Quotes of the Day
Naomi Watts -- 21 Grams
She's one of those girls in the back of the class, her nose buried in a book (so you can't see her beauty) or daydreaming (so you can't read her mind). And then, in a flash: prom queen! Star of the school play! Valedictorian or vamp! Likely Oscar nominee for 21 Grams! Her vault from nowhere to notoriety reminds you that anonymity is an ideal perch for looking at others, and into oneself. Nothing succeeds like late success.
At 35, Naomi Watts is not exactly a Gray Panther. But like the character she plays in 21 Grams — and like three other featured players in our ensemble: Paul Giamatti, Sean Astin and Shohreh Aghdashloo — she has been abruptly thrust into the spotlight after years of scrambling to make do.
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Watts has worked in movies for half her life, though the movies hardly knew it. Australia, where she moved from England when she was 14, exported half its acting population to Hollywood (including Watts' buddy Nicole Kidman), while she was left to play in Aussie soaps. Moving to California in the mid-'90s didn't land Watts starring roles, unless you count Children of the Corn IV and some TV shows. One of these was dumped by the network, and released to theaters as a movie: Mulholland Dr. ABC's rejection of the David Lynch pilot proved to be Watts' promotion from the back row. Playing a starstruck, recklessly curious blond, she led viewers into thinking they could trust her, then pulled a spectacular double cross. That was the flash moment, at the film's nightmare climax, that revealed the actress's cunning intelligence, her subversive allure. Watts could even seduce viewers into thinking she wasn't seductive.
Like so many actors bred in Australia, she has the gift of slipping into any character, any accent, and looking, sounding comfortable in it. She can play smart people in stupid situations, like the reporter walking into endless psychic booby traps in the hit thriller The Ring. This can't be a plate of supernatural baloney, the audience thought, because she's feeding it to us.
21 Grams has the narrative brazenness of Mulholland Dr. But this time it's for real. As a recovering drug addict who suffers a brutal shock, Watts must navigate between numbness and steely rage, mourning and the stirrings of a romantic interest that seems the worst form of betrayal. While co-stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro get to strut and spume, Watts has to implode. She does it with a heartrending delicacy and power. To watch her here is to see America grieving.
Watts can tunnel into her characters, but she can't hide her luster. In Hollywood high art, she's near the head of the class.
— By Richard Corliss
Shohreh Aghdashloo -- House of Sand and Fog
There is something inexplicably wounded in her eyes, something wary and frightened in the way she meets the world. As Nadi, Shohreh Aghdashloo, 51, is the delicate fulcrum of civility on which the hostility of House of Sand and Fog is balanced. She cannot avoid the tragedy that envelops her proud husband (Ben Kingsley) and a careless, clueless young woman (Jennifer Connelly) as they wrangle over the eponymous dwelling. But through her serene, subtle and heartbreaking performance, she does steal the film.
A promising actress, Aghdashloo fled Iran during the revolution of 1978-79, first for London, then Los Angeles. She virtually abandoned acting until she and her playwright husband founded a little theatrical company that tours with Iranian plays. The casting directors found her, and director Vadim Perelman's camera found in her the still center ("dignity, integrity and saving face in a most beautiful way," as she puts it) this intense movie requires. "Now that the American film industry has got to know me I might be able to do more," she says modestly. About that there should be no question.
— By Richard Schickel. Reported by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles
Wentworth Miller -- the Human Stain
Good looks, good school (Princeton), pretty good Hollywood job (in development). But Wentworth Miller wanted to test himself as an actor. Voila, good luck. He won a starring role in the mini-series Dinotopia. Then he read the script for The Human Stain, from Philip Roth's novel about a professor looking back in regret on having kept the secret of his identity as a black man. Part of the film would show the character 50 years earlier.
The story hit "too close to home" for the fair-skinned, mixed-race Miller, who had been accused of racism at Princeton when a satirical cartoon he drew of a Cornel West course was misinterpreted. "But the script spoke to so many relevant issues. I grew up on the outskirts of two different communities. Which one did I belong to? [My character] thinks that he belongs to no community and that he has to answer only to himself. He turns his back on the community that gave him so much. That is betrayal."
Miller, 31, says that to play a younger Anthony Hopkins, "I rented all his videos so I could steal pieces of his performances and layer them into mine." His own is quietly virtuosic, revealing the character's intelligence, ambition, brutality and solitude.
"This project spoiled me in the best way," he says. And Miller honored it. In a sterling cast, he held his own as a young man learning to live a lie.
— R.C. Reported by D.P.
Emma and Sarah Bolger -- In America
Child actor: that's an oxymoron. To know one's lines, to sell the sass of a sitcom gag, to know how to counterfeit tears, take after take, is to have put away childish things for the art of lying, grownup style.
So the Bolger sisters — Sarah, now 12, and Emma, 8 — have scored a double triumph in In America, Jim Sheridan's semiautobiographical drama of an Irish family's struggles in 1980s Manhattan. Are the girls adorable? Adoptable? You bet. Just as important, they bring two strong, wise children to beguiling life, and they do so without pushing the pathos or flirting with the camera. Sarah with her watchful poise and her precocious awareness of a family's wobbly emotional vectors, and Emma with her blithe energy, make the movie's Christy and Ariel seem like real girls. Which may be the subtlest kind of child acting.
