EVERY SCRIPT NEEDS A SECONDER TO MOVE COMPELLING SCENES FURTHER FORWARD
by PETER THOMAS BUSCH
In the movies as in life, the story needs a seconder to affirm the lead character’s reason for being there.
In the Mission Impossible film franchise (2015) (2018) (2023) Ilsa, played by Rebecca Ferguson, is initially a covert operative who has infiltrated the same Syndicate that the IMF has been haunted by. The IMF Team Leader, Ethan, quickly realizes Ilsa’s leanings when she helps him escape from a sure death torture session with the Bone Doctor.
Ilsa helps the Impossible Mission Force complete the narrative. And Tom Cruise rewards the character by giving Rebecca a recurring role in a continuous story involving the Syndicate that unfolds over two blockbuster spy thrillers.
Ilsa becomes more of an independent agent as the Syndicate is shut down by the IMF and British Intelligence, only for a more sinister, more mysterious threat in a third film involving weaponized artificial intelligence.
In Dune (2021) Rebecca’s character, Jessica, is at times center stage as she must play a maternal role to her young son, Paul Atreides, who is learning to become the ‘promised one’ he was born to be.
In Dune: Part 2 (2024) though, Timothee Chalamet’s character Paul Atreides has become a young man on a more assertive quest to develop sufficient leadership skills that will inspire a following on the sand planet, especially after his father was assassinated in Dune (2021).
Rebecca develops more of a three dimensional character for Jessica, but Jessica becomes pushed into the background as she becomes a Bene Gesserit while her son becomes a leader of the Fremen.
After being cast in significant supporting roles in 5 consecutive blockbuster thrillers, Rebecca has incrementally gained enough cache for her screen character to save what remains of an apocalyptic world in the episodic streaming story of survivors living in underground cities.
In Silo (SERIES 2023-2025) Juliette incrementally appears in episodes until she has a greater share of the screentime in a separate narrative from the main narrative. As season two begins, the camera follows Juliette in what appears to have become the main narrative, but after a few episodes of the 21 episode series, Juliette’s narrative gives way again, in a kind of two season wraparound that brings the ensemble cast back together in front of one camera.
Rebecca has not yet entirely allowed herself to be typecast as an agent for blockbuster producers.
In Life (2017) Miranda incrementally earns authority among a scientific expedition by surviving an organic life form extracted from soil taken from Mars. Initially, the scientists affectionately name the life form, Calvin. But Calvin begins to rapidly mutate by consuming the scientists aboard the International Space Station.
Rebecca moves through a sequence of emotions as difficulty arises for her characters during the script. The audience’s expectations rise and fall correspondingly through a series of emotive triggers, during which self-sacrifice is always a possibility for the preservation of the greater values such as personal integrity and social inclusion.
As Ilsa in Mission Impossible, Rebecca’s character learns quickly that playing a secondary lead may be more valuable to completing the mission than controlling the covert op. By protecting members of the IMF team, Ilsa obtains the desired result even though Ethan is in charge and takes the lead.
In Dune, everything in existence has so far been focussed on nurturing Paul to lead. Even Jessica becoming a priestess contributes to the desired result by appeasing the people resisting Paul’s leadership.
In a not so common twist to the casting directive, Rebecca provides a supporting character to the script who becomes someone just short of a one person overwatch for the leading protagonist.
This unique casting plays well in spy thrillers and science fiction adventures involving ensemble casts. The stylized supporting character signifies that individualism has a role in preserving the community.
In Silo, the world on the surface of the planet has been lost because of an unwillingness to sacrifice personal and community gains for a greater common good. But Juliette exemplifies the better way forward for humanity by sacrificing an easy life and peace of mind in one silo to investigate the planet surface and, what she discovers once on the surface, a secondary silo that is haunted by a mass extinction event.
The character integrity and well being of the community are advanced by the sacrifice.
The individual and the community are of equal importance, with each entity having to make sacrifices to preserve each other, just as marque names and leading actors find greater meaning in the script from interactions with supporting actors.
ACTOR TURNS MAGICIAN TURNED ACTOR
by PETER THOMAS BUSCH
To suggest Adrien Brody is merely acting would be an understatement.
