Entertainment

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I'm Richard Brody. I'm a film critic at The New Yorker, and today I'm gonna talk about the best performances of the 21st century. I'm gonna highlight American performances today. Maybe the chance will come up soon to talk about international ones.

Number five is Mahershala Ali in Moonlight. What he does with his character and with his bearing in embodying this character sets the tone for the entire film.

[dramatic orchestral music]

Feel that right there? You in the middle of the world.

Ali plays the role with a wry, sarcastic, yet involuntarily vulnerable undertone. It's almost as if he's whispering, murmuring the role of Juan.

My mama. She do drugs, right?

[birds chirping]

Yeah.

[footsteps falling]

Yet at the same time, Ali's very presence is commanding, decisive. It's as if throughout the entire film, not just the first sequence, even when he's absent, his power dominates the entire movie.

Number four is Miranda July in The Future. She actually plays two roles in her movie. In one of them, she lends her voice to the character of a talking cat. But what I'm most enthusiastic about is her performance as Sophie, a 35 year old dancer, who feels that her best creative years are on the verge of slipping away, and that she needs to seize the day, take control of her life.

Well, 40 is basically 50, and then after 50, the rest is just loose change.

Loose change?

Like not quite enough to get anything you really want.

Oh, God!

As a dancer and even more as an essentially creative and imaginative person, Sophie has a kind of obsession with a shirt she calls Shirty, and when she has an affair with a man she meets by a strange series of coincidences, she creates a dance with, for, and because of Shirty.

That is, for me, one of the most profound and moving moments in the modern cinema.

[melancholy music]

Miranda July, well, she's a great writer, but it's her balletic grace. It's her performance as a dancer in her own movie playing the role of a dancer that, for me, makes this movie transcendent.

Number three is Anna Paquin in Margaret. Paquin stars as Lisa Cohen, an Upper West Side teenager. Lisa inadvertently causes a bus accident in which a woman is killed, and soon, this case takes over her life.

The entire point of the lawsuit was to get the guy fired so he doesn't kill somebody else.

Lonergan writes and directs the movie as a city symphony, filling it with the grand passions of urban life, and Paquin handles the intricate dialogue that Lonergan crafts for her with a deft, almost a rope dance-like precision that nonetheless is filled with the energy that expands to fill the city as the images do.

I think you're very young.

What does that have to do with anything?!

If anything, I think it means I care more than someone who's older because this kind of thing has never happened to me before.

No, it means you care more easily. There's a big difference.

And Paquin invests this character with a precocious authority and a preternatural sense of command that makes it one of the great teen performances in the history of cinema.

Number two is Helena Howard in Madeline's Madeline. The character of Madeline is a theater prodigy who has a significant role in a major theater company in Manhattan. Yet this very advanced young actress is also dealing with the regular problems of a teenager.

[kissing smack]

[Date] Where are you going?

Goodnight.

Are you goin' home? I mean, can I get a kiss without the hair in it?

[Madeline laughing]

The movie pivots on the relationship between art and life, between creative drive and personal problems. It's as if the continuity between Helena Howard as a teenager off screen, and Helena Howard as a prodigious young actress on screen is itself the essence of the dynamic that Decker captures in the movie.

Evangeline is gonna-

[liquid splashing] [Regina gasping]

And what Howard does as an actress in the life of Madeline and in the stage presence of Madeline reminds me of the great Gena Rowlands, who in John Cassavetes' film Opening Night, delivers the most remarkable performance of acting on stage in a movie that I've ever seen.

My hand! [screaming and wailing]

[Madeline sniffing]

This troubling, unsettling, ambiguous dynamic between life onstage and life offstage, between family life and creative life gives the movie, and above all, gives Howard's performance a terrifying power.

The best performance of the century is by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, which for my money, is also the best film of the century so far.

[lively big band music]

Do I look like the cat who caught the canary?

[people offstage laughing]

When Scorsese won his Best Directing Oscar for The Departed, his 2006 film, I felt that it liberated something in him, that some of the crazies that came out in Shutter Island went on full blast in the Wolf of Wall Street.

[Jordan and Mark pounding and humming]

[whistling] Yeah. [Jordan chuckling]

It's one of the great outpourings of creative energy, from a director and from an actor, in the history of cinema.

It's a story of greed as, essentially, a form of original sin. And Jordan Belfort has the unique skillset to make that greed seem eminently desirable.

[Donnie] Excuse me.

Yeah?

Is that your car on the lot?

[Jordan] Yeah.

[Donnie] it's a Jag? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How much money you make?

I dunno. $72,000 last month.

You show me a pay stub for $72,000 on it, I quit my job right now, and I work for you.

Hey, Paulie? What's up?

No. Yeah, no, everything's fine.

Hey, listen, I quit.

What's more than two sides of his character, hedonism and a kind of consummate, slick professionalism, come together in an absolute fury of destructive, yet completely appealing energy.

And it's that very appeal that lends the movie its heart of emotional and intellectual, and even religious authority.