Tangled Up In Wires

2009 provided yet another year of great film performances. Trying to rank them was just too hard, so we just picked our top 10 (cop out, we know). Let us know what you think in the comments!

Jeremy Renner – The Hurt Locker
There are countless movies that show what “war does to a man,” but Jeremy Renner’s performance in The Hurt Locker stands out. With Renner’s portrayal as a bomb squad technician, you get the sense that it’s not the war that has made him crazy, but instead made him sane and feel actual emotions. In the end, it’s hard to what impression is to be made of him, as he borders between sympathetic, misguided, and obsessed.(M)

Christoph Waltz – Inglorious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino has created a lot of memorable characters over the years, but he claims Christoph Waltz’s extra evil Nazi Hans Landa as the best he’s ever written. Part of that has to be attributed to Waltz, who adds the necessary charisma to the character that makes him even more sinister. Nazis are so frequently played one way, but Waltz adds a unique twist to him that gave us teh best villain of the year. (M)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt – (500) Days of Summer
For all the bad parts about (500 Days of Summer), there’s a good thing, and in most cases, that good thing is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance. When the film slips into indie rom-com cliche, Gordon-Levitt brings it out thanks to his energy and general likability. With (500) Days of Summer, Gordon-Levitt suggested that he was maybe the heir to Tom Hanks, a likable guy that can flawlessly balance the lighthearted, rom-coms with darker, more dramatic material (Brick). (M)

Rachel Weisz – The Brothers Bloom
When preparing for her role in The Brother’s Bloom, Rachel Weisz had to learn how to skateboard, play guitar, rap, juggle, and do card tricks. For any other actress, this might have been a daunting task, but not for Weisz, who gives the movie a shine throughout. She is the perfect antithesis to Adrien Brody’s dour con man, and without her, the film would have been half as fun. Weisz doesn’t take many lighter roles like this, but The Brothers Bloom showed she’s just as good with those as she is the dramatic roles she made her name with. (M)

Max Records – Where the Wild Things Are
Child actors are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, but what stands out about Max Record’s performance is Where the Wild Things Are is a naturalism that’s rare for someone his age. Record’s probably benefited from being in a film set in a fantasy world, but he plays emotions so well that you forget the kids isn’t even in middle school yet. Being a kid can be just as strange and scary as being on an island with feuding beasts, and Record’s does an excellent job of conveying it. (M)

Michael Stuhlbarg – A Serious Man

For the Coen’s most personal movie to date, they shied away from the superstars they had been working with recently, instead casting an unknown stage actor as Larry Gopnik, a Minnesota professor put through a series of moral tests with no easy answers. Stuhlbarg perfectly balances the comedy and tragedy of his character, building a picture of a Job-like man questioning his faith and looking for sense in a senseless world. (J)

Peter Capaldi – In the Loop

Amid the ensemble of doofuses and intellectual lightweights that populate In the Loop, Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker stands out, not just as they year’s most brilliant comic invention, but the hurricane force that continually pushes it forward. His spiteful, profane, midlevel bureaucrat seems specifically designed to navigate the sea of dunderheads, as he pushes towards war, adding a subtle violence to the film that works perfectly with the military satire. (J)

Charlotte Gainsbourg – Antichrist

I’m no fan of Antichrist, but what little about it worked did so thanks to Charlotte Gainsbourg. Playing the cryptic, rapidly unraveling center of the film, Gainsbourg veers from frightened to crazy to frightening in a convincing way, never stopping and giving herself fully to the utter insanity of the role she was asked to play. It takes a bold actor to agree to be in a Von Trier to begin with, triply so with this one, but Gainsbourg pulled it off with heartwrenching panache, grounding the film long after Von Trier was interested in doing so. (J)

Nicolas Cage – Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Sure playing against type is a major accomplishment, but sometimes we underrate how great an actor can be when he or she is in his or her comfort zone. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans seemed like nothing more than a hilarious joke, but the film, improbably, worked, thanks primarily to a performance that represents the perfect marriage of actor and material. Nicolas Cage is at his unhinged, wild peak, putting all of his wacky idiosyncracies to use in a role where they actually feel like a natural, sensible development. His joy in unleashing the inner wild man gives the film an energy that keeps it from being a bland cop procedural or heavy trip into addiction. (J)

Matt Damon – The Informant!

Matt Damon’s character in The Informant! makes less and less sense to the audience as the film goes along. Yet Matt Damon digs underneath the surface and becomes Mark Whitacre, lending a verisimilitude to the incredibly unlikely story that Steven Soderbergh tells. Damon plays off of his costars extremely well (especially Scott Bakula and Joel McHale’s frazzled federal agents), but its his stream-of-consciousness narration, at times mindblowingly out of sync with the desperation of Whitacre’s situation, that makes Damon’s performance so special. (J)