Critic After Dark,
own — but the movie remains bad. I think someone like Brad Pitt — who’s more Hollywood star than artist of Phoenix’s calibre — actually turned in a better performance in James Gray’s Ad Astra because the actor did what the director needed him to do: be the withdrawn alienated figure at the center of the interplanetary epic (which I find wonderfully perverse because it’s a large-scale production with a withdrawn alienated figure at the center). Phoenix is hanging out there in a vacuum: he has a muddled scenario with no rounded character to play, just a bunch of hazy notions cobbled together from different movies, ultimately meant to forcefit themselves into a pre-existing mythology. The other characters are disposable if not imaginary; even the mob that eventually idolizes him seems motivated more by script direction than recognizably human drives (“He’s the Joker! Follow him!”)*.
As for that last question — does Phoenix deserve an Oscar? It’s not even his best work — he was more unsettling in You Were Never Really Here where his swollen belly suggests depressed dissipation better than his emaciated ribs ever did here (I can imagine, having been there myself, a depressed man over- rather than undereating, especially in binge-prone America). Plus Lynne Ramsey, unlike Phillips, is a real filmmaker with an unsettlingly oblique take on action sequences, catching Phoenix on surveillance camera rounding corners or just passing out a doorway while the man he’s just bludgeoned with a ball-peen hammer collapses to the floor. Plus there’s the moment Joe gutshots the man who killed his mother and, as the man lies there on their kitchen floor dying, joins him in an agonized rendition of “I’ve Never Been to Me” — nothing in Phillips’ movie comes close to being as perversely tender, or grotesquely funny.
Does Phoenix deserve an Oscar? Considering that I think of an Oscar more as an indicator of big box-office and savvy marketing than of quality cinema — sure, why not? It’s flashy enough, and controversial enough, more in terms of articles written than ideas involved. Much good it’ll do him, and I suspect he knows as much.
*I suppose you can say the rioters recognize him as the killer of famous talk show host Murray Franklin (De Niro yet again) on TV — but if they were out on the streets rioting, when did they watch the show? And why should they care, since Franklin was never established as pro- or anti-rioter? While we’re at it, why would Franklin use the video of Fleck’s stand-up without permission, then invite him to the show without even a cursory security check (the guy could be a psycho!)? And why, if Thomas Wayne (if you don’t know who he is you probably shouldn’t be watching this) is a billionaire, wouldn’t he spend real money on security, for his son in the garden, for himself in the men’s room, for his family when out watching a movie (Couldn’t he afford a private theater?)?