Oscar 2010: The Performances

Is a seemingly casual performance harder to pull off than a mannered or highly stylized one? The answer to that question has as many variations as there are actors, but the fact that Bridges’ “Crazy Heart” performance feels so breezy and natural shouldn’t cause anyone to underestimate it. This performance doesn’t come out of left field for Bridges — it comes out of the field, which is to say it springs from a lifetime spent giving terrific performances in good movies as well as mediocre ones, as Bridges has done. Bridges has been great in many terrific movies (“The Fabulous Baker Boys,” “The Fisher King,” “The Big Lebowski”), but it’s hard to think of even a bad movie in which he’s been bad. His presence has elevated otherwise lousy pictures — “Starman,” for instance — into works that can’t be wholly dismissed. There are few other actors who have been so consistently good and also, strangely, so consistently invisible.

I don’t mean that audiences have been blind to Bridges’ gifts: In the month since the Oscar nominations have been announced, I haven’t run into a single person who openly hopes he doesn’t win. (I’m sure that person is out there, but I don’t want to meet him.) But Bridges is so understated as an actor that perhaps it’s been easy to take him for granted, which is why it’s fitting that he should make the biggest splash of his career in a small picture that arrived practically out of nowhere. “Crazy Heart,” written and directed by first-timer Scott Cooper (and adapted from a novel by Thomas Cobb), was hustled into a quick pre-Christmas release by its studio, Fox Searchlight. Obviously, some execs there saw the strength of Bridges’ performance and thought it might attract Oscar consideration.

Heartfelt appreciation of the actor’s craft or crass marketing decision? Who cares? It doesn’t matter, as long as he wins. In “Crazy Heart,” Bridges plays Bad Blake, a sozzled has-been who meets Jeannie (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a journalist and single mom who coaxes him, without even trying, into straightening his life out. I’ve heard, as you probably have, “Crazy Heart” described as your typical “washed-up performer saved by the love of a good woman” narrative. But even though the story told in “Crazy Heart” is quite simple, I don’t think there’s anything typical about it. For one thing, it doesn’t stoop to giving us a sappy ending. And Gyllenhaal, as a romantic match for Bridges, isn’t a boilerplate character. You can look at this woman and think you’ve seen her before, but Gyllenhaal — in the way she here and there shows a flicker of exasperation, or shifts between guardedness and wholehearted openness within the space of a few frames — plays Jeannie with a searching forthrightness that always feels honest.

She also challenges Bridges, pushes against him, giving him a range of actions and believable emotions to respond to. I marveled the first time I watched Bridges’ performance, but I couldn’t even begin to parse what he was doing to shape the role. The second time I watched, I had even worse luck — whatever it is Bridges is doing here, it keeps slipping through my fingers like water. In some scenes, his enunciation is intentionally lousy: Explaining to Jeannie why he quit one of his earlier enthusiasms, playing baseball, he says, “Figured I’d stick with the guitar, sumbitch stayed where it’s supposed to.” You can understand him perfectly — this is hardly a drunken slur — and yet the line has a slippery-graceful texture, like a garden snake darting behind a stone wall. With just a line, Bridges clues us in to what makes Bad an artist and not just a drunken lout who’s had a few lucky breaks. He’s the hard-living manifestation of Warren Beatty’s mumbly frontiersman line from “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”: “I got poetry in me!”

This is also a performance with no vanity. Time and again Bridges’ Bad will plunk himself down on a couch, or sprawl on a hotel bed, his threadbare shirt left open to reveal a somewhat soft-looking, whitish belly. That belly isn’t sexy, and it’s not unsexy: It’s just there, an unself-conscious declaration — “This is where I’m at now.” This is acting, of course — by now we’ve all seen how sweet and well-groomed Bridges looks when he shows up for an awards event — but here he’s so fully slipped into the character’s skin that it’s indistinguishable from his own.

