The Wondrous One Note Wonder That is Jason Bateman
Why having limitations is not always a bad thing
I had a dog once, a Lab mongrel mix named “Dirt”. The name was the result of my father’s complete indifference to animals, and the fact that Dirt was discovered between two garbage cans in my family’s driveway, covered in, well — dirt. Given Mr. Gil’s less than spectacular imagination, the animal’s name could’ve just as easily been Garbage Can, or Driveway, but for whatever reason Dirt spoke to him that June afternoon.
My brothers and I had been clamoring for a puppy for some time, and it was solely due to my mother’s insistence that Dirt joined our tribe. Though Dirt was not precisely the puppy we’d envisioned — the dog was well past his prime, what with his silvered snout and clouded, cataract blighted eyes — we loved Dirt with all of our hearts. As an elderly member of his species, Dirt was not one to learn new tricks. Throw a stick, Dirt would note its position in the middle distance, and then hobble off in a direction of his own choosing; call Dirt without the enticement of food in hand, and you would receive a stare of such terrifying blankness that more than once observers wondered aloud if the canine had passed away standing.
But there was one thing Dirt could do, and indeed did very well. The discovery was made one night about three months after Dirt’s adoption, while our family was gathered in the living room watching The X Files. Dirt, as he was wont to do, had just finished a surreptitious defecation behind the couch, and was sneaking his way back to my mother’s side (his favored member of the Gil clan) when my father, ever watchful of his begrudgingly adopted companion, turned suspicious attention toward the place from whence Dirt had just emerged.
Upon locating the glistening black nugget, he jumped up from the couch, thrust an admonishing finger to the kitchen, and roared “GET OUT!” at Dirt with such ferocity that us bystanders were stunned into silence. A second later Dirt, staring up at my father with Buddha-like equanimity, promptly put his ass on the ground and, with his front paws, began dragging said ass across the carpet. The action was so unexpected that we watched in complete silence as Dirt, tongue lolling happily out his mouth, jerked his way erratically toward his confounded master. Upon reaching him he sat up obediently and stared, as if expecting a treat for the performance, and we all immediately broke out into wild laughter.
I’d seen dogs do this kind of thing before, but how Dirt learned to do it on command no one knew (we later surmised it’d been taught to him by a previous owner). Regardless, he and my father got along much better after that. For the remaining three years of Dirt’s existence, the animal performed the “GET OUT” maneuver, as it came to be known, whenever commanded to, delighting scores of family, friends, gardeners, ComEd technicians, and frequent numbers of dog walkers in the park.
Now you might be asking yourself: why is an article about Jason Bateman going on about some dude’s long dead, geriatric dog? That’s a fair question, and let me inform you of the reason behind this admittedly verbose preamble. It is because I firmly believe that Jason Bateman is the human equivalent of Dirt. Don’t misunderstand me — I’m actually a fan. I find him to be personable, witty, entertaining in just about every movie he’s in, and (at least from interviews I’ve seen) a genuinely nice guy. But, like Dirt, he also has one gear. I speak of course, of his versatility as an actor — or lack thereof.
If there was ever an example of knowing your audience and playing to it, Jason Bateman is the exemplar. The man has basically built his entire acting career around playing the same person in every film. Watch Horrible Bosses, Identity Thief, The Breakup, The Switch, Game Night, Extract, Paul, Couple’s Retreat, Hancock, and you are essentially watching Michael Bluth with only subtle variations. Correction: you are essentially watching Jason Bateman with subtle variations, because, from what I can tell, there is scant daylight between the titular straight man he played in Arrested Development and the real Jason Bateman.
But there are many actors, you might argue, especially marquee names, who are always, to some degree, unavoidably themselves. You’re right. It’s impossible to watch Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt and not see Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt on screen, no matter how divergent their characters are from their real selves. But theirs is a case of the human slipping through the character, not — as in Bateman’s case — the character embellishing the human.
With rare exceptions, the characters Bateman plays have remained strikingly faithful to the persona of Jason Bateman — a feat remarkable in an industry where change is the currency upon which an actor sinks or swims. God gave Jason Bateman one facial expression — a nascent frown, the look of a man preparing himself for disappointment — and dared him to act. Bateman said “hold my beer.”
