Over a long Editorial Retreat weekend, we got together away from the stress of the office to survey the acting achievements of Young Hollywood and selected the 10 best performances given by an actor or actress under age 30 in the last five years. We managed to settle on the 10 without the expected fuss--by Monday, only one person had been fired. Your favorite is not here, you say? What of it? This is our list. We asked Rebecca Morris to go watch the 10 movies and explain our choices to us and to you.
James Spader in sex, lies, and videotape
Not too many actors could reap either dry comedy or soft seductiveness, much less both, out of the line "I'm impotent." But James Spader, as the mysterious, masturbating voyeur Graham, who comes to town and changes everybody's life, including his own, in sex, lies, and videotape, succeeds in uninflecting his delivery of that pronouncement so charmingly that it sweeps Andie MacDowell and us off our feet. Previously known for nicely underplaying smarmy, arch young WASPs, Spader was hardly the betting person's choice to essay arty Graham, the passive eye of the storm in Steven Soderbergh's minimasterpiece (Eric Stoltz was reportedly first choice). But perhaps partly because he's so adept at portraying ooze and deceit, Spader is able to hint distantly, through the layers of reserve and hesitant candor he gives Graham, at the remnants of his character's dark past as a pathological liar. Spader manages to exploit the peculiarities of his own verbal cadences--he has always had arresting halts and glides to his speech--to build the vulnerable facade of a young man who has retired from the horrible job of being who he used to be, and hasn't solved the mystery of who there is yet to come. Spader takes off from the central idea of Graham--that he is a person closed off in a self-styled emotional cocoon--and finds just the right strategy for bringing dramatic shape to his existential passivity. That is more difficult than it sounds.
The sensitivity Spader invests his character with--he can make a smile advance and retreat from his features with singular suspense--provokes our fascination with Graham, and, to Spader's credit, our sympathy. Every performance in sex, lies, and videotape is first-rate, but Spader's is the most crucial, since we must find Graham appealing for the film to work--and Graham is, after all, a guy who videotapes women talking about sex and gets himself off watching them. For the sake of perspective, imagine James Woods in this role. None of Spader's work before or after sex, lies, and videotape has shown the same level of skill and intelligence; then again, none of the roles have called for it.
Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs
Foster's Best Actress Academy Award is the most deserved of all the accolades heaped on the intelligently constructed, but nevertheless overpraised, The Silence of the Lambs. Her performance is the single truly important thing about the movie, elevating it above the level of cheesy thriller. FBI agent-in-training Clarice Starling, a small female fish in the huge pond of male predators, is not your plucky gal of yesteryear. She's not just smart, she's brilliant; she's not just intuitive about others' feelings, but accurate about their criminal intentions; not just determined, but quietly unstoppable. What's more interesting is that Clarice is at least as screwed up as she is brilliant, and this is where Foster's performance brings intensity and poignancy to the character and the movie.
Hannibal "the cannibal" Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins with a merciless, scene-stealing creepiness from which only Foster, perhaps, could emerge unmugged) is the one who perfectly describes Clarice for us: "ambitious . . . not more than one generation from poor white trash," he says early on, and then later points out, "Your problem is you need to get more fun out of life." Foster creates a character whose complication is that she must reconcile the truth behind those two accurate observations.
Clarice is a woman who is permanently bereft from childhood loss. Her past invades her present consciousness with impunity, forcing her to constantly regroup and regain her emotional poise, a process Foster shows us with great precision in closeup. Clarice is also, however, fiercely intent on rising above mere unhappiness to a life of purpose, however grim. Our "successful woman" here is neither a Donna Karan-suited corporate lawyer nor a selfless doctor to the poor, but a frumpy stalker of serial killers who has far more to fear from within and without than glass ceilings, though she worries about them, too. "Scared at first, then exhilarated," is how the candid Clarice describes herself faced with horror, and this is exactly how Foster acts it, expertly turning the flinch into a virtual motif. Clarice is a downright peculiar heroine, constantly doing stomach-turning and/or spine-chilling things that are not made the slightest bit palatable by any bogus bravado suggested by Foster. Instead, the austere truthfulness and constrained emotional depth Foster builds into her characterization make us not only accept Clarice--a joyless, willful, fearful, brave young woman--but regard her, somewhat improbably, as an ideal.
No other actress in Hollywood has this kind of authority. By the end of The Silence of the Lambs, we the audience have the eerie pleasure of feeling for Clarice exactly what Hannibal Lecter does--love and respect.
Kenneth Branagh in Henry V
Yes, Kenneth Branagh was only 28 when he played Henry V, for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination. A few things set Branagh's achievement apart from the other performances on this list. First of all, in terms of acting style, he is very much the apple to nine other oranges, what with his British stage background and formal technique. But it's all just acting in the end.
The more important point is that Branagh was directing himself here, so we know he didn't just carry off this portrayal of Henry, he dreamed it up. Most important of all, Branagh had the best possible scriptwriter--it's one thing to have inspired dialogue to work from, and it's quite another to have Shakespeare's language and concept as the heart and soul of your characterization. Branagh the director does not dawdle with Branagh the actor, so each time he appears, Branagh the actor takes us right inside the mind of Henry--a tremendously interesting place to be, because Henry is just beginning to show the world, and confirm to himself, that he has transformed miraculously from libertine to moral warrior king. Branagh, possessed of a wonderfully musical voice, does not declaim in the "Shakespearean" manner. He draws down the level of theatricality to an effective cinematic pitch, stepping out only when he's after the big moments which then count all the more.