And Bad’s rubbery smile — a smile that sometimes comes out of nowhere, like a naughty secret — is killer. That smile is what makes one of the movie’s darker moments — when Bad, after a night of drinking, pukes into the toilet and then curls up on his bathroom floor, whimpering in self-loathing — so anguishing. To see Bad that miserable is pain itself; he’s got to get that smile back, or we’ll be the ones to suffer. That’s the secret, maybe, of “Crazy Heart”: On its most base level, it probably is your stock redemption story. But this is Jeff Bridges we’re talking about, an actor who makes every gesture, every offhanded expression, so effortlessly believable that to watch him in anguish is almost unbearable. Late in “Crazy Heart,” Bridges — who does his own singing throughout the movie, in a voice with the hearty, mellow quality of barbecue smoke — performs a song with the line “This ain’t no place for the weary kind.” It’s a song about not stopping, even when you think you’re through, a staple idea in the country-music canon. Bridges’ work in “Crazy Heart” is just one astonishing performance among the many he’s already given. But maybe it’s the one that best pulls together all of the things so many of us love about him — the way the poetry in him seems so plainspoken, even though it has no words.

But if, too much of the time, I find Streep predictably mannered and actressy, there are also times when I fully succumb to adoring her, when all my conflicted and annoyed feelings about her are temporarily erased. I felt that way about her performance, as one-half of a sister-sister singing duo (opposite Lily Tomlin), in Robert Altman’s final film, “A Prairie Home Companion.” And I feel that way about her rendering of Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia,” which is my favorite of the Oscar-nominated actresses’ performances this year.

It’s easy to think you know a person when you’ve seen her often on TV, particularly if it’s someone you grew up watching. In “Julie & Julia,” Streep builds on that familiarity: In some ways I think her performance riffs on the idea that we don’t know the real Julia Child, even if we think we do. Streep creates her version of Julia Child from a magpie’s collection of bits and bobs: She captures Child’s trilling vocal mannerisms and her habit of resting her hands on her hips like a jolly fishwife, which are so familiar from Child’s TV appearances over the years. She captures Child’s easygoing affection for her husband, Paul (here played, beautifully, by Stanley Tucci, who was clearly nominated this year for the wrong role), in a manner that mirrors the way Child herself wrote about their marriage in her wonderful posthumously published 2006 memoir, “My Life in France.” And, most thrilling of all, she slips right into the embrace of Child’s big-gal sense of humor. When Streep re-creates the famous broadcast in which Child nearly flipped an omelet right out of the pan, she pauses awkwardly at the wonder of her own clumsiness, and then goes on to explain the mishap with the sensible approach of a good-natured scientist: In that split-second when the omelet is supposed to take momentary flight, she just didn’t have the courage of her convictions. But, she assures her audience, such a mishap is hardly the end of the world: “You can just sort of — put it together,” she says, nudging some stray bits of broken omelet back into the pan. Child gave her audience permission to be imperfect, a quality Streep channels beautifully.

In my review of “Julie & Julia,” I wrote, “Streep isn’t playing Julia Child here, but something both more elusive and more truthful — she’s playing our idea of Julia Child.” And in some ways, it may be harder to play the idea than the person. That’s partly because Child is so easy to impersonate. (Exhibit A is Dan Ackroyd’s “SNL” “Save the liver!” skit.) But Streep goes beyond impersonation into a realm of pure affection and openheartedness. I don’t think you can successfully play Julia Child — and you certainly can’t play the idea of Julia Child — just by learning a specific accent or physical mannerism. Streep gives shape and dimension to that abstract quality we call joy. When she tucks into a piece of fish sautéed in butter, the smile that lights up her face is one of pure, sensuous pleasure; when she proves, after much practice, that she can chop an onion faster and more meticulously than her snooty male cooking-school compatriots, she radiates pride along with just a touch of understandably human “I showed you guys, didn’t I?” self-satisfaction.

