The Screengrab : david hare

That Guy!: Jonathan Pryce

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Almost as deadly for an actor as a face made for radio is a style made for theater. An actor who is thought of primarily as a stage presence will often be considered either too overblown and theatrical for film, from years of playing to the back row, or too subtle and mannered to have the kind of dynamic charisma one looks for in the image-intensive medium of motion pictures. Occasionally, though, a highly praised stage actor breaks through in film and establishes himself as the class of his field, and if Wales' Jonathan Pryce lacks the good looks and intensity of a Laurence Olivier, he has at least managed — largely due to his longtime association with the troubled, talented director Terry Gilliam — to become one of the most skillful and reliable character actors working today. A veteran of RADA (on an acting scholarship) and the former artistic director of the celebrated Liverpool Everyman Theater, Pryce's stage credentials are impeccable, but he's also a stalwart movie veteran who's appeared in everything from James Bond movies (he played the main villain in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, opposite Pierce Brosnan) to summer blockbusters (he's been the Don Knotts-esque governor of Jamaica, Weatherby Swann, in all three installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise). But despite these occasional gestures at superstardom, he's most at home assaying highly distinctive and memorable character roles, even imbuing his occasional lead performance with a nervous energy and sublime competence that comes straight out of his theatrical training and perfectly feeds into his on-screen persona.

Pryce (the son of a Welsh shopkeeper, and originally named Price; the reason for the name change is murky and doubtless irrelevant) still keeps extremely busy with stagework, and even his big-screen roles maintain elements of the theatrical: one of the few times he broke away from his normal roles as precise and deliberate, almost timid, characters is when he played Argentine strongman Juan Peron opposite Madonna in the 1996 big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. But despite the moneymaking blockbuster roles he takes, and the occasional foray into television work, he still wins his highest praise for independent or 'little movie' screen work, and in 1995, he received what he's described as one of the highest honors of his storied career, winning the Best Actor award at the Cannes film festival for his sensitive, powerful and emotional portrayal of British novelist Lytton Strachey in director Christopher Hampton's little-seen Carrington. Recently, Pryce got the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream and portray Sherlock Holmes on British television, but he's been taking less work recently to spend time with his family. He'll be appearing (as the president of the United States, no less!) in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie, although his devotees are much more excited about next year's My Zinc Bed, where he'll be playing the lead in a new David Hare adaptation. Pryce just recently turned sixty, and with a few more choice roles (and, well, a few less G.I. Joes, he's still got a good chance at following in Olivier's footsteps as a Grand Old Man of British cinema.

Where to see Jonathan Pryce at his best:

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1983)

Though it wasn't the breakout role that would come his way two years later, Pryce's performance as the sinister Mr. Dark in this spotty but entertaining adaptation of a Ray Bradbury novel is incredibly compelling. As the proprietor and ringleader of a curious and somewhat menacing circus that comes to visit a small town, Pryce strikes a perfect balance of sophistication and terror; throughout his entire time on screen, it's hard to take your eyes off of him, and he swills Bradbury's ripe dialogue around in his mouth like a fine wine, making the moments when he loses control all the more effective. A stunning performance from a nearly forgotten film.

BRAZIL (1985)

The movie that really thrust Jonathan Pryce into the public eye was his performance as the hapless and ultimately hopeless Sam Lowry, best described as Winston Smith with even more British repression. It would be the first of many collaborations between Pryce and Terry Gilliam, and while it made quite clear the reasons why he wasn't cut out to be a typical romantic lead, it was a brilliant piece of acting, aided and abetted by the clever and theatrical scripting of Tom Stoppard. Gilliam and Pryce would work together several more times, from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to The Brothers Grimm, but it would never be this magical again.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

As the terrified and uncertain would-be real estate investor James Lingk, Jonathan Pryce not only gets the chance to act in one of the most powerhouse ensemble casts in recent memory (including getting to play the majority of his scenes off of Al Pacino at the very last moment in his career when he did any actual acting, as opposed to just yelling at things), but he also played the unusual role of the film's moral center, getting to act like a normal human being among these amoral Type-A monsters. Curiously enough, Pryce went on to play Shelley "The Machine" Levene -- portrayed here by Jack Lemmon -- in a London revival of the David Mamet play.

