In Contention

Tag: Richard Jenkins

  • Rousing Best Actor race shaping up

    Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonIn a year I maintain to be disappointing, I must confess that the sprint to the finish is looking more and more exciting all the time, with an exceptional crop of actors vying for Best Actor nominations. This could very well be the year that Clint Eastwood wins an acting Oscar, or that the previously washed-up Mickey Rourke wins for “The Wrestler.”

    At this writing I have 12 actors who could potentially land in the field of play, though in fairness, four of the films have not been widely seen and I am going on the buzz and speculation within the industry right now.

    There seems to be a lot of belief that Richard Jenkins, a wonderful character actor who has been around forever, could land a nomination for “The Visitor.”  He came back into the public eye as the dead father in HBO’s critically acclaimed “Six Feet Under” and has been working consistently ever since.  This year he did a nice job as the heart and soul of the Coen brothers’ “Burn After Reading.”  If the studio can mount a decent campaign and keep him in the minds of the voters, he may nab a nomination.

    But he could easily be left out. Remember Michael Douglas in “Wonder Boys”? After the film’s November re-release for awards consideration helped him win the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for Best Actor, everyone was stunned when he failed to land a nomination with the Academy.

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  • Best Actor race looking tight as always — expect surprises

    Leonardo DiCaprio in Revolutionary RoadThe Best Actor category tends to be one of the more crowded categories come Oscar time, and 2008 looks to be no exception. To be sure, there are a handful of frontrunners as usual, but hovering behind them are another group, more than eight who could easily sneak in and nab a nomination. Last year Tommy Lee Jones was nominated for his powerful work in “The Valley of Elah,” a richly deserved nod, but completely unexpected by the majority of prognosticators.  I remember smiling when I heard his name read, but it was a huge surprise.

    I would expect something similar this year, as we have some of the great  actors and potentially stunning performances in contention.

    The obvious frontrunner at this point is Mickey Rourke, basking in the attention being given to “The Wrestler.”  His performance is nothing short of miraculous, an astounding piece of acting, and it is great to see him back in the fold.  But when it comes to winning the award, I have to say: not a chance. Rourke is intensely disliked in Hollywood.  He’s seen as someone who basically spit on the industry to walk away and become a boxer. As a friend close to Rourke said, “A lot of people were happy when he left and don’t want this guy back.”

    Frank Langella looks to be terrific in the trailers for “Frost/ Nixon.”  He has always been a great actor, better known for his stage work than film, though in the last few years he has become a formidable presence on the big screen. I remember seeing him as “Dracula” both on stage and on film in the late 1970s and hoped he would go far. He did, just not in the movies, until recently.

    Kris has Michael Sheen down as a lead actor possibility as well, and I agree. It’s one of those “Amadeus” situations where one performance cannot exist without the other. There is a strong chance that if the film and the actors are terrific, both of them will be nominated, though Langella certainly has the showier role of the two.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 performances you’re underestimating

    Every year it seems there are a number of performers in the thick of an Oscar hunt that don’t get the same attention as the expected heavy-hitters.

    It’s no surprise, of course, that Oscar prognostication would lean toward the anticipation of what lies ahead, unseen, unproven.  The mystery stays in tact, if for precious few moments.  But a number of nominated actors and actresses, year after year, tend to bank on the underestimation of the masses, allowing those heavy-hitters to fall by the wayside and provide just the opportunity they were waiting for all along.

    Here, then, is an attempt to shine a light on 10 stealthy contenders that seem to be flying low on the radar so far this season:

    Richard Jenkins in The Visitor10. Richard Jenkins, “The Visitor”
    At the moment, “The Visitor” star Richard Jenkins might seem like the obvious bet for a list such as this.  But with Overture Films planning an Oscar campaign for the character-actor-turned-leading-man and a year increasingly giving credence to smaller films, this gem of a performance from way back in the first quarter of the year could find room to make a move.  A prime DVD release date will keep the film fresh in voters’ minds and perhaps divert some of the attention away from the Brad Pitts, Sean Penns and Frank Langellas for a spell.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Burn After Reading” (*1/2)

    Focus Features' Burn After ReadingI really didn’t like “Burn After Reading,” but I laughed.  A LOT.