Brody develops a character and then steps inside what he has created, a bit like magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, whom Brody would later play, finding escape in front of a world-wide audience inside a magic trick.
The talented creative learned to act before performing the Houdini character acting as a magician.
While Houdini did not possess spiritual powers, Brody has that metaphysical presence on screen that forces one to believe the character is not being portrayed by the same actor as the one that played a different character in a previous film.
The composition of the character is so complicated and so thoroughly detailed that the actor disappears entirely.
In the Brutalist (2024), Brody plays a modernist architect who has survived death in a Nazi concentration camp where intellectuals in opposition to fascism were deported to, especially Jewish intellectuals, and especially people just for being Jewish in Budapest.
The character survived the Buchenwald Concentration Camp only to discover nothing was left for which to remain in Budapest after World War II.
Laszlo Toth is a character that personifies the culmination of an experienced actor mastering the creation of all the other creations while simultaneously being remarkably different, even separate and apart from a previous Oscar worthy performance.
Director Brady Corbet, who cowrote the script with Mona Fastvold, seems to have crafted every little nuance of these new circumstances within which the leading actor might invent a new magic trick, even adding a bit of vulgarity projected in either direction, now and then.
Laszlo’s escape from Budapest to America is orchestrated in such a way as to suggest a bleed from the closing scenes of The Pianist (2002) and perhaps from all the films that Brody has starred in before and after – although only after so many years have passed and so much more has happened, until escape is no longer just escape but deliverance, as the Statue of Liberty appears in the New York skyline off of Ellis Island.
The narrative continues to compel forward as Brody assesses each new character and each new situation from the lens of a new immigrant engaging with the new world surroundings, and then he subjectively creates an original nuance, based on where Laszlo has been, and on what Laszlo has done, and on where Laszlo is going.
Brody is a hard working actor making every new scene something special, with an emotive response or a character tick, as well as having worked relentlessly in dozens of film projects until finding another Oscar worthy performance
The escape was orchestrated differently than in The Pianist (2002) in which Brody plays a classic concert pianist who survives the Jewish ghettos in Nazi occupied Poland just as he and all the other Jews in Warsaw were to be deported by train to the Concentration Camps.
Wladyslaw Szpilman, with the help of friends, hides out in safe houses and the bombed out Warsaw neighborhoods until the Russians liberate Poland.
As occurs in war, Szpilman’s friends and family incrementally disappear until he is alone in an isolated space with nothing but the idea of existence in front of the camera. Brody learns to project the pain of loneliness and starvation in a cruel and desolate world in which his people are being arrested for extermination in the concentration camps.
Brody shows that even little acts of kindness betray the real hatred and failure of humanity that has culminated in the real horrors of genocide.
If the antagonist is not the tyrannical state consumed by the extreme hate filled machinations that conjure up genocide, the antagonist is the giant ape personifying a struggling humanity and planet earth in King Kong (2005). Brody plays a popular playwright who does not want to be on the ship that goes to the island and, unbeknownst to the crew, will bring back King Kong to New York City for the greatest show on Broadway.
Jack Driscoll immerses himself in the scripts of his recent stage craft successes for inspiration, until he gets a glimpse of Ann Darrow, and quickly becomes smitten. As the ship churns into the fog bank, Driscoll’s screenplay is about to become a reality, and Brody quickly steps into the first scenes on the island as an omniscient narrator.
Director Peter Jackson first pans the camera through the life of Carl Denham, played by Jack Black. Denham is a disgraced film director who has bet everything on a nothing film.
To make matters worse, the script is yet to be delivered, and the star of the film has dropped out just before filming is to begin. Denham must quickly find a replacement for his leading actor, and by happenstance, finds one in Ann Darrow, played by Naomi Watts.
Brody quickly wins the attention of Peter Jackson’s camera with a gentle, soft hearted character that cannot help but fall in love with the rising starlit. In this way, Brody incrementally emerges from an ensemble cast, only to briefly disappear into the background from time to time as other relationships develop, such as the love hate relationship between Darrow and King Kong.
Driscoll survives the running of the dinosaurs, kangaroo size insects and the wild sweeping arms of a rampaging giant ape. But that confrontation with the Jungian swamp hardly prepares Driscoll for King Kong breaking lose from his Broadway contract only to suspend disbelief on the streets of New York City.
