Top Ten Performances in the Last Five Years

Laura Dern in Wild at Heart

Granted, she had lines like "You got me hotter 'n Georgia asphalt" to launch her memorable performance from, but with or without that dialogue, Laura Dern becomes nothing less than a spontaneous force of sexual nature in David Lynch's underloved, weird-at-heart film about a gal and guy on the run. While technically a very different kind of actress than Jodie Foster, Dern brings the same fierce conviction to the roles she plays, and it is that conviction that keeps any hint of campiness from her creation of the out-there Lula. Dern has played two extremist Southern sexpots in the last few years, the second of which, Rose in Rambling Rose, won her an Oscar nomination.

Lula is the more beautifully daring performance. For Lula, Dern invented an intensely original, highly stylized physical dimension. Early in the film Lula stands in a brazenly erotic pose at the top of the stairs with her arm behind her head, elbow high in the air, as she talks to her mother, and this becomes a repeated emblem of an irrepressible sexuality that bursts through in whatever Lula is doing. Dern also manages to back up the bizarre stylization with believable emotion. Her conception of her character is so sure, and the realization so fluid, that the remarkable strangeness of it all is moving and pleasing. "The way your head works is God's own private mystery," her boyfriend says to her, and Dern makes her partner's line ring true. The best thing about Dern's performance is that Lula is one particular woman's idea of one particular woman's sexuality, not the reflection of that fictional Universal Male's wet dream.

Dern's ambition is not--and just how often is this the case?--to make every man in the audience want to fuck her, but to convince us that her boyfriend wants to and that she wants him as well. The amount of insecurity that had to be overcome in this achievement is something to contemplate. Wild at Heart is about, among other things, sexual complications in romantic love, and its darkest statement is also Dern's best scene: Playing one of the sleaziest characters ever to grease a movie screen, Willem Dafoe comes on to Lula behind her boyfriend's back, and she, suddenly victim rather than queen of her intense sexuality, responds to him. Dern's fear and horror, first at Dafoe but then at herself, is very disturbing and unusual and real. The movies are so conservative that the true strangeness of our lives is seldom dramatized or even suggested; Dern is an actress curious and capable enough to go after some of that, and talented enough to pull it off.

River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho

Here is one of the truly great Oscar-ignored performances, overlooked because it lies at the heart of a dauntingly idiosyncratic film by Gus Van Sant, one of the few directors to consistently offer rich, teeny-bopper-defying roles to young actors.

In Idaho, Phoenix plays an outcast of blackly hilarious and heart-breaking dimensions--his Mike is a homeless gay hustler who, as if he did not have enough problems (dubious parentage, distorted upbringing, poverty), is also narcoleptic, meaning he falls asleep spontaneously in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of turning a trick, or in the middle of the road. One is tempted to say that in any other young actor's hands this role would have been a mere conceit. Phoenix not only makes you believe in the impossible character, he turns Mike into a contemporary young Everyman, a Huck Finn too discombobulated to remember the Mississippi. He inhabits Mike so seamlessly you cannot detect the "acting." Phoenix's forte is introverted sensitivity, well displayed and Oscar nominated in Running on Empty, but as the ironically guileless (considering he's a hustler!), inarticulate Mike, he takes introversion to a near-implosion that is inexplicably eloquent. All the mysteries of how certain human beings, God's inadvertently faithful, keep going in their tortured lives are invoked by Phoenix's portrayal of Mike's patient, heartfelt bewilderment at his own circumstances. "If I had a normal family and a good upbringing, then I would have been a well-adjusted person," Mike tells his rich-kid friend and fellow hustler Scott (Keanu Reeves), who is living proof that Mike is dead wrong.

Then we get a hint of Mike's secret weapon against crushing odds--he can't figure them. "I don't feel sorry for myself," he says with soft earnestness. "I feel I'm well adjusted." This conversation takes place in the very quiet standout scene of the movie, in which Phoenix, raising Mike's hunched, eyes-averted, cosmic discomfort to expressive beauty, tells Scott he loves him--and so convinces us that he is indeed, in some skewed, miraculous sense, well adjusted. And Phoenix also convinces us he is the emerging anti-Pacino of his generation.

Lukas Haas in Rambling Rose

When Lukas Haas gave one of film's most luminous child performances in 1985's Witness, it was possible, as it is with most child performances, to credit the director (Peter Weir) with drawing out the magic rather than the youngster for creating it. But if it was not entirely clear in any of the many films he made after Witness, it became undeniable in 1991's Rambling Rose that Haas is a truly gifted actor. Much has been made of the work of the other actors in Rambling Rose--Laura Dern and Diane Ladd received Oscar nominations, and Robert Duvall was heartily praised--but it is Lukas Haas's pubescent Buddy that is both the soul of the picture and its most exceptional performance.

The entire story of Rambling Rose is framed as the grown-up Buddy's memory of the endearing, oversexed housemaid (Dern) who wrought delicious havoc on a progressive, eccentric Southern household. As the dangerously bright 13-year-old Buddy, who is overcome with fascination for all things gruesome, sordid or sexual, Haas had some free assets to throw into the mix of his character--namely, the gawky sudden height and cracking voice of his own hormonal shift. But Haas was also very knowing about how to play what remained of the boy in him; blessed with remnants of the same wide-eyed receptiveness seen long ago in Witness, Haas here lets a testosterone-driven curiosity blaze through the diminishing naivete. He has the relent-lessness of puberty's lust for experience down perfectly, from the quickness with which sexual content is detected no matter how covert, to the pure concentration of the eye at the keyhole, to the sheer awe that the power of sex elicits from the uninitiated.