    I think the Coen brothers are probably the only filmmakers who can generate such a reaction.  The entire film is expendable.  It doesn’t even work on the grounds of slapstick, really.  It’s a series of events strung together, no point, no thematic ingenuity, a tapestry of…stuff.

    And that’s obviously the point.  The film willfully aimless.  Like J.K. Simmons says at film’s end, “I’ll be damned if I know what happened.”  And I stand on my chair and applaud the Coens for doing exactly what they wanted to do after the critical embrace of “No Country for Old Men” last year, because it takes balls to crank out (probably knowingly) your least accomplished film one year after what could be considered your most successful one.

    Only the Coens.

    The star of the film’s wacky ensemble is, without a doubt, Brad Pitt.  The actor’s age, however, pokes through sometimes, making his character oddly askew and somewhat…creepy?  But he takes the bull by the horns and rides this character for all it’s worth.  Chad Feldheimer is without a doubt Pitt’s most inventive creation since Jeffrey Goines in “Twelve Monkeys.”

    The rest of the cast is merely passable.  Frances McDormand gets the appropriate snorts as a superficial, middle-aged gym employee trolling the Internet for love interests.  Tilda Swinton is awkward as the stuck-up wife of John Malkovich’s disgraced CIA agent.  Malkovich provides plenty of laugh-out-loud moments but seems consistently aware that the story is spiraling out of control.

    Elsewhere, George Clooney is probably the runner-up for talent on display as he makes his way through a character addicted to sex in the most humorous and matter-of-fact ways, while Richard Jenkins kind of gives the audience something to attach themselves to as a life jacket in the choppy waters.  Kind of.

    But ultimately, the film is nothing more than a romp.  A harmless one, but a difficult one to qualify in any sense.  Enjoyable, yes, but hollow and lacking any ability to fully satisfy.  Not unlike eating large amounts of candy.

  • BEST ACTOR WATCH: Jeff Goldblum in ‘Adam Resurrected’

    Looking at the latest contenders to muscle in on an already crowded Best Actor field, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 1986 or something.

    First, the formerly washed-up Mickey Rourke rebounds with an apparently career-best performance in “The Wrestler” that is generating loud Oscar buzz.

    Now Rourke’s relative contemporary, Jeff Goldblum, is setting tongues wagging for another indie effort, albeit one with a much lower profile going in. As Holocaust survivor Adam Steiner in “Adam Resurrected,” the latest film from the ever-underrated Paul Schrader, Goldblum is attracting the kind of attention he hasn’t seen since, well, his career-making performance in “The Fly.”

    Writing from Telluride, where the film bowed, Cinematical’s Kim Voynar began beating the drum:

    Goldblum’s performance as Adam is complex and engrossing to watch, and while I can’t begin to fathom what it must have taken out of him to get inside this story and character to pull the performance off at this level, it’s truly a wonder to behold onscreen. The Oscar buzz circulating Goldblum’s turn in this film is far from hype; he educes the death and rebirth of a man’s soul in such a way that I’d be hard pressed to compare it to anything I’ve ever seen onscreen.

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  • Could a preemptive DVD release bolster ‘Visitor’ star Richard Jenkins in this year’s Best Actor race?

    Richard Jenkins in The VisitorAs you may have noticed, Anchor Bay Entertainment has announced that “The Visitor,” my mid-year pick for best film, will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on October 7th. I’ve long argued that films, especially very good ones, are bolstered in the Awards race by their DVD release and this could be a starting gun for this mid-year gem.

    Richard Jenkins, the lead actor in the film and its most inimitable aspect, is relatively unknown in the derby. While he’s appeared in more than 50 films (recently in “Step Brothers”), Jenkins hasn’t had much of a presence on the awards circuit. His only award nomination to date is an Independent Spirit Award tip for his role in “Flirting with Disaster.” He’s already picked up two awards for his role in “The Visitor” at Method Fest and the Moscow International Film Festival.