The Dublin sibs were just 10 and 6 when they made In America. Emma, who was cast first (in her first movie), served as a tireless promoter for her older sister, who had been in a few other films. As Sarah recalls it, "Emma — she's a little devil — tugged on Jim's jacket and said, 'Great, I have a sister in the car.' Emma got me, and Jim asked, 'What age are you?' I said, 'Ten.' He muttered, 'Too young.' And Emma asked, 'Jim, can she just read the part?'" Christy was to have been 14, but Sheridan reconceived the role to fit Sarah.
At times, Sarah had to play stern mother to the director. On the second day of shooting, something went wrong, and Sheridan let loose a four-letter tirade. As Sarah recalls, "I turned around and said, 'Listen, Jim, can I see you in the corner for a sec?' I told him, 'It's O.K. to curse in front of me, I'm 10. But my sister's only 6, and that's rude, to curse in front of her.' After that, he toned it down a lot."
Emma, the one whose quick charm conquers you immediately, says acting "wasn't easy, and it wasn't hard either. It was a job. You went in, got it over with." But she plans to try it again "when I'm a bit older — 10 or 11." Sarah, the one whose sweet gravity finally steals your heart, says she can't wait to do another film. "Give me anything."
How about a little fame? In a Dublin restaurant recently, she and Emma were asked for their autographs. Sarah even created a new signature. "It used to be in bold letters. Now it's a light scribble."
The Bolger girls are already lovely young actors. Now they're teaching themselves how to be celebrities.
— R.C. Reported by Amy Lennard Goehner/New York
Sean Astin -- The Return of the King
Getting the one ring back to Mount Doom was a piece of Elven cake next to the task of making a nine-hour movie from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. If director Peter Jackson was the general, the actors were the foot soldiers. And for Sean Astin, who plays Samwise Gamgee, that meant fake feet — donning the furry Hobbit appendages at 4 a.m. for a chaotic day of shooting. "The volcano where we filmed, in the middle of New Zealand, was shale," Astin recalls. "So our prosthetic feet were constantly getting gouged and gored."
Physical pain was the least of it. "On a typical day," Astin says, "we'd rehearse a scene with Peter on one sound stage, then ride to another part of town and rehearse a shot with a second-unit director, then finish makeup, go back and shoot a piece of the first scene we rehearsed. Then in the cutting rooms they'd realize they didn't have some shot, so we'd go back and do stuff from a year earlier. You had to be totally nimble, willing and trusting. You did what the acting gurus profess: to exist in the moment, and try to be sure you're emotionally resonating with whatever the drama is."
Amid all this frenzy, Astin, 32 — the son of Patty Duke and John Astin, and a professional actor since he was 10 — managed to make Sam as coherent as he is endearing. In the first two films Sam was Frodo's devoted servant and comrade. But in The Return of the King, he is the true hero, the one creature who will not be corrupted by the Ring's power and who literally shoulders the burden of war by toting his master up the mountain.
Sam's fiercest moment comes when he leans over his friend, ailing and bearing the deadly Ring, and declares, "Come on, Mr. Frodo. I can't carry it for you. But I can carry you." The scene has evoked tears from strong men and yanked Astin into the awards limelight. Yet as much as he reveres Jackson, Astin believes the wrong take is in the film."I know the way I delivered the line was so much more powerful than what the audience sees. That was one of the great acting achievements of my life, and I feel only 20% is on the screen."
After LOTR, Astin took a slapstick holiday, playing with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates. He has started writing a book about his adventures in Middle-earth. "Through all the insanity," he says, "we accomplished this journey of 1,000 miles, foot by foot." Foot by tired, aching, hairy foot.
--R.C. Reported by A.L.G.
Paul Giamatti -- American Splendor
Paul Giamatti is the very definition of the phrase "working actor," the kind of guy who does small parts in big pictures and looks forward to doing big parts in small pictures. Ever reliable, never anyone's idea of a movie star, he has soldiered for Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan, played a character known as Pig Vomit in the Howard Stern biopic Private Parts and portrayed a cowardly orangutan in the remake of Planet of the Apes. So when he was approached to play Harvey Pekar in American Splendor, it seemed to be just business as usual — except that Pekar, the notably depressive writer of comic books about his grim life and glum times, was also going to be in the movie.
It was a novel and, says Giamatti, "intimidating" prospect. How many actors ever get to test their "interpretation" of a role against the real thing? But then he realized that the Pekar he was playing was "actually a character based on a character he had made of himself." Put simply, Giamatti didn't have to go looking for the real Harvey. It helped too that Pekar "seemed like he couldn't have cared less that they were making a movie about his life. It was like he came by for the free doughnuts and coffee," says Giamatti.
That's something Giamatti, 36, never does. He's shy and literally self-effacing as an actor but fiercely committed to his craft. Married with a young son, he's a bookish, family-oriented private-school and Yale graduate and the son of the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, once Yale's president and Major League Baseball's commissioner.
A triumph at Sundance a year ago, American Splendor is among the best-reviewed (deservedly so) movies of the year. Narratively splintered, full of hilarious, but homemade-looking special effects, it never sells out to sentimental uplift. Giamatti deftly walks the same line. He and Pekar share a physical resemblance — both are chubby, round-shouldered and balding — but he gives a performance that goes beyond mere impersonation. He infuses this cranky character with some of his own sweet tentativeness of spirit, giving Pekar an audience appeal that perhaps the more churlish original lacks. And he gives himself a problem. A self-confessed "escape artist," a master of submerging self in role, Giamatti is currently trying to escape the acclaim being heaped on him and his movie. Sorry, Paul, you've finally been found out — as one of the movies' best character actors.
— R.S. Reported by D.P.
- Richard Corliss; Richard Schickel