Physical Alterations and Acting

I am agnostic over the question at hand in this article, whether Anne Hathaway is a good actress. This is largely because I can’t think of a reason why I would watch most of her movies unless the wife wanted to go. Rachel Getting Married was pretty interesting. My wife did force me to watch The Devil Wears Prada, which was decent enough for the genre I suppose. In any case, I certainly have nothing against Hathaway, even if I never quite understood the buzz.

But I do have an opinion on the point about whether the weight loss and short hair in Les Miserables (which I most certainly did not see) constitutes something in itself that means good acting.

A part like Fantine also caters to the industry’s weakness—shared by most actors, male or female—for flagrantly masochistic martyrdom. Since Hollywood’s definition of “winning ugly” is different from the NFL’s, it doesn’t hurt that Hathaway starved herself silly to play Victor Hugo’s tramp with a heart of lead. Then she consented to having her hair done by the guy from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. She may shill for Lancome in “real” life, but in Les Mis, she looks and carries on like the spokesmodel for a pricey but pungent new fragrance named Nostalgie de la Boue.

At least since Robert DeNiro gained all that weight in Raging Bull (or maybe even since he gained weight for Godfather, Part II), the idea of physical transformation as great acting has had a lot of appeal. DeNiro was truly amazing in those films, although especially in Raging Bull a lot of the popular conversation about it revolved around the weight gain. Maybe the most egregious actor in this genre today is Christian Bale, where both in Rescue Dawn and The Machinist, he put himself through masochist sacrifices in order to satisfy his directors. A subsection of this is the idea that playing someone with a mental or physical disability is also a way to get notice for your acting. The first time Leonardo DiCaprio came to fame was in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. As an actor once told me, that kind of role is not particularly hard. Far more difficult is an actual portrayal of mental illness that makes sense (say Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King, although that’s hardly a film without problems) or having a physical aliment that can shut off the brain and force an actor to switch back and forth, a la DeNiro in Awakenings.

I think all this shows is a willingness to throw oneself into a role, which is fine. At this point, I certainly can’t blame someone for doing it because, for whatever reason, that sort of physical transformation is a great way for people to think you’ve created a great performance. But I’d argue that it really is more or less irrelevant. While I suppose we wouldn’t want Philip Seymour Hoffman playing someone in a concentration camp in 1945, it’s also a bit ridiculous to expect living people to starve themselves in order to play a role. And if they do, the added touch of authenticity or whatever doesn’t mean much either way to the quality of the acting or the quality of the movie.

In other news, Oscar night, etc. I didn’t see enough of the films nominated to have too strong of an opinion. If Lincoln wins, well, it’s middle-brow enough to fit and will probably be forgotten about by 2015, but it clearly superior to the average Best Picture winner.