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I am not sure where to post this, but I found an excellent retrospective piece of Ryan's past roles. I highly recommend the red. Here are the links: Part 1 and Part 2 If Robert DeNiro Was a Mouseketeer: A Critical Appraisal of Ryan Gosling (Part 2) | CultureMob
Quote:
To study Ryan Gosling is to view an actor in cyclical transition. Over the last five years, he has matured into an actor off uncommon subtlety and grace, and one is tempted to look at Gosling in recent films like Blue Valentine, Drive, and The Ides of March, and say, “Finally! He has arrived,” as if the nuance of his recent performances represents a sudden transformation, a casting off of the previous psycho?/gloom-head?/heartthrob? status with which critics chose to label him.
A closer look reveals another truth, that his creative successes and failures gave the young actor the opportunity to come full-circle, to revisit the roles of his youth, albeit in a markedly different light. The great artists, the enduring movie stars: the same obsessions forever haunt them—they just become better at realizing these demons.
The emergence of Ryan Gosling: The Actor began not with his Mickey Mouse Club or “Young Hercules” days but with 2001’s The Believer, a dark drama about a Jewish Neo-Nazi. In many ways, writer/director Henry Bean’s film is a pale shadow of Tony Kaye and Edward Norton’s infinitely more polished American History X.
For all its obvious melodrama—the setup, with Norton’s reformed skinhead trying to rescue his troubled brother from a future of racism and hate, is only two or three paces removed from something like Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien in Angels with Dirty Faces—American History X works on a gut-level, whereas The Believer ultimately founders under the weight of its morally provocative-yet-unsatisfyingly realized ambitions.
What distinguishes The Believer is Gosling. In many ways, Gosling’s work here reminds me of DeNiro in films like The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight or Bang the Drum Slowly; it’s a sloppy, undisciplined performance, yet it has a crude vitality that transcends both itself and Bean’s unfocused script. The transcendence cuts both ways. He throws himself into the film’s contrivances, and his manic conviction, primarily in a scene where he discovers that his on-screen love interest (Summer Phoenix, playing the ridiculously named Carla Moebius) has been having an affair with Billy Zane’s enigmatic Aryan leader, rings as more-than-a-little embarrassing. On the other hand, the zeal he works himself into fits the internal moments—his Danny Balint is a kid whose love for his Jewish faith equals his hatred for the same institution, after all—giving his constant self-loathing/self-love an operatic charge far outpacing anything in American History X. The moment I knew Gosling was going to matter comes late in the film, when his character explodes on a group of skinheads for not showing the proper respect to a synagogue that they have come to vandalize. The force of anger, the depth of feeling—it was (and is) so strong, with a shifting, unpredictable intensity. He felt dangerous. Most actors don’t.
For all its technical faults, the performance got him noticed (as it should have), and Hollywood, as it is wont to do, came ‘a calling. Unsurprisingly, the studio system immediately diluted his work. I imagine that when the suits had their assistants describe The Believer to them, the conversation went something like this:
Suit: I’m hearing good things about this Ryan Gosling fellow. What have you heard?
Over-educated, under-paid Hollywood assistant: I think he could go big-time. This movie he did, The Believer? Really unconventional stuff. He’s a Jewish Neo-Nazi who approaches Judaism and anti-Semitism with the same near-psychotic idolatry.
Suit: Psychotic, ay? Is he scary?
Over-educated, under-paid Hollywood assistant: Well, yeah, but that’s not really the point. It’s more about the moral and spiritual vacuum—
Suit: So he can play the bad guy? How ‘bout a real Hannibal Lecter-type role?
Over-educated, under-paid Hollywood assistant: Um, I mean, I don’t see why he couldn’t, but again, it’s not quite—
Suit: Then it’s settled! Give him a real Hannibal Lecter-type role.
And that’s how we got Murder by Numbers, his big post-Believer part. He’s a teenage murderer in a cat-and-mouse game with troubled cop Sandra Bullock, and he fits the “Hannibal Lecter-type” too well—he overacts with the forced enthusiasm of late-period Anthony Hopkins. Think Red Dragon Hopkins or The Wolfman Hopkins—pure paycheck stuff. Gosling is entertaining enough, I suppose, in a hammy sort of way, but the creative dilution hurts to watch. It’s much ado about nothing, Gosling’s talent servicing a surface-level, Movie-of-the-Week psycho with no layers; the film flirts with giving him a homosexual connection to Michael Pitt’s weaker criminal accomplice—à la Leopold & Loeb—and then quickly abandons the idea. Hollywood likes its sinners easily classifiable, which means mainstream taste sands down the interesting edges of a Believer performance.
I suspect that Gosling knew he was dumbing-down superior work simply because he dialed his energy way back in two subsequent pictures—2003’s The United States of Leland and 2005’s Stay. In both films, he plays young men rendered near catatonic by their psychological troubles. Here’s the rub: while I commend his willingness to go 180 degrees from what audiences now expected of him, he just is so boring to watch in this mode. It’s as if he’s saying, “I’ll give you something I know you won’t like simply so you can’t use it against me later.” There’s no risk in Leland or Stay, no sense of play—he’s a handsome blank, nothing more, nothing less.
But salvation—both critical and commercial—would arrive a year later, and it would take a form that no one (Gosling included, I’d wager) expected….
