Give the actor some

What’s a performance everyone thinks is bad, but you don’t?

We’ve settled into a Fun Fridays routine here, and I’m happy with it — it seems, from readership and response, to be popular, and at the end of a long horrible week of political insanity (as they all seem to be!) it’s nice to focus instead on the lively arts.

I hope no one takes that statement to mean I think politics is serious and the arts are not. First, as I’ve been saying for decades, art is more important than politics, though politics is within its narrow sphere absolutely crucial, which is why I’ve spent so much effort on it. (I was going to say “and where has it gotten me, and this country? harrumph,” but I actually believe people are catching on somewhat and pushback from cranks like me has been of help; no, don’t thank me, a simple statue in the park will suffice.)

But ars longa, and it refreshes the human spirit a lot better than the Congressional Record. I’ve always thought Bukowski had it right: Politics is like trying to screw a cat in the ass. At the same time, one can see in Bukowski’s work, without squinting or overinterpreting, a rich, humane, social and even political point of view — and probably a better argument for that POV than most straight-up “political” writers can make.

Anyway, in this far more pleasurable field, we’ve had a lot of Friday fun talking about personal favorites and especially how (to use the Gene Rayburn construction) “people think blank is great but I think it’s terrible” or vice-versa. Today I want to apply that formula to performances, especially in film, though if you have a relevant TV or stage equivalent knock yourself out.

There are some film performances that people just get a kick out of slagging. I understand. Everyone laughs at Tommy Wiseau in The Room, and they’re right to do so – though I’ll go to my grave believing that he knew the impression he was making all along.

But when I see a “bad” performance — one that seems out of key with what we expect from film actors — my mind almost always goes in a different direction: Maybe this actor, and the director who permitted this apparent atrocity, had something different in mind than the rest of us about what this performance was meant to convey.

Consider the naïve or just plain torpid actors in Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey and John Waters movies. Are they bad? Is Edith Massey a bad actress? How can you say so? My God, look at her, especially in “Desperate Living,” snarling at her go-go boy; the way she says “rabies” just slays me (“Could we spread that disease inexpensively?”). There’s no way you can convince me she’s not brilliant.  

We don’t have to confine ourselves to the demimonde. People have been ragging on Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza Doolittle for almost 60 years. Hell, the Motion Picture Academy gave Julie Andrews an Oscar mainly to let everyone know what a mistake it was to steal the role from her and give it to a woman who couldn’t even sing. (I’ve always thought this rather excessive display of affection toward Hepburn by Rex Harrison after he won the Best Actor Oscar was the My Fair Lady team’s effort to present a united front behind her — though knowing what a freak Harrison was I may certainly be wrong.) But to me Hepburn’s both charming and wonderfully artificial in the role, and I can’t imagine what a more authentic Cockney accent would have added to it.  

My go-to on the subject, however, is Tim Holt in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard even fans of the movie (one of the contenders, in my mind, for the Great American Film) say, in a shrugging way, that of course Holt is bad, or at least disappointing, in the lead. But I’m with Neil Sinyard: Holt’s George Minifer is “uncompromising,” in the sense that he didn’t mind looking petty and unattractive because George is petty and unattractive.

Clearly Welles is in agreement. “Georgie’s” fatuousness is treated as a joke at the beginning of the film, when he grandly tells Anne Baxter that his ambition is to become “a yachtsman.” But over time, neither Welles nor Holt lets up — because George, locked in a sick, spastic embrace with a dying way of life, gives them no reason to, and his persistence makes him even more monstrous and pathetic. I think of the dinner table scene where he says, in spite of Eugene, “auto-mobiles are a useless nuisance and had no business being invented.” Welles doesn’t even give George the courtesy of showing him saying this in close-up. When he is shown in seething reaction shots, he’s lit and shot to look almost flat — a living caricature.

As his flailings against the progress of time and society become more obviously ineffectual, George’s anger becomes more pinched and emasculated and his sorrow over the loss of his mother and his girl Lucy remains stubbornly childish. This probably convinces some viewers that Holt isn’t doing his job, but the opposite is true: He’s doing it so well that audience identifies the weakness of the character for the weakness of the actor. (At the end, when George gets “his comeuppance,” he is visually obliterated, as if when the town forgot about him he ceased, for all practical purposes, to exist. “Uncompromising” is indeed the word.)

How about you?