He begins by having Henry speak in a deliberately soft, restrained tone that holds within it the possibility of lethal wrath and provides the ground from which he can catapult to high emotion. Branagh uses Henry's relationship to emotion--showing us clearly which feelings Henry may allow himself to have, which feelings he may allow himself to show, which feelings he must generate in others--as the index of the king's emerging greatness. Branagh conjures up on his unconventionally appealing features Henry's public determination, optimism and courage and his private doubt, sorrow and loneliness. The tangibility of feeling in Branagh's performance is what gives this Henry V renewed, contemporary relevance, for it shifts our attention away from the play's clarion war cry--it chronicles the events of the Battle of Agincourt, a remarkable enough David-and-Goliath confrontation to fascinate a Quaker--to contemplation of the nature of leadership and the power of moral purpose.
For all this gravity, Henry V ends on a note of pure charm, at which Branagh excels, as Henry woos the French princess after conquering her father's armies. With clever comic self-effacement, Branagh apologizes for his non-leading-man looks: "The elder I wax, the better I shall appear. My comfort is that old age, that ill layer off of beauty, can do no more spoil upon my face, and thou hast me, if thou hast me, at my worst. And thou shalt wear me, if thou wear me, better and better."
Winona Ryder in Heathers
First of all, the precocious Winona Ryder of four years ago gets credit for having the nerve and intelligence to go after this role to begin with. She knew that the subversive, satirical and blackly humorous script for this film would indeed play on-screen and that she could play in it. So far, it's the best of the movies she's been in--and that includes Bram Stoker's Dracula, folks.
As the disgruntled Veronica in a band of hilariously vicious high-school cliquettes, the other three of whom are all named Heather, Ryder gave a performance that took her out of the screen corps of resonant, prepubescent ducklings and put her in a league of her own, as a smart, unexpectedly beautiful young woman sporting an unearned but charming irony. Hitting upon the perfect strategy for carrying an ultrasurreal girl-coming-of-age story, she plays Veronica as if she were just your average popular girl in a fairly realistic story about the vicissitudes of teen life. Ryder was perfectly aware of the filmmakers' concept, which was that only the blackest surrealism could get at the reality of teenage humiliation and despair. She knew that if she brought only a normal quantity of sneering, eye-rolling and glaring to the plot points it would all come off as fabulously weird and true. So, as Veronica gets happily seduced by the literally devilish Jason Dean (Christian Slater) and turns semi-wittingly homicidal, Ryder becomes increasingly believable within a revenge fantasy of deliberately increasing unbelievability.
The more outrageous the proceedings (Veronica and Jason knocking off one of the Heathers and two jocks), the more crucial Ryder's grounded performance becomes, and the more consistently she keeps us involved in Veronica's confusion and emerging strength of character. None of the actors in this film plays for laughs, which is why it succeeds in making us laugh, but the underlying sincerity in Ryder's performance is especially important because it is the key to the film's moral center (and, while making jokes about teen suicide, it does have one). Heathers sets out to redeem teen mentality in the only way possible, by mercilessly eradicating the sentimentality with which its fucked-up cruelties and quests are habitually viewed. Ryder's vanity-free, dignified take on her ridiculous, conflicted character--whose moment of triumph is to watch her ex-lover blow himself up--serves this purpose well and raises Heathers to the level of a minor classic.
Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy
This performance packs all the bigger a punch for being such a surprise. Most people who'd seen something in the loose, beautiful boy Dillon of Over the Edge and Tex had given up, after enduring years of films like Target and Kansas and The Big Town, on the idea that the "something" was ever going to translate into adult parts. Reportedly, Dillon had to lobby hard for the role of enterprising junkie Bob Hughes in Drugstore Cowboy, because director Gus Van Sant imagined an older Bob. Perhaps Van Sant suddenly saw that with Dillon as Bob, the weird inversions that make this opiate enthusiast so engaging were given an added kick. Unlike your average junkie, Bob is hardworking (ripping off drugstores), subject to God's law (if not Portland, Oregon's), and devoted to an upper-middleclass pastime (golf).
With Dillon in the role, Bob is also--counterintuitively--healthy, gorgeous, and infected with lurking goodness. In any case, Dillon comes out looking like perfect, inevitable casting in Van Sant's inspired film. He does one of the single best voice-overs (technical difficulty 9.9) in recent memory, at one early point intoning the virtues of pharmaceutical junk (". . . the drug would surge along until the brain consumed it in a gentle explosion that began in the back of the neck and rose rapidly until I felt such pleasure that the whole world sympathized and took on a soft but lofty appeal . . .") with a smacked-out, ghostlike zeal that strikes you as funny just as you realize how frighteningly accurate it is. And he has the hooded eyes of a psyche at half-mast down to a tee.
Dillon is not an actor one thinks of as having a lot of range, but here he certainly shows depth. His bold, superstitious, obsessive Bob is a full-color portrait of a deliberately grayed-down life. Dillon has convincingly calibrated the physical, mental and verbal speed of a junkie--something akin to vampire rather than human metabolism--and made this marginal way of life something we can relate to as well as be fascinated by. The authority of Dillon's performance allows the deadpan comedy of Van Sant's vision to work; it's the bizarre integrity of his one-track worldview that makes us laugh. Dillon's performance is also the key to the film's larger stakes: Bob's eventual conversion to the straight life would be a flatly unbelievable plot point if not for the vulnerability Dillon layers into the facial expressions of a character ostensibly bent solely on slavish attention to his own nervous system. The poignancy of Bob's unexpected capacity to change gives Drugstore Cowboy its vital counterpoint to hip comedy. In short, Dillon's performance is the brilliant engine of a brilliant movie.
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.