In Blonde (2020) Brody plays playwright Arthur Miller, under another name, in the Marylin Monroe biopic starring Ana de Armas as Norma Jeane (Marylin).
Director Andrew Dominik tells the story from the perspective of Monroe being lied to and exploited by the people nearest to her, beginning with her mother. Ana de Armas then projects parts of the script as an outerbody experience to signify the trauma Monroe goes through one relationship trauma after another, and that repeated traumatization eventually results in a psychotic break from reality.
Dominik changes the tone and atmosphere for the scene sequences involving Miller. Monroe is shown to be quite happy together with Miller, finding a balance with mutual respect for each others’ creative work. But when the couple have a miscarriage, everything spirals out of control, especially with a bit of help from the toxic cocktail of barbiturates and alcohol that Monroe uses to self-medicate her depression.
Brody’s artful presence within a complicated life narrative of the film’s protagonist intimates that Miller wrote that brief part of Monroe’s life in which he has become omniscient.
Brody often takes on acting roles in which he can show the character with a particular skill, and then illustrates how that skill relates to who that person is on the outside and on the inside, simultaneously.
Sometimes that curiosity for creationism gets Brody cast in a popcorn movie. But the actor keeps working with his character development by infusing a rather particular skillset into the mask Brody then wears for the camera until that Oscar worthy script falls into his lap again.
A particular skillset links to a specific word choice that connects with an accent in sync with the character’s body language.
The attention is not just on Brody, though. The director’s camera often pieces together a particular epoch with time stamped props and sensibilities, which ultimately creates an undercurrent of Americana and the relationships that the cultural banner entails.
In a costarring role with John Leguizamo in the Summer of Sam (1999) Brody shows his method. Ritchie personifies the real fear on the street as New York City does everything but shelter in place while a serial killer stalks residents during the hot summer of 1977.
Director Spike Lee paints the uniquely urban trauma that occurred within his neighbourhood. The disco suits and the shoes, the vintage muscle cars and the shadows in the dark night all define 1970 New York City.
The film moves beyond murder to assess the morality of the city, first finding Brody’s character still living at home walking around the kitchen in light blue bikini underwear while his parents and neighbourhood friends sit around the table playing poker in the late afternoon.
In the next scene sequence, Ritchie is shown to be a street kid just having returned from London wearing a Union Jack t-shirt and speaking in a British accent.
Brody has revealed an acting mask that he will continually shape and shift throughout his film career.
Ritchie initially appears as a caricature of the city in a punk rock musician motif – almost like wearing a comic book costume as the city falls into the chaos that fear can cause. Just a few years later, Brody becomes the Oscar worthy classical pianist.
Summer of Sam becomes a classic portrayal of the Americana that existed at an important time and place, so meticulously engineered as to include kids growing up with Yankee baseball and trips to Yankee Stadium with their parents.
The actor only ever so delicately reveals the backstory, compelling the narrative through his eyes and emotive responses to that trauma that has occurred before the script has begun, but which has influenced his reactions in the scenes moving forward, and his perceptions about the people around him and what he must do to survive another movie magic trick.
In King Kong, Jack has become more motived by his love for Ann, which had been developed in the backstory, during a few scenes on the ship, than for his passion for writing.
The character struggles with the illusiveness of love, as a metaphor.
The punk, the pianist, the architect, and the playwright also have distinct accents, and those accents sync with a particular body language, all of which get the character sufficiently engaged with the other characters to compel the narrative forward.
Miller is sublime, and almost laconic, in dialogue and in the manner he carries himself, even around the biggest movie star in the world. Brody conjures a thoughtful character who thinks before he responds, and explains motivations before he acts.
Brody subtly layers into the character his interests in language and dialects, and moves carefully through the sets inside the character so as not to spark an unexpected emotive response.
In Houdini, Brody cannot contain the intertextuality of the world famous magician actually being an actor suspending the air of disbelief between the stage performance and the theater audience better than the stars confined to inside the early film projectors in 1914.
Each magic trick is revealed to be as much about perception as movie magic.
The illusion of an actor as a magician becomes perfected with a second Oscar worthy performance as Brody escapes into the character and projects the trick of a lifetime.
STREAMING FILM FESTIVAL BIOPICS AWARD CEREMONY