Haas adds to all this the great gift of comic timing. The sequence in which Rose sneaks into Buddy's bed at night seeking consolation over her hopeless love for his father, and Buddy, astonished at this stroke of fortune, resolves to exploit the unbelievable opportunity, will undoubtedly become one of the enduring scenes of film comedy. Haas also weaves an extra thread through Buddy by making a few small bursts of teen irritability subtly convincing, so that we remember, even in the midst of this humane comedy, that adolescence is hell under the most pleasant circumstances. And underlying all, Haas builds into his performance, or perhaps allows to radiate out, a sweetness that is of the most uncloying variety, the kind that grows out of the compromises wrought between perversity and goodness within a sensitive adolescent.

Nicolas Cage in Vampire's Kiss

Nic Cage is one of the most gifted actors of his generation, and also its designated madman. Indeed, he is the madness in whatever is left of the Method these days. In almost every role he grabs, he plays a character who is interestingly and/or extremely fucked up. Fortunately, his gloomily elongated features, so amenable to comic exaggeration, are complemented by body language that conveys an improbable but palpable sexual edge that was first picked up by director Martha Coolidge when she cast the young Cage in Valley Girl, and then later exploited to happiest effect in Norman Jewison's sleeper hit Moonstruck.

Cage's combined qualities of the half-crazed and the romantically sexy made for the zip that took Moonstruck from the merely offbeat to the truly charming. None of this would have worked as well as it did if Cage were not a committed extremist, willing to take obvious assets into the chancy realm of creative distortion. The deadpan, controlled results of this nerve were best seen in Raising Arizona, in which Cage played an endearingly misguided young man for whom kidnapping is an act of devotion and stealing is just the best way he knows to build a nest egg. Cage's full-blown, speeded up tour-de-force dementia is on glorious display in a very funny, very obscure freeway smash-up of a movie called Vampire's Kiss. A vain, misogynistic, predatory New York literary agent, Cage's character turns out to be the prey on the night he picks up Jennifer Beals in a bar. As his character turns from legend-in-his-own-mind to vampire-in-his-own-mind, Cage acts out an expanding, fabulously mean-spirited psychosis that involves tormenting office clerk Maria Conchita Alonso in hysterical eruptions that bite political correctness right in the neck.

No one but Cage could make this funny, much less hilarious. Maybe the script instructed him to leap onto an office desktop to point and scream at Alonso with choreographed overkill, but such moments as his chasing her down the hall, wagging his head back and forth chanting, "Too late! Too late! Too late!" in response to her finally finding the unfindable contract he assigned her to look for--this is Cage with all the doors open. Cage's performances ultimately succeed because the feeling always comes through the excess; the tornado has a definitive shape.

Christian Slater in Pump Up the Volume

Christian Slater has been in more than the requisite number of bombs for a young actor favored by teenyboppers, and Pump Up the Volume is one of them. But this subversive little fantasy, like Heathers, another Slater film, failed at the box office not because it was schlock like Kuffs or Mobsters, but because it succeeded at bringing too much intelligence and hipness before teens who generally deserve the terrible films they pay for. Slater is the kind of movie star--and if he weren't an undeniable movie star, he'd be a goner by now--who is born, not made.

His best work proceeds from his good but unusual looks, his vibrant, distinctive demeanor, and his loud-and-clear sexual charisma, which simultaneously causes girls to put down their Barbie dolls and women to take up cradle-robbing thoughts. All those assets go down the tube regularly with would-be stars who can't act, but Slater can act and makes that evident with Pump Up the Volume. As an outsider high-school kid who turns by night into anonymous pirate-radio jock Hard Harry, inspiration to fellow alienated teens, Slater does the near impossible: He makes long, winding radio monologues fascinating even in voice-over; and he makes himself interesting on-screen as a lone talking head--with no one to play off of for what could have seemed like eons of screen time--in front of the microphone.

We are not talking Andrew McCarthy here. Slater has a strong, eccentric voice that can travel from rant to sigh with surprising ease, and he has a cool, self-effacing physicality with enough twists and turns to keep you tuned in. Hard Harry (his shtick is masturbation over the air) was a daring invention on paper and Slater took admirable risks bringing him to life, yet none of Slater's outrageous reaches read as actor excess. Early in the film, the camera pauses on a button that says, "Being weird isn't enough," which could easily have been Slater's philosophy in playing Harry. Harry's raps are savvy and original, full of lines that Slater slows down for--"All the great themes have been used up and turned into theme parks"--and delivers, though they are unmistakably the thoughts of a smart older person empathizing with youth today, as the authentic communiques of one lone teen to his invisible followers. Pump Up the Volume depends entirely on our belief that Hard Harry has the power to draw in his listeners and rev them up. Thanks to the range of frequencies Slater operates on in this role, we actually do believe it.

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Rebecca Morris wrote about Joel McCrea for our October issue.

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