilliantly acted unravellings in the history of cinema.
It is not quite as extreme as other breakdowns that lead to
homicidal rampages or other such insanities.
But it is certainly one of the best traced with painful details the entire way down
to a six month commitment and beyond.
Most terrifying of human truth is that as we grow so must we some day perish.
And often the very key to our undoing is that same seed from which we grow.
So for our number one slot we called this the rise and fall.
This is Barry Lyndon, Scarlett O'hara and TE Lawrence.
It's Jake LaMotta and Henry Hill and Jordan Belfort and Ace Rothstein.
Are you seeing a pattern here?
They are all brilliant and incredible character studies.
But for our number one pick, we've got to go back to the OG of character epics.
The one rise and fall to rule them all.
Orson Welles' titular Citizen Kane.
>> Speaker 13: If you could have found out what that Rosebud meant,
I bet that would have explained everything.
>> Speaker 14: No, I don't think so.
No.
Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it.
Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get or something he lost.
Anyway it wouldn't have explained anything.
I don't think any word can explain a man's life.
No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle.
Missing piece.
>> Speaker 1: Citizen Kane is a study in character arcs.
A journalistic dissection of a titanic man.
An investigation into how someone became exactly who he was in all his forms.
Child, leader, magnate, politician, husband, failure, recluse.
Loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, a man who tried
desperately to prevent its release, Citizen Kane is Orson Welles' masterpiece.
Crafting a monument to a American Icarus, flying too high and lending
proof to Fitzgerald's claim that there are no second acts in American lives.
The scope is enormous and the execution is masterful as it connects its
every turn to its central spine, tying its beginning to its end.
Practically writing the book on how to create a good character arc,
which is why we think it's the best of all time.
Of course, character arcs get a lot more detailed that this, but
this should get you started.
So who did we leave out?
Did you disagree with any of our picks?
Let us know in the comments below, and be sure to subscribe to more Cinefix video.
>> [MUSIC]