I make this point without acrimony. On the contrary, I say it with a good deal of admiration. In a society where everyone wants to be everything to everyone (and a society that assures them they’re capable of it), it’s refreshing to see a person who recognizes their limits, their specific skill-set, and focuses their time honing that skill-set, rather than wasting it in pursuit of goals beyond their grasp. I’m not here to discourage ambition — I’m a strong believer in setting one’s sights high — but I’m a bigger believer in knowing where you’re aiming. And that is something less discussed in our well-intentioned, though slightly soft-minded “dream and you shall achieve” motto we happily chant as Americans.
After all, the world already has its fair share of Daniel Day Lewises and Meryl Streeps, but it has precious few Jason Batemans. The guy has elevated the sarcastic, snarky, smartest-guy-in-the-room persona to an art form — a persona, by the way, that seems to have become the dominant male template in Hollywood (see Ryan Reynolds, Robert Downey Jr., Benedict Cumberbatch, and all the other influential practitioners of the Batemen snark arts). But no one does it better than Bateman.
Watching Arrested Development recently, I was reminded of just how important the straight man is in comedy — the sounding board upon which jokes, depending on said sounding board’s solidity, either get stifled to nothingness or amplified exponentially. Every Costello needs its Abbott, every Kramer its Seinfeld, and Bateman’s superlative finesse in this arena elevates the talents of the actors around him without fail. He’s the gold standard of the type.
“But haven’t you seen Ozark?” A friend recently reproached me, after I’d reiterated Bateman’s narrow bandwidth as an actor. We were drinking in a crowded bar and I raised my voice above the tumult to respond:
“Serious Michael Bluth.”
“What about Up In the Air?”
“Michael Bluth with a better wardrobe.”
“This is Where I Leave You?”
“Michael Bluth with long hair.”
“Identity Thief?”
“Michael Bluth.”
My friend grew exasperated, and — not wanting to jeopardize an already mentioned offer of a free drink — I relented:
“Juno. He was very good in Juno.”
It’s true. I found Bateman’s performance in that film better than anything he’s yet done, dramatically speaking. That might sound odd, considering that his character in the film is, at least superficially, not starkly different from his other roles, and the role itself is a rather quiet one. But its power is its quietness.
Bateman’s never been an especially expressive actor, and, as Mark Loring, the prospective adoptive father of Juno’s child, his natural inclination toward the subdued serves him well. Mark is in the throes of potent midlife ennui, a man who feels his life has passed him by and now finds himself trapped in an emotional, if not existential, limbo. He’s not particularly happy, nor sad — merely stuck in a place he never envisioned himself being.
Mark’s real problem of course is that he’s never properly grown up. He’s got the car, the nice house, the beautiful wife, but retains, on a deeply emotional level, the image of himself as an early twenty-something musician, full of ambition and dreams of rock and roll stardom. Juno re-awakens this long buried self, and hints at the possibility that he could still be retrieved.
Part of the reason I think the performance is so affecting is because it feels honest in a way Bateman’s other dramatic roles don’t. I got the feeling, watching Mark emphatically argue rock n’ roll tastes with Juno, that I was sneaking glimpses of the real Jason Bateman, or at least of a real, vulnerable human being. He doesn’t overplay Mark’s quiet yearning, his slow-motion, voiceless despair — a little pathetic and sad, and all the more poignant because it slips through in flashes: a furtive glance, a knowing pause. That Mark turns out to be kind of a sleazeball only heightens the authenticity of the performance. If there was ever a role that embodied Henry David Thoreau’s famous quote “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” Mark Loring is it.
Whether or not we’ll get more Mark Lorings from Jason Bateman remains to be seen. But really, does it matter? The guy’s clearly found his niche in Hollywood, and is justly reaping the rewards. If, like Dirt, he remains a one-note performer, a comedic straight man who drags his proverbial ass across our television screens for years to come, we should all be so lucky. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, the saying goes, but if that dog already knows a good one and does it better than any other dog, does he really need to learn any more? Dirt certainly didn’t, and neither do I think does Jason Bateman. So drag away Jason Bateman, I say. For all of our sakes, drag away.
