DRIVER’S SEASON
Actor having a moment that’s a decade in the making, Sonia Rao writes.
Watching a scene primarily concerned with the dynamic between a film’s protagonist and his romantic rival, a viewer might not expect the random guy in the corner to attract too much attention.
And yet as Oscar Isaac and Justin Timberlake’s characters in 2013’s Inside Llewyn Davis record a novelty song begging then-president John Kennedy not to shoot them into outer space, it isn’t just their harmonizing or the lyrics that make the bizarre tune work, but how their screenmate Adam Driver punctuates it with comical noises and refrains — “Outer ... space!”
That’s Driver in a nutshell, someone who, in part thanks to his large presence and general way of being, can’t help but command the screen. HBO’S Girls, on which he broke out as the volatile Adam Sackler, even features a scene in which another character notes that he “does sort of look like the original man.”
The episode aired in 2012, early in a decade that proved to be star-making for the Oscar-nominated actor, and which he has capped with a robust fall slate: He stars as a lead in two films, Marriage Story and The Report, and plays a villain in the recently released Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
So how did the season of Adam Driver come to be? There’s the esthetic intrigue mentioned above that once led The Guardian to ask the lanky actor about “not being the standard Hollywood Mchunk,” to which he candidly responded, “I have been told before that I have an unusual face. But my face is my face.” His success is likely due more to how that sense of grounded honesty comes through in his performances.
Driver, who trained at Juilliard after serving in the Marines, broadcasts a quiet intensity that can capture a range of feelings, sometimes all at once. In the earlier seasons of Girls, for instance, Driver’s mannerisms often display a mixture of pent-up range and emotional vulnerability.
Driver has already earned accolades for his performance in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, now on Netflix; he won the Gotham Award for best actor, and is nominated for a
SAG Award and a Golden Globe Award for the role — bolstering his stance as a front-runner in the Oscar race.
Baumbach cast Driver in three other projects before this one, and it becomes clear while watching Marriage Story that, as was the case with co-star Scarlett Johansson, the character was written with Driver in mind. They play a couple — theatre director Charlie and actress Nicole
— whose marriage crumbles over misaligned priorities. Charlie’s company is in New York, where they have raised their young son for most of his life. Nicole, who has long indulged Charlie’s ego by putting off her dream of returning home to Los Angeles, moves back for work when they separate.
What follows is a meditation on divorce, a compassionate look at how it can liberate two people but still decimate their spirits as they re-evaluate their relationship.
Baumbach infuses his script with comedy, but it’s when the tension between Charlie and Nicole climaxes that the actors shine brightest. When an attempt to hash out the details of their divorce without lawyers escalates to a screaming match, Charlie, red-faced with frustration, shouts at Nicole, “Every day I wake up and wish you were dead.”
He immediately bursts into tears, falling to his knees and embracing her legs.
In a recent Hollywood Reporter
interview, Driver said that, with such scenes, “You don’t push for emotion. It either happens or it doesn’t.”
He credited his ability to portray clashing feelings to the script, which rings true — several of his strongest performances are tied to acclaimed writers, including Lena Dunham, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese.
Driver’s turn as Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones in The Report is internal, this time a relatively restrained depiction of anger as he spends years investigating the CIA’S use of torture after
9/11. Driver faces the tough task of anchoring a film that heavily involves sifting through paperwork in a confined space, but he accomplishes it by, as The
New York Times put it, expressing that fury “not in explosive confrontations, but in a gradually hardening resolve to protect and disseminate his findings.”
It’s also true of his Oscar-nominated role in Lee’s Blackkklansman as Flip Zimmerman, a brooding Jewish cop who goes undercover to take down the Ku Klux Klan.
And it’s of course true of Kylo Ren, the Star Wars villain who operates on another plane in the most literal sense.
Driver’s greatest talent is arguably his ability to keep a character’s fiercest emotions brimming beneath the surface, releasing them in bursts both great and small.
He avoids making a cartoonish villain by approaching Kylo as he would a character in any “prestige” project.
There’s a strange sort of kinship between his conflicted performance in The Last Jedi, which allowed for a deeper exploration of Kylo’s interiority, and Charlie Barber’s reactions to the strain of divorce, or even Adam Sackler’s battle with his more primal tendencies.
The season of Adam Driver, a compressed display of the actor’s talents that will only continue to spark awards buzz through February, has been nearly a decade in the making.