    At its peak, “The Visitor” was running in only 270 theaters across the United States. It stayed in general release for only 13 weeks, yet it grossed almost $10 million. Compare that, for example, to “The Dark Knight,” which was released in 4,366 theaters.

    In what I anticipate to be a competitive Oscar season, an early fall DVD release might be the great equalizer for “The Visitor” and for Jenkins, especially. To find his way into the final five for Best Actor he’s going to have to outpace Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jamie Foxx, Frank Langella and Leonardo DiCaprio — major names all around, with other contenders right on the outskirts.

    One thing that might go to Jenkins’s benefit is that he clearly gave the best first half performance. Mainstream publications like The New York Times ran feature stories about him, and, of course, the film received glowing reviews from critics. But as we all know from the dozens of independent films that receive similar recognition each year, early buzz and critical acclaim isn’t enough to push a film or its lead actor out in front.  It takes passion.  And the kind that lasts.

    Enter the DVD. Smartly released in October, will it give Academy members a chance to see it without having to sort through the hundreds of other DVDs that will arrive on their doorsteps in late-December and early-January? If they do, I suspect they’ll have the same reaction I did: Richard Jenkins gave one of the finest performances of the year.  And that might be enough to propel him into the final five.

  • The Guardian fires the starting gun

    No particularly new insights to be gleaned from this, but when a Limey paper declares awards season to be officially on, you know it’s here.

    Guardian writer Jeremy Kay glosses over the upcoming Venice and Toronto festivals, picking out some awards potential from the lineup. He begins by trumpeting the Best Actor chances of Mickey Rourke, rumoured to give a “standout performance” in Darren Aronofsky’s surprise entry “The Wrestler,” which I discussed yesterday. Elsewhere, however, Kay finds little to chew on in the lean American lineup:

    The Venice lineup of US entries is skimpy this year because the writers strike in the first quarter slowed down production. As a result the studios are holding back some of their big guns until later in the year because otherwise, well, they wouldn’t have much to get excited about come November and December. Mueller and his team previously announced that the Coen brothers’ dark CIA comedy Burn After Reading will open the event and, while an Oscar win for a comedy is about as unlikely as a snowstorm in July, it would take a brave pundit to bet against Joel and Ethan, who won three statuettes for No Country For Old Men back in February.

    Well, it’s a theory. Meanwhile, I’m quite confident to bet against the Coens – the Academy rarely feels obliged to reward newly-crowned directors for their follow-up efforts. (Just ask any number of recent winners: Sam Mendes, Ron Howard, Peter Jackson, Ang Lee… ) And “Burn After Reading” doesn’t exactly look like Oscar fodder. (Of course, neither, in a different way, did “No Country for Old Men.” Who knows what these guys like anymore?)

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  • Variety ponders the season at the mid-way point

    We’ve already been over what a thin year it’s been so far for Oscar candidates – or good films at all, for that matter. Now Variety has come to the same conclusion. In his mid-year awards-season study, Timothy M. Gray goes so far as to say that “the past six months have offered fewer potential contenders than any January-June period in memory,” and wonders if we’re seeing a return to the days when the Oscars were dominated by winter releases from the majors.

    Indeed, Gray only finds one title from the first-half of the year that he thinks has main category potential: Overture Films’ “The Visitor,” the prospects of which I discussed extensively yesterday. I’m not sure I’d boil down an entire half-year to a sole film (“In Bruges,” anyone?), but I agree that “The Visitor” has a real campaigning advantage:

    Keep an eye on Overture’s “The Visitor”: Lead actor Richard Jenkins has rightly earned awards buzz, but the film has many other virtues (Thomas McCarthy’s script and direction, the other performances, etc.). McCarthy, a talented actor in his own right, has crafted an actors’ movie — a character study with current-event concerns — that will play well on DVD, so late-year mailings could pay off.