Forgotten Films: "The Designated Mourner" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Mike Nichols really doesn't direct movies that often, so maybe it's not so surprising that whenever he does unwrap a new film, such as Charlie Wilson's War, the critical response tends to run from polite to rapturous, the occasion treated in the media as a serious cultural event. (Even Regarding Henry inspired thoughtful meditative pieces exploring the question: what heavy object might have fallen on Mike's head?) But for some of us, the real puzzler is, why doesn't Nichols act more? He made his name doing revue sketches with his old partner Elaine May. Elaine May doesn't act much, either, but she seems to be a far less social creature to begin with, and between her appearances in Enter Laughing and Luv in the 1960s and her most recent on-screen role, in Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks in 2000, she has done enough — turning up with some kind of almost-every-ten-years regularity — to keep the movie world aware that she has a corporeal form. Nichols, on the other hand, has in the course of his career taken exactly one on-screen acting role in a feature film. It was a doozy, though — the title role, which is one-third of the cast, of David Hare's 1997 film version of Wallace Shawn's play The Designated Mourner.

Having chosen to be exclusive, Nichols also went out of his way to make his big starring debut in a project guaranteed to be seen by as few people as possible. In terms of potential mass-audience appeal, The Designated Mourner is not an ingratiating work in either its form or its content. It's a theater piece written for three actors, who never interact; they deliver their accounts of how the world fell apart in long monologues delivered straight to the camera. David de Keyser plays Howard, a distinguished literary figure and political thinker; Miranda Richardson is his daughter, Judy; and Nichols plays Jack, her husband, an English professor. The main action that the characters describe is the collapse of their country (America? Maybe.) into a thugocracy, a fascistic police state that uses the threat of a revolution by a communist guerrilla movement said to be taking root. The government sees Howard and the world he represents as the enemy — the "elitists" — and members of that world, friends of the central triumverate, have begun disappearing and being jailed and executed. Though Howard and Judy rail, in their elegant, cultured way, against the government repression, they're just as likely to be targeted by the lower-class guerrillas, who don't like elitists either. The joker in the deck is Jack, who is assumed by the members of Howard and Judy's circle to be in staunch sympathetic agreement with them about everything, including Howard's magisterial saintliness. In fact, he confesses to the audience, he has never felt entirely comfortable around Howard and resents the standards that Howard and Judy, just by their own conduct, have always seemed to be demanding that he live up to. When the changing tide of the country forces him to adjust to a less cultural exalted way of life — by basically wiping out "highbrow" culture through a climate of fear and the systematic extermination of its more dedicated adherents — Jack has to admit that he finds himself happier, under less pressure. He takes on the identity of the "designated mourner" for that culture because there's no one else left — he is the last person, he says, who can understand a poem by John Donne — but whatever remorse he may feel over the loss of Judy, he wouldn't really have things back the way they were.

How are we supposed to feel about Jack's confession? Elitism and John Donne aren't cool subjects to be defending these days, and the Howard that we see is indeed both an admirable man of principle and more than a bit of a stick. At the same time, Jack, whose plea for the unambitious, unoffending pursuit of basic, self-interested modest enjoyment of one's time on earth, is a monster, even if he sometimes sounds not so different from Wallace Shawn himself, in My Dinner with Andre, saying that he'd rather sit at home reading Charlton Heston's diaries and sipping a cup of cold coffee than head out to reinvent theater in a Bavarian forest. (in live performances of the play, Shawn has often played Jack.) It's a disturbing, ambiguous role, and Nichols seems to embody it down to his flesh tones. (Jack keeps his soft-looking, pale, doughy hands in view, as if he enjoyed reminding you that for all his whining, he's never done an honest day's labor in his life.) As a text and as a piece of staging, The Designated Mourner has none of the show biz pizzazz that made Nichols phenomenally successful directing in both movies and the theater, but something in this weird little play must have spoken to him very deeply: both he and Hare are credited among the film's producers, and if it remains his only extended piece of screen acting, it'll serve an important function in determining the way he's remembered after he's gone. Future biographers looking for clues about what it was like to be in the room when Mike Nichols was there will turn to it, and see the director of The Graduate and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? talking about how liberating it felt to place a book in the bathtub and shit on it.

