The art of changing forms
Not all actors can act. Quite a lot of them just ham their way through the lines. You can see it if you pay attention. You can’t if you are in love with the face. Once you’re in love, there is no cure for your bias. That’s human nature. What’s also human nature is our compulsion to adapt. We behave differently with different people. Our core, for better or for worse, remains the same though. An actor, unfortunately, keeps floating between several extremes for a significant portion of his time. If you laugh at his joke, he can roast you for clowning him. If you don’t laugh at his joke, he can chastise you for your highhandedness. To him, everything is an act and everybody else, fellow actors, for his convenience.
Unless we are talking about Joaquin Phoenix.
Here is an actor who is in his own world — on the screen. He sets his own parameter to define what his craft is as well as his own perimeter to define where his craft is. If you put Daniel Day-Lewis in a frame with a terrible actor — something you can notice in his earlier films — you can also notice the damage his counterparts are laying on his performance. Joaquin Phoenix is immune to this disease. His work is more independent than most of the indie films are nowadays. I don’t know whether he follows club football but he defies Liverpool FC by walking all alone.
I was watching You Were Never Really Here (2017) last week and it struck me how intense the film is only because of one man’s work. From the first huffing scene itself to the final mise en scène, only he shines. Why? Because he owns the project. Despite having meager dialogues, his aura speaks out. Although there are other characters in the film in comparatively minor roles but it’s him. You start out by not knowing who the hell is he to reaching a stage where you want to drown in that river with him. He can kill you but he can save you too. And he doesn’t judge you even if you shot his old mother in the eye because he knows you were just doing your job; if not you, somebody else would have done the deed. He is irreversibly damaged and yet he displays the courage to repair others.
And by he, I mean Joaquin Phoenix the actor, not Joaquin Phoenix the character. That’s the level of art he reaches in his movies and therein lies the number of forms he is capable of. Instead of transforming in to a person in the script, it appears like the person has transformed in to him. No wonder almost all his films feature at least one shot of his piercing green eyes. As if to remind us that it is Joaquin Phoenix.
All actors are unique: the good ones, the not-so-good ones and the bad ones. A stunning similarity between them is none of them know where they stand. They need others, the so-called experts and critics, to tell them how things are. Amid this inchoate thirst for literature (read: flurry words), Joaquin Phoenix continues to walk on a road ostensibly built by him.