    (Indeed, the more I think about the film’s position in the awards derby, the more it reminds me of a certain tiny spring release from last year: “Away From Her.”

    Looking forward into the rest of 2008, Gray ends up pondering most of the same questionmarks that we all are, including the following questions:

    Will the early buzz sustain for Disney-Pixar’s “Wall-E” and WB’s “The Dark Knight” and Heath Ledger?

    What effect will the Clint Eastwood double whammy — November’s “Changeling” and the December bow of Warner Bros.-Village Roadshow’s “Gran Torino,” in which he stars as well as directs — have on kudos? Similarly, Scott Rudin, who was in the winner’s circle with “No Country,” has two December openers — but will he have a third with “The Reader,” whose opening date is not yet set?

    Benicio Del Toro won Cannes’ actor award for Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” but will it find a U.S. distrib this year and, if so, in what form will the two-part film be released?

    And then there are … other questions. In the last few years, the song category has been dominated by tunes that were production numbers (as opposed to those end-credit or background songs). So does this bode well for Disney’s “High School Musical 3” and Focus’ “Hamlet 2”? (If the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” can win, there may be hope for the latter pic’s “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.”)

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  • Will Oscar have an unexpected ‘Visitor?’

    Richard Jenkins and Hiam Abbas in The VisitorAs you all know, we in the UK tend to be a bit behind the curve on most American releases, so I didn’t get to see Tom McCarthy’s wonderful “The Visitor” in time for our mid-year review. Had I done so, it certainly would have been in contention for my ‘best of the year so far’ title. (Happily, Blake recognised it in his contribution.)

    The film opens in the UK tomorrow (July 4 — an auspicious date for a film that challenges American ideals of liberty quite insistently) and, amid the summer movie crush, is getting a fair amount of publicity here, including this interesting piece in last weekend’s Guardian. Drawing comparison to such indie word-of-mouth successes as “In the Bedroom” and “Junebug,” critic Damon Wise believes that McCarthy’s gentle, wry but politically impassioned film could make a similar dent in awards season:

    Normally, articles about the Oscar race appear in late November, once the studios have dusted off their A-list movies. But almost every year when the noms come in, there’s a film that leaves everyone scratching their heads because it seems to have appeared from the ether: it’s the film that came out ages ago, got some good reviews but didn’t do so well at the box office …

    Today’s strangers arrive unannounced, and after the surprise appearance of In The Bedroom at the 2002 festivities, the industry now realises that there is no pattern any more: they can come from anywhere. Which, coincidentally, is, in some ways, the plot of The Visitor, a film that ticks several potential nomination boxes – it features a powerhouse central performance, it ponders on the flaws and foibles of being a so-called normal human being, it finds drama in the everyday – and it does it really rather well.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Stuck in the middle with…what?

    Since we’ve finally reached the midway point of 2008, it seemed as good a time as any to post the first “Off the Carpet” column since our year in advance take over four months ago.

    First and foremost, I’m in a unique situation this year.  Being in London since mid-May, I’ve found myself looking from the outside in on a lot of projects.  The UK generally has later release dates, meaning later press screenings.  And so, films like “WALL-E” and “The Dark Knight,” I won’t be commenting on them (and, therefore, won’t have an educated viewpoint on their Oscar prospects) until I’m back in the States in three weeks.

    In a lot of ways, it’s just like the old days (for those who remember the old, clunky Oscar Central stuff, or perhaps the sporadic columns at Oscarwatch (now Awards Daily).  I’m back in the position of fan first, commentator second in some areas, and it’s been a bit of a thrill, I have to say.  Especially in a year of Bat-hype nearly approaching the hysteria of the summer of 1989.

    But with that in mind, I also humbly recall that my Oscar-guessing mind was in a slightly better place back then, removed from the fray, having the true instincts of an observer on which to depend.  But all of that is beside the point.  The real question is, right now, half way through the year, which films have even laid a claim for film awards attention in the brutal season that will be here before we know it?

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