Streep also has a great deal of fun with the role’s physicality. Child was a tall, strapping woman who, in the late ’40s, found herself living with her new husband in France, the land of tiny girls in ballet slippers. In showing that contrast, Streep is helped along here by clever production design: At one point Child stretches out on a French bed, her big American feet dangling off the end. But Streep also makes Child’s stature a metaphor for her outsize capacity for delight. Her Julia strides through Paris with a sense of wonder: Being a giantess, as well as a gleeful and enthusiastic mangler of Français, makes her an outsider. But it also gives her license to explore and discover, to appreciate aloud things that blasé Parisians might take for granted, and she does so without hesitating or second-guessing. Streep’s performance in “Julie & Julia” is among the best she’s ever given, a turn so flirtatious and light that some might be tempted to dismiss it as being less than serious. But Streep — who is wonderful, and underrated, as a comic actress — may be at her best when she’s freed from the constraints of proving how serious and worthy she is. She doesn’t earn our love and admiration in “Julie & Julia.” She instead shapes a character we find ourselves falling in love with, just as Julia herself found the second love of her life — after Paul — in the nation and the food of France.

Mulligan’s performance is touching because it isn’t about overcoming teen awkwardness. Jenny is far from ungainly, either in her bearing or her way of expressing herself. As it turns out, she’s more poised — more straightforward, more principled, essentially more all-around grown-up — than the man with whom she’s become involved, David (Peter Sarsgaard). David is a rather shady deal maker who gets by on his smooth manners. (He also happens to be Jewish, and one of the movie’s flaws is that instead of seizing the opportunity to puncture anti-Semitic attitudes in early ’60s Britain, Scherfig instead plays into them.) David’s equally suave friends, Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike), are climbers too, and for a time the three of them treat Jenny as something of a mascot. Under Helen’s tutelage, Jenny learns how to wear the right dresses and twist her hair up into a perfect lacquered chignon. At one point she remarks to Danny that, when it comes to art, she’s still not sure “what makes good things good,” and he reassures her — meaning it — that she does know, even when she doesn’t know why. Her instincts, in art if not yet in life, are sound.

Actors can’t (or shouldn’t) play instincts; they can only play people. And that’s the marvel of Mulligan’s performance here: She navigates the tricky territory of playing a young woman who’s sure of herself but doesn’t yet know it. This isn’t a dark performance, or a moody one. What’s wondrous is the sunny intelligence of it. At times Mulligan’s face appears soft, childlike: Her dimples are like stealth weapons — they appear out of nowhere, unbidden and striking. Mulligan was in her early 20s when the film was being made (she’s now 24), and in real life she’s certainly a grownup. But from certain angles Jenny’s face still shows traces of baby fat, remnants of childhood that aren’t yet ready to disappear forever. Maybe that’s what makes Jenny’s resoluteness so affecting. When she rails against the headmistress played by Emma Thompson, who has urged her to stay in school and work toward doing something useful, like teaching, the hellfire in her eyes is anything but childlike. Why, she demands, should she want to go through life doing something that’s “hard and boring”? (In the heat of the moment she’s mischaracterizing the profession, but she’s responding to the way Thompson treats a teaching career as a glum death sentence, not a challenge.) “This whole country is bored!” she continues. “There’s no life in it or color or fun.” In that moment, as Mulligan plays her, Jenny isn’t just a woman who’s stopped waiting for things to happen, but an historian of the future: Before long, strange and wonderful things will happen to her country — things like Jimi Hendrix, Ossie Clark, the Rolling Stones, not to mention the Beatles — and they’ll happen as a direct response to the boredom she’s talking about.

While Mulligan’s performance is completely intelligent and sensitive, it isn’t necessarily what you’d call delicately multilayered: It’s as direct as a bullet, which is what makes it so effective. That’s especially true in Mulligan’s sex scenes with Sarsgaard. Jenny has told David that she wants to remain a virgin until age 17, a choice he supports. He doesn’t move in on her or pressure her, but when, after her birthday, the moment has finally arrived, she sets down a few ground rules: “No baby talk. No ‘Minnie,’” she says pointedly, referring to the childish pet name he’s given her. “Treat me like a grownup.”

The experience of losing her virginity is something of a letdown, but Jenny isn’t surprised, saddened or disappointed: There’s something inside that tells her there’s something — someone — better out there, and before long, she’s on her way toward finding that. Mulligan is just at the beginning of her career, and with luck, there will be plenty of roles for her to grow into. But the performance she gives in “An Education” is the kind that an actor can give only once in his or her life. It’s about knowing what you want before you can even articulate what that something is, reaching out toward a murky future that feels like darkness but is really light.