That Guy!: Wallace Shawn

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"Squat", "toadlike" and "bespectacled" are not the first three adjectives you want on the list when you're building your movie star résumé. But That Guy! isn't about movie stars. It's about character actors, B-listers, stock-in-traders — and Wally Shawn is one of the best. Best imagined as the guy who gets parts for which Bob Balaban is simply too macho and charismatic, Shawn suffered perhaps the ultimate indignity when, playing Diane Keaton's ex in Manhattan (his movie debut), he was described as a "homunculus" by none other than Woody Allen, himself not entirely lacking in homuncular qualities. Still, the son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn has managed to carve out a decent Hollywood career playing nebbishes, losers and schnooks — while simultaneously building an eminently respectable career in New York as an insightful, volatile playwright whose work is intelligent, fiercely political and often controversial. Harvard-educated and terrifically well-informed, Shawn has written opinion pieces for The Nation, interviewed Noam Chomsky, and produced a widely-read translation of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, all while appearing in Hollywood fare ranging from Clueless to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. His distinctively nasal, high-pitched voice has made him a natural for animation, and he's provided memorable voice-overs as Rex the dinosaur in the Toy Story franchise and Bob Parr's insufferable boss in The Incredibles. Only a few of Wallace Shawn's outstanding plays have made it to film; while a David Hare-directed version of The Designated Mourner (perhaps his finest work) was made in 1997, it was seen by precious few people, and his most popular script, Aunt Dan and Lemon, remains unfilmed. But as an actor, Shawn has endeared himself and his ungainly appearance to thousands of people who know nothing about his off-Broadway existence.

Where to see Wallace Shawn at his best:

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981)

The movie that put Wally Shawn on the map — and gave him his first and last leading-man role to date — was made at a time when he was still known only as the author of some well-reviewed plays in New York. Louis Malle's filmed adaptation of a number of actual conversations Shawn had with his friend Andre Gregory, who has been the director of a number of Shawn's plays, turned out to be a surprise hit, proving that there was a bigger audience than previously suspected whose idea of a good time was watching two overeducated Manhattanites argue about whether or not an electric blanket is morally defensible.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987)

Wallace Shawn's best-known role is as the not-so-masterful criminal mastermind Vizzini in Rob Reiner's beloved adaptation of William Goldman's The Princess Bride. It is here that he gives new meaning, or lack thereof, to the word "inconceivable," and gets to play straight man to Andre the Giant in one of Hollywood's oddest comic pairings. (Shawn claims that he played the role of Vizzini perfectly straight, since he lacks a sense of humor. That claim in and of itself would seem to suggest otherwise.)

VANYA ON 42nd STREET (1994)

A meta-referential film that is both an adaptation of Anton Chekov's Uncle Vanya and a movie about making that adaptation (and making the movie about making the adaptation), Vanya on 42nd Street is one of the most successful blends ever of film and theatre, thanks largely to its explosion of talent: aside from Wallace Shawn in the title role, it features great performances from Julianne Moore as Yelena and Brooke Smith as Sonya, a crackerjack script by David Mamet and tight, taut direction by Louis Malle, and a big-screen reunion of Shawn and Andre Gregory, again playing himself.

— Leonard Pierce