No one would consider The Notebook a game-changer. Nicholas Sparks’ beyond-saccharine novel is the stuff of daytime soap operas, and the 2004 film does little to leaven the oppressive schmaltz. It’s got James Garner going twinkly-eyed as he reads a story of loss and love to an old woman (Gena Rowlands) suffering from Alzheimer’s. It’s got comfy period trappings, since Garner’s tale involves two young lovebirds (Gosling and Rachel McAdams) during the post-World-War-II era. It’s got Joan Allen as McAdams’ frigid mother and Sam Shepard as Gosling’s wise father, and a final “twist” involving Garner and Rowlands that will surprise only the most trusting.
No one was surprised when it grossed almost four times its $30 million production budget.
Yet it let Gosling give what was his most truthful and charismatic performance. Maybe it was the own off-camera romance with McAdams that goosed his work; maybe he felt safe appearing in a movie that he suspected would actually make money; maybe he just grew up a little bit. Whatever the case, the level of maturity and confidence Gosling displays is staggering.
He helps drain away some of the sap, internalizing what lesser actors might proclaim, and it’s mesmerizing (unlike the ineffectually internal The United States of Leland); forget his Method-esque role preparations (gaining twenty pounds for the film’s second half, moving to South Carolina for two months to build furniture)—the man smolders. You watch his Noah Calhoun standing in the rain, practically devouring McAdams with his eyes, and you start free-associating to Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront or John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.
In The Notebook’s signature scene, Noah dangles off a Ferris Wheel to make McAdams’ Allie date him, and the light in his eyes gleams. Formula and cliché dictate that Noah won’t let go; Gosling might, and for a few seconds, we’re thrown. Unlike in The Believer, Gosling doesn’t spray his energy everywhere. We get it in focused bursts. For the first time in his professional career, Gosling invites us in, rather than obscuring himself behind actorly flourishes. We might have suspected before that he could become a great actor; now, we knew he was a Movie Star.
With that, Gosling recharged his career seeking perfection. Most of the films he appeared in post-Notebook mirror his pre-Notebook oeuvre; the difference lay in Gosling. In revisiting previous work, he meant to get it right.
2006’s Half Nelson occupied the same gritty indie territory as The Believer; the self-loathing Jewish Nazi was now a brilliant cokehead trying to balance his addiction with the demands of his middle-school teaching gig. Same theatrical temptation: to vamp with the unstructured grace of the Oscar Hopeful. But Gosling doesn’t shout or faux-shudder in addiction woes. He disappears, becoming quieter and more ethereal as his problems take hold. At Dunne’s lowest point, you suspect he might float away, until his classroom sessions bring him back, and Gosling turns on the charm and motormouth verbosity. Genius exists in this man, and we don’t feel disgusted—we feel a curious mix of compassion and confusion, as if Dunne were one of Bergman’s tortured spirits quietly trying to rationalize the pain of existence.
The tortured mute from Stay and The United States of Leland returned in the dramedy Lars and the Real Girl—Gosling plays an alienated young man who connects with people through an anatomically correct Real Doll—except he wasn’t boring anymore. Lars’ reticent speech patterns and massive bulk suggested a kid hiding under whatever layers he could glom together (fat rolls, puffy snow gear); it’s no surprise that when Lars “opens up” to his doll, his interests are tree-climbing and old Tiny Tim songs. The family-friendly Lars and the Real Girl has none of Leland’s faux-grit, but Gosling makes the latter film more psychologically intriguing.
Based on a notorious true crime story, All Good Things took his shallowly ebullient Murder by Numbers psycho, dialed back the commercial appeal, and added way more perversions (an unnerving self-loathing, a propensity for women’s dresses). It’s a perfect and deeply creepy role in an overwrought and unfocused film. This happens more and more now: Gosling elevates lesser movies with his craft. His sly, generous star turn in the Grisham-wannabe Fracture, the depths within his ladies’ man finding true love in the excretable Crazy Stupid Love, or the chilling amorality of his political campaign manager in George Clooney’s way-more-mediocre-than-it-should-have-been The Ides of March. If nothing else, he’s learned how to maintain control even when the films surrounding him can’t.
But Gosling is better when examining his own image in successful movies. Blue Valentine, one of the most wrenching screen depictions of “true love gone sour,” works because of how skillfully it subverts Gosling’s Notebook associations. Like The Notebook, Blue Valentine jumps between a relationship’s giddy past and melancholy present, except Blue Valentine puts the lie to The Notebook’s assertion that True Love Lasts. The most passionate beginnings can devolve into lovelessness, and the film doesn’t pull out Alzheimer’s as an escape route; Blue Valentine knows that the accumulation of years can be even more destructive. Watching Gosling, you see an actor in love with his job, the same verve powers both his “happily ever after” memories as well as his ineffectual, fighting-to-maintain-stasis waking nightmare.
Last year’s Drive presented Gosling with his finest hour (so far). My feelings for the film itself notwithstanding, his unnamed driver acts as a career summation: all-consuming love for an onscreen soul mate (The Notebook and Blue Valentine), hidden trauma (Stay, The United States of Leland, Lars and the Real Girl), a propensity for savage, explosive violence (The Believer), and all with a movie-star sheen (Crazy Stupid Love, Fracture). Familiar component parts, now forged into an archetypal creation myth. If Paul Newman were the serial killer, you’d have Ryan Gosling in Drive.
Most actors eventually bore us. We become inured to their tricks, and the work loses its appeal. I used Robert DeNiro in this article’s title for his positive and negative connotations; 1970’s DeNiro shares Gosling’s passion and discipline, and current DeNiro serves as a cautionary tale of how brilliance can go to seed (Hell-lo, New Year’s Eve!). If Gosling pursues the same themes and interests with the same level (or better!) of craft, then he’s heading for the books. Mark my words.
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I really admired Ryan as an actor and his ethics towards his crafts. |
Xiao Lan Hua - LBFAD
