International Herald Tribune
11-22-2005
Groups that hand out awards can be suckers for acting stunts, from Nicole Kidman's fake nose in ''The Hours'' to Adrien Brody's near-starvation for ''The Pianist.'' The tradition is so entrenched that Kate Winslet, playing an outrageous version of herself in the HBO series ''Extras,'' listed a surefire way to get that elusive Academy Award. ''Daniel Day-Lewis in 'My Left Foot?' Oscar. Dustin Hoffman, 'Rain Man?' Oscar,'' she says. ''Seriously, you are guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental.'' Irreverent, imprecise (the Day-Lewis character was not mentally troubled) yet essentially true.This season she might have added: playing gay. There has been an explosion of Oscar-baiting performances in which straight actors play gay, transvestite or transgender characters. Philip Seymour Hoffman melts into the role of the gay title character in ''Capote,'' while Cillian Murphy plays a transvestite in 1970s Ireland in Neil Jordan's witty, endearing ''Breakfast on Pluto.'' Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger play lovers in ''Brokeback Mountain,'' already better known as ''the gay cowboy movie.'' But big-name actors are leaping into such roles in smaller films, too. Felicity Huffman stretches way beyond ''Desperate Housewives'' as a man about to become a woman in ''Transamerica,'' and Peter Sarsgaard plays a gay Hollywood screenwriter who has an affair with a closeted, married studio executive (Campbell Scott) in the current ''Dying Gaul.''It's this cluster of sexually different roles that is new, not the idea itself. These actors are simply following the Oscar-winning path set more than a decade ago by Tom Hanks as a gay man with AIDS in ''Philadelphia'' and followed by Hilary Swank as the cross-dressing heroine of ''Boys Don't Cry'' and Charlize Theron, whose role in ''Monster'' was a kind of award-baiting triple-whammy: she gained weight, wore fake teeth and played a lesbian. The actors are straight as far as we know (give or take occasional Internet rumors). Our awareness of these nonfiction roles makes it easier for middle-class heterosexual viewers a group that does, after all, include most of us in the audience to embrace characters whose sexual orientations we don't share.This politically incorrect pragmatism aside, portraying gay, transvestite and transsexual characters allows actors to draw on a huge supply of gimmicks wigs and costumes, mannerisms of speech and posture that signify Acting. The transformation of the burly Hoffman is so complete that you might spend five stunned minutes thinking ''That's Philip Seymour Hoffman?'' only to forget very quickly that anyone is acting at all.The film is set during the early '60s, when Truman Capote was researching and writing ''In Cold Blood.'' Hoffman does more than impersonate the real Capote. The mincing delivery of his speech and the lighter-than-air voice become the character's brazen declaration of how special he is. He stands apart from mainstream '60s society not only because he is gay but also because he considers himself a genius, flaunting his wit and flashes of brilliant insight as flamboyantly as he tosses a scarf over his shoulder. It is all part of who he is.In a similarly brilliant turn, Murphy uses the posturing of his cross-dressing character Patrick Braden, who prefers to be called Kitten to make ''Pluto'' unexpectedly moving. The son of an Irish priest and his pretty young housekeeper, Kitten is left on the rectory doorstep as a baby and taken in by a foster mother who rejects him when she finds him trying on a dress. As an adult, Kitten's colorful '70s clothes and makeup are part of his attitude toward life. His favorite expression, a dismissive ''Serious, serious, serious,'' is the equivalent of Scarlett O'Hara's ''Fiddle-dee-dee,'' but his carefree pose is the disguise and defense of a character who finds life too painful, his need for love and acceptance too great, to take seriously.The film's style echoes Kitten's self-protective evasion of reality. He also has the bad luck to be in a disco when it is bombed, leading the police to wrongly arrest him and Kitten to ask one of the officers guarding him, ''If I wasn't a transvestite terrorist, would you marry me?'' The deceptively frivolous ''Breakfast on Pluto'' allows its audience to feel the profound emotions that Kitten spends his life trying to keep at a safe distance. Although we never forget that Kitten is a man and are not meant to, but we come to believe in this character so fully that we forget Murphy is playing him. It isn't necessary, and maybe from the awards angle not desirable, for an actor to disappear so completely into a role. ''Brokeback Mountain'' suggests that more conspicuous acting can be emotionally moving, too. As Jack Twist, Gyllenhaal appears early in the film standing with a hand on his hip, as if he's posing for a Gap ad; fortunately the male-model stance disappears, but it signals that of the two main characters, his is more comfortable in his own skin.Ledger's character, Ennis Del Mar, is the taciturn guy, the one who tucks in his chin and mumbles the few words he speaks so uncomfortable with his own sexual desires and so angry at himself for feeling them that he sometimes doesn't know whether he wants to kiss Jack or punch him.Given these contrasting styles, it's not surprising that after ''Brokeback'' was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival in September the Oscar buzz began for Ledger. His is the less naturalistic performance. We know that he doesn't always mumble and we never quite forget how much he's acting.And when Ennis's wife (played in the film by Michelle Williams), accidentally sees the men kissing and says nothing about it, she offers another way in for a heterosexual audience, as the character we can identify with most easily.''Transamerica'' is ostensibly about essential human relationships too: those between parents and children. Huffman plays Bree, a man living as a woman who, days before gender-reassignment surgery, heads from California to New York to find the now-grown son she fathered.When the two of them drive back cross-country, they visit Bree's parents and we see how the family dynamic has changed now that she's no longer Stanley. Despite the universal element of family, though, this modest film is really about Huffman's performance. She lowers her voice, wears conspicuous wigs and fake nails, and, as Murphy does in ''Pluto,'' allows the emotional reality of the character to show through that layer of deliberate artifice.''The Dying Gaul'' is similarly driven by acting, though in this case it's not nearly enough. Sarsgaard has the flamboyant role here, and he pushes it to the very edge of caricature. This psychological thriller daringly turns Sarsgaard's sympathetic character, who has been preyed on by the studio executive, into a lethal villain. But ''The Dying Gaul'' is done in by a claustrophobic style and a preposterous script. No acting trick, however energetic, can save it. Sometimes mannerisms are character, but sometimes a stunt remains a stunt.
2005 Copyright International Herald Tribune. http://www.iht.com
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