No Small Parts
Back in the ’90s I rented Philip Haas’s film The Music of Chance, starring Mandy Patinkin and James Spader and based on the novel by Paul Auster. It is an agreeably creepy and unsettling little movie, but the thing I remember best about it, which happens at the end, has nothing to do with the story. Auster has a cameo: he drives along a deserted road, stops his car, gets out, and speaks one line. I don’t remember what his five or six words are, but they may as well be, “I AM NOT AN ACTOR!”
It wasn’t Auster’s fault — he is, after all, a novelist, not a screen performer. And, actually, he provided a service, if only for me. Hearing his line reading was like watching as a Christmas tree is plugged in, seeing things illuminated that had been invisible before: I suddenly had an appreciation for every bit-part player in every film I’d ever watched. Every time I had accepted, for a few seconds, that one of those actors was a bank teller, grocery-store clerk, gas-station attendant, or bus passenger, he or she had done the job well. The first requirement of the actor had been met: not standing out from the pack, but simply seeming to be what you are not, making it look as easy as being yourself.
Those roles don’t bring Oscar nominations, of course. The actors who are so honored — or deserve to be, anyway — are those who meet that first simple requirement while also registering intensity if not range of emotion, making us think not “Wow, that guy can act” but “Man, that person is really suffering,” or happy, or confused, or you name it. A few off-the-beaten-path examples:
Jane Fonda in Klute. At the movie’s climax, Fonda, as a prostitute, listens to a recording of the voice of her dead friend, her heart breaking right in front of us.
Candice Bergen in Carnal Knowledge. Bergen, as an undergraduate, has a night out with the two young men she is torn between, Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel. At one point she laughs hysterically. If there is better laughter captured on film, I’ve never seen it.
Adolph Caesar in A Soldier’s Story. In the segregated army of World War II, Caesar is a self-hating, evil s.o.b. of a sergeant in charge of soldiers including David Alan Grier, Denzel Washington, and Robert Townsend. After a bout of drinking, Caesar screams his regret at the choices he has made, just before being sent to his Maker by — whom?
Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Sheen’s drunken scene in a hotel room. This one may need an asterisk next to it, since Sheen, while playing a man breaking down, was . . . well, breaking down. (See the chilling and illuminating documentary Hearts of Darkness, on the making of Apocalypse Now.)
What else is there? Tell Cliff . . .
A quick aside Cliff on your comments about novelists as actors: In the film version of James Dickey’s novel Deliverance, Dickey plays the local sheriff at the end who knows them city slickers have been up to something but can’t quite get enough on them to haul ‘em in. It’s a priceless little cameo, creepy and controlled and, well, extremely well acted. Word is Dickey was plastered most of the time during the shoot but I still remember his brooding presence in the movie. Of course, on a par with Auster in The Music of Chance you have say Irvine Welsh’s ludicrous appearance in the film version of his novel Trainspotting–that’s painfully awful to watch but overall a very good film nonetheless. Actually a particular favourite writer of mine, Denis Johnson, has a cameo in the terrible film version of his scintillating book of short stories, Jesus’ Son. He plays the poor dude in the story Emergency who walks into hospital with a knife in his eye. Nice cameo that in an otherwise excrutiatingly bad adaptation. Then there’s the great Thomas Pynchon and his two cameos in The Simpsons but I guess that’s a different kettle of fish.
Auster’s line should have been, “Buy more of my books so I don’t have to do this.” The story I heard was that he went to Hollywood because he was struggling financially as a novelist. Very sad.
Sad indeed; if he’s struggling, what does that mean for the rest of us? Noddy — I saw Dickey in Deliverance and I was impressed, too. He did a good job of projecting authority, which I as a viewer was craving by the end of that movie, having watched a couple of hours of nightmarish chaos. I saw it in college with someone I was dating at the time, at her suggestion; when I asked what it was about, she said, “These four guys spend the weekend in the woods and have some trouble.” That belongs in the Understatement Hall of Fame.
“These four guys spend the weekend in the woods and have some trouble.” Lordy, the four dudes do get themselves into a spot of bother, don’t they? Good one, Cliff. Reminds me of a friend of mine who described that Danish art-house movie from the 80s, Babette’s Feast, as just a bunch of old folk eating soup!