The Muriels: Best Supporting Performance (Male)
By Craig Kennedy - February 17th, 2009; 6:24 pm
Can you guess how tonight’s Muriel award turned out?
I suspect I’ll take a lot of crap since I didn’t vote for the winner.
My picks:
- Sam Rockwell – Snow Angels
- Javier Bardem – Vicky Cristina Barcelona
- Philip Seymour Hoffman – Doubt
- Eddie Marsan – Happy-Go-Lucky
- Brad Pitt – Burn After Reading
Read on for the results.
Hee hee, you’re an independent thinker, Craig.
I’m not surprised that even Muriel gave the award to Heath Ledger, but am pleased to see that Brad Pitt came in 2nd for Burn After Reading. He was a joy to watch in that movie and I’m glad he was recognized. And I’m happy that Muriel recognized my man RDJ. I know you didn’t like his movie. :-)
Also, I see you’re also putting PSH in supporting actor. Isn’t it arguably a lead role? Maybe people voted him in both categories among the Muriels, as with Casey Affleck last year.
There are no hard and fast guidelines for supporting vs. lead when it comes to Muriel acting awards, but I think in cases where a performer receives a lot of split votes, the tallies are combined.
I was pleased and surprised to see Brad Pitt in 2nd place as well.
Recently re-watched The Dark Knight and it reminded me that Ledger’s performance is my favorite of 2008 across any category. Glad to see Muriel make yet another excellent choice.
sartre, I agree that he really was terrific in the role.
As an aside Alison, I’ve been meaning to say that my wife and I really loved Let the Right One In. One of our favorites of the 2008 class.
Glad to hear that, sartre! It’s still playing here in NYC and I continue to recommend it to people. :D
The Joker was one of those rare career-defining performances; too bad it came at the end of a promising career. I’m with Sartre in counting it as a favorite, across the board, from last year.
Brad Pitt was also an inspired choice–the better of his two ‘08 performances and another bright spot in an otherwise dim category.
Some of the shine has come off Kirk Lazarus for me. When I think of Tropic Thunder, I remember an offensive/repulsive/stereotypical/blah Tom Cruise, Jack Black in his undies, and Ben Stiller sucking as usual. Downey was a refuge in an otherwise putrid film, but his performance feels tainted by his proximity to so many hacks.
Brendan Gleeson was great in In Bruges, but I consider him a co-lead with Colin Farrell.
I missed Revolutionary Road and 3/5 of your list, Craig, so I can’t really judge there.
I’m glad to see Bardem getting some mention. While most everyone was watching Cruz and Hall and even Johansen, Javier was delivering a very good, but in some ways thankless, performance.
I think Pitt’s role in BAR was good for him.
Oh — and snaps to Let the Right One In, which I’m pushing like Dilly Bars in August.
This time I’m with the crowd:
1. Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
2. Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder (I love that movie from top to bottom but he’s clearly the best)
3. Josh Brolin, Milk
4. Eddie Marsan, Happy-Go-Lucky
5. James Franco, Pineapple Express
My runners-up: Shea Whigham from Splinter (nobody else saw this, I guess), Brendan Gleeson, Michael Shannon, David Kross from The Reader, and Danny McBride from Pineapple.
How is Brendan Gleeson supporting in In Bruges? I think he and Colin Farrell were co-leads, and Ralph Fiennes is supporting.
sartre, very happy to hear you loved Let the Right One In. It’s my #3 film of the year. I was listening to the score just yesterday, it’s truly a thing of beauty.
And gosh, I have to agree, Ledger was peerless as far as I’m concerned. But I like seeing Javi from VCB. He’s such an effortless actor.
So, Craig. Did you not vote for Ledger because of something about his performance, or because you wanted to let other actors get some love, or because you’re just an incorrigible contrarian?
JB, my reasons are convoluted and not altogether sound. I was actually a little embarrassed when I looked back to see how I voted.
There was a bit of spread the love mentality, a bit of incorrigible contrarianship, a bit of falling just short of everyone else’s TDK enthusiasm and still being a little cranky about it, and a bit of a nagging curiosity about how much real life events have colored people’s feelings about the performance.
Plus, I think actors who play psychos or the handicapped have an unfair awards advantage over those who create ordinary human beings.
If I did my vote all over again, I’d drop Marsan without even thinking twice about it and I imagine Ledger would take his spot.
“Plus, I think actors who play psychos or the handicapped have an unfair awards advantage over those who create ordinary human beings.”
They certainly are juicy roles, particularly when the actors have brilliant dialogue.
All I can say is that by my recent second viewing of TDK the shock/sadness about Ledger’s death had softened and the character was very much a known quantity to me. Yet I was completely dazzled by what Ledger did, finding pleasure in even the small decisions he made about animating his facial expression in certain ways and how to flavor his language with subtle shifts in its timing and emphasis.
Can’t wait to see Let the Right One In again. It’s look, feelings, and story have stayed with me. I need to check that soundtrack out Dorothy. Sadly, I haven’t yet seen VCB and what I know are its celebrated performances.
I agree that Ledger’s performance, since he’s not playing a ‘real’ human being, is somewhat opaque and doesn’t really open any insights into human behavior or plumb the depths of emotions.
He’s still pretty damn impressive though.
K., I figured that Farrell was the primary protagonist, with the bulk of the movie centering on his actions and arc, that he was the lead and Gleeson was supporting. But I can see how it could be a gray area.
Marsan is a great pick – not necessarily worth to be dropped. Of course I didn’t pick him but that’s beside the point.
Ledger was my #1, obviously, since I wrote about him. But I was the only one to vote for Michael Ealy (Miracle at St. Anna) and Patrick Wilson (Lakeview Terrace), probably because three people in America saw those two movies.
At this point, a loss for Ledger on Sunday night would truly have to be considered the greatest upset in the history of the awards. This would a complete shock to the system, wouldn’t it? I would say Slumdog shouldn’t even be in the same conversation as Ledger as far as “locks to win” are considered.
It’s hard not to be impressed by someone breathing new life into a character that’s so well known and been so flamboyantly played previously. Yet Ledger doesn’t play him straight or play him radically differently from the Joker of both page and screen, he simply stylizes the Joker’s cunning and psychosis in a very new and exciting way.
It’s reminded me a lot of Alan Moore’s take on the Joker from The Killing Joke: not completely crazy, fiendishly calculated, and always unpredictably dangerous.
The Joker isn’t a living and breathing character but he is an excellent vehicle, as was Chigurh, for stimulating thought about moral reasoning. When a character makes their psychopathic logic seem almost rational and darkly seductive it can bring the counter-arguments and sentiments – our generally held core values, those mediated by emotions such as empathy and compassion, into sharper focus. I think that creative desire fitted the hawkish Bush era zeitgeist exceptionally well.
I really like your take on the Joker as conceived by Ledger and his collaborators, Joel. Emphasizing his efforts as a stylist were spot-on.
I believe, quite adamantly, that if Ledger were with us today, he would still be a lock come Oscar night. Who would defeat him, Josh Brolin for Milk? Robert Downey, Jr. in Tropic Thunder? I loved them both but Ledger’s portrayal of unbridled, living and breathing psychopathology would have become the frontrunner seven months ago whether or not he left us with such untimeliness, and the truth is nothing else emerged to mount a considerable challenge for the remainder of the year. To this, one can add the Brokeback Mountain “make-up” factor (though few believe he was truly robbed by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s win) and universal praise for his incarnation of The Joker as other reasons he would be a rather secure winner if he had not died thirteen months ago.
Weren’t Rockwell and Bardem (and Hoffman for that matter, but that ship sailed long ago) leads in their films, though? Again, I realize these categories are not guided by completely concrete criteria.
