BEST OF 2011: Supporting Performances
by Steve Dollar 
It's that most wonderful time of the year. No, not Christmas, Saturnalia or Festivus. Rather, 'tis the season for pundits to draw up lists honoring the best movies and performances of the year, give awards and have Twitter-fights about them as everyone anticipates nominations for the 2012 Academy Awards.
While perusing these surveys, it struck us that the past year was a remarkable one for supporting performances. Many already are racking up the trophies. Out of the blue, actresses such as the now-ubiquitous
Jessica Chastain (
Take Shelter,
The Tree of Life,
The Debt,
The Help,
Coriolanus) and Shailene Woodley (
The Descendants)?a former child performer breaking out at 20?already are winning notice, but there are also such presences as seemingly immortal as
Max Von Sydow, whose performance as a mysterious old man in
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has even inspired an
oracular Tumblr page.
To assist with horse-race handicapping and Twitter fights, I've assembled a shortlist of some of my favorite supporting actors for 2011.
Albert Brooks in Drive. One of the first meta-comedians, Brooks spoofed reality-TV before it barely existed in 1979's
Real Life, achieving regard as an astute director of social satires and as a handy character actor (playing the conspicuously sweaty schlemiel reporter Aaron Altman in
Broadcast News, he scored his first Oscar nomination). As the knife-obsessed villain in
Nicolas Winding Refn's psychological thriller, Brooks reveals a new, chilling facet of his talent. "The concept of Albert Brooks was really intriguing," Refn told us a few months back. "A) He'd never killed anybody before, or been a bad guy. B) The notion of what had happened to him in all those years. Bernie Rose, I mean, to be this gangster who became this movie producer who had to go back to being a gangster and he doesn't want to be." A win for Brooks at the Academy's big night would also guarantee a classic acceptance speech. As Brooks tweeted after claiming a pair of early prizes, "Was just told about N.Y.F.C.C. and
Spirit Awards! THANK YOU. I feel like
Herman Cain at a Dallas Cheerleader convention.?"
Patton Oswalt in Young Adult.
Charlize Theron's brilliant performance as a cracked swan in this Mean Girl vs. MIddle America dramedy has plenty of pundits talking Oscar. But how cool is it that she's upstaged by Oswalt's ugly duckling? As "the hate crime guy," he's the maimed and crippled reality factor who challenges the delusions of Theron's Mavis Gary while reaffirming her brutal assessment of her Minnesota hometown?usually when both of them are bombed on his homebrewed "Star Wars juice." As one of the
Comedians of Comedy, Oswalt's talent was never in doubt. But after a decade of playing second banana to
Kevin James on
The King of Queens, it's almost startling to see how good he is playing opposite the stunning (and likewise underrated) Theron. And he's never more or less than himself, raw and vulnerable enough to lace the dialogue with barbed wire, even more impressive as the film is a collaboration between those masters of glib,
Jason Reitman and
Diablo Cody.
Christopher Plummer in Beginners.
Mike Mills' (
Thumbsucker) sophomore feature is a tad problematic?too whimsical by half and overdetermined by the filmmaker's clever designer's aesthetic. But it's also a reminder of how charming movie-movie romances can be, and that it's perfectly fine to give in to the sentimental feelings that they evoke. There are two love affairs here, which mirror each other: Mills surrogate
Evan McGregor's on-again, off-again affair with an enigmatic French actress and, in flashback, Plummer's (as his art historian father) with life itself: coming out as a gay man at age 75, taking a younger lover and utterly blowing the mind of his son, flabbergasted that all this is happening even as the old man has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Plummer's performance is, indeed, flamboyant and bubbling, joyful and nutty, and even if you're the kind of person who thinks they're too cool for that, he gets to you anyway.
Ellen Page in Super. As an amped-up comic bookstore clerk with an unhealthy fixation on
Rainn Wilson's vigilante superhero The Bolt, Page delivers a crushing deathblow to her smug hipster incarnation as
Juno. Her oversexed, potty-mouthed and likely homicidal junior crimebuster?who transforms into Wilson's sidekick, Boltie?is the kind of deranged character movies could use a lot more of, and the sort of performance that wouldn't automatically call to mind Page's particular gifts as an actor. She made us all gushy.
John Hawkes in Martha Marcy May Marlene. The second Hawkes arrives onscreen, as the leader of a suspiciously creepy agrarian sex cult, your Inner Moviegoer goes "Oh, shit." At once seductive and sinister, the actor's Manson redux comes guised in utopian double-speak and predatory cunning. As with his turn as the intimidating Uncle Teardrop in last year's Appalachian drama
Winter Bone, it's the kind of character Hawkes seems born to define, wooing Elizabeth Olsen's fledgling (and soon to be runaway) recruit with
rustic, soulful folk ballads, but also drugging and raping her in a ritual initiation that exposes the serpent in the soul of a weedy, would-be redeemer. Bonus points for a small, if pivotal turn in
Contagion, which should have yielded some awards-talk for
Elliott Gould if he'd gotten more than an outsized cameo as a pathbreaking research scientist.
Pollyanna McIntosh in The Woman. I could say that the Scottish model gave the best single performance of the year as a cannibal wolf-girl turned suburban root cellar sex slave in Oklahoma indie-horror director
Lucky McKee's savage satire, but that would, of course, be disingenuous. What's not is to applaud McIntosh's grace and intellect in portraying a feral captive who embodies a brutal critique of Bush Era Americana and lights a feminist revolution of sorts with her fiery stare. Sure, she's hot?and more vulnerably exposed than a van full of mumblecore actors?but she'll rip your heart out and munch on it like smokehouse brisket. We've yet to see Meryl Streep do that.
Posted by ahillis at December 19, 2011 2:15 PM
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