A Letter to Jesse Eisenberg
Please stop answering Woody Allen’s phone calls
Dear Mr. Eisenberg,
Please stop answering Woody Allen’s phone calls. Excuse me for getting right to the point, but this has been bugging me ever since I saw you in Woody Allen’s Café Society two summers ago. The issue isn’t so much his seedy reputation (well, to be honest, it is also that) or his late career’s increasingly diminishing returns (and maybe that, too) — what I’m mostly concerned about is how convinced Woody Allen seems to be of your ability to play, well, Woody Allen. Because while I know you’re roundly hailed as a worthy surrogate, I feel the need to tell you: you’re no Woody Allen. Your particular brand of neurosis is distinctly your own. While Mr. Allen neurotically obsesses over sex and death and the ever-expanding universe, you, Mr. Eisenberg, are very different. In fact, your neurosis is not at all expansive; instead, your insecurities are acutely restricted to the narrow confines of your head. You’re a closed loop of roiling self-consciousness and narcissism and self-doubt. There’s no escape. Strictly pseudo-psychologically speaking — and I mean this with the utmost respect — you’re fucked.
It’s all very evident when you zero in on the face. Watch Woody Allen in literally any of his movies, and you’ll see a whole parade of expressions, his face often changing shape several times within a single whining sentence. Better yet, just watch his eyebrows: they wiggle and squirm like they have a mortal allergy to his thick-rimmed glasses. Consider this the face of the free-range neurotic. Now, watch yourself in literally any of your movies, Mr. Eisenberg, and you’ll find your face is considerably less elastic. Often, your face won’t change shape within a single scene. When your eyebrows move, I can practically hear your face creaking. No straitjacket is required with facial muscles like yours. This is the face of solitary confinement.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love that you’re stiff-limbed and lurching, that you have the physical dexterity of petrified wood. (Truly, I do.) I’m thoroughly tickled with how you emote like a second-rate ventriloquist — your pouty lips opening just enough for the words to squeeze through, your face locked in a not-quite-believable neutral expression. And while I can appreciate the occasional nervous chuckle or spasmodic smile, what I admire most is when you forcefully attempt to stifle your agitation, when you act like a stoic strapped to an electric chair. Trust me: when these qualities are on full display, there are few things I enjoy watching more.
Your neurotic genius was evident as far back as twelve years ago, when you played an insecure teenager trying to emulate his father’s intellectual arrogance in The Squid and the Whale. Throughout the film, even as you pontificate about Kafka or Orson Welles or philistines, there is an undeniable pathos in your performance by virtue of your unrelenting physical restraint, an expressionlessness that retains the residue of complex human emotion. And that’s the thing: despite the sometimes overwhelming verbosity of your characters, it’s the visual blankness you give them that I find so gratifying. Because your blankness is never truly blank. Neurosis always bleeds through. Your misanthropic portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network cranked up the tension between your verbosity and blankness to its extreme. While your Zuckerberg spews words at an auctioneer’s speed, you emote with the anxious mathematical precision usually reserved for defusing a bomb. Every dramatic beat is limited to the minutest adjustment of one or two facial muscles. We’re talking millimeters. A clenching of the jaw, a flinch of the brow, or a subtle flare of the nostrils could mean the difference between emotional vulnerability and outright hostility. It’s dramatic maximalism muscled down to its most minimal form. Even blown up on the big screen, it’s a spectacle on the scale of a flea circus. And every second of it is riveting.
But too many of your more recent films have gotten it wrong. Many have taken your projected self-confidence at face value: they forget — or, at the very least, under-appreciate — that while you often strive to be the first human being to have figured out the complicated calculus of the universe, just a couple inches behind that earnest brow is your quivering frontal lobe, where your insecurities light up your cranium’s interior like an electrical storm. Other films have translated your neurosis into a twee kind of social tic, as if they were a cute pair of suspenders — in other words, they try to make your anxieties seem like fun