Yeah, Alexander, my take is that they count as leads but the subjective gulf between lead and supporting is obviously wide indeed, if our comments on these various categories is any indication.
I also agree that Ledger would be winning this award were he alive or not. It’s a dazzling performance, especially in light of the rest of the field (good, but no one else truly lit up the screen like that in any category).
I think I ought to point out that even if I want to be cranky about it, Ledger’s performance was among the most purely entertaining of the year and whatever else you think about acting, that’s surely worth something.
sartre, although I think there’s a bit more flesh and blood to Ledger’s Joker than the methodical narrative machine that is Anton Chigurh, I’d have to agree that TDK’s screenplay and Nolan’s direction keeps him at an emotional arms length. Even my favorite shot of the film, the Joker taking the air from a careening squad car, doesn’t really offer a broader reading of the character than the rest of the portrayal.
Curious that these kind of performances owned this category two years in a row.
Wow, there’s some nice writing in this thread, guys, all round. I’m too tired to add anything coherent, but I will say I agree Ledger would own this category even if he were alive. I’ve seen the film four times now, and the performance very much holds up to scrutiny and after the haunting chill of the tragedy dissipates. One of my pet peeves is when people penalize a film or performance or whathaveyou for what the external reaction has been to it; sometimes backlash can’t be helped, of course, but whenever possible I like to evaluate art on its own merits, not on whether it’s star died, or it made too much money, or has been overpraised or has whiny fanboys or the lead threw a telephone at someone. That stuff fades, but the artistry, at whatever level the camera recorded it, remains.
Comparing the Joker and Chigurh, I’d say that Anton still comes out on top as a character, if for no other reason than because he had a notch more variance in what he was asked to do by the screenplay – Ledger’s Joker was never put into a position of true weakness and humility as Chigurh was at the end of No Country
True weakness and humility isn’t something I associate with the murderous near automaton psychopathic Chigurh. Are you referring to his temporary disadvantage after the car wreck? I thought he handled that with the same calculation and flat affect he showed throughout.
I thought there was a crack or two in the facade, the revelation of what was behind the flat affect, which was my point – maybe I overstated it. And not just in that scene, but in the self-surgery scene from earlier, which reveal a cruel killing machine, but one that’s still a man underneath. While Ledger’s Joker remains in control of every situation he’s in, from beginning of the movie to end, even when his plans fail*, and we never really see any other nuance to his persona, making him a notch less psychologically ‘real’ to me.
Of course, considering that this is DC Comics’ The Joker and I’m complaining about his relative lack of psychological verisimilitude, it starts to become a slightly silly argument.
* – lone exception, the delayed hospital explosion – and my single favorite moment in the film.
Contributing to the through-line of Jeff’s thesis, I’d say that Anton was placed where Ledger’s Joker never was–confronting the merits of his own “system” or “code,” such as it was, directly, as when Carla Jean points out that he is in control of the situation, not a coin. Interestingly, Sartre and I had quite a fascinating discussion about this in the comments section of my review for The Dark Knight. (And of course, the Joker says he’s an agent of chaos, meaning he is supposedly free of any “system” or “code.” So it’s a difficult comparison to make.)
The Joker actually prevails in the philosophical debates he has with his enemies, such as Batman and Harvey Dent. Which was actually one of my absolute favorite elements of The Dark Knight.
I didn’t see much that was genuinely real in either of them. But they were wonderful creative devices, and representatives of amoral thinking. For sure, Chirgurh had to contend with physical vulnerability. And he may have been slightly discomforted – though I think even that’s likely too strong – by Carla Jean challenging his logic. But nothing she said changed his cold-blooded decision to kill her.
The only passing moment of disquiet for the Joker I can recall was when the people on the boats didn’t blow each other up and confirm his confident thesis about regular humanity.
Yeah, but even that was only a minor speedbump, and the lead-in to his final feat (subverting Harvey Dent). They were both cartoon supervillains, but I can believe Chigurh existing in the real world, but not this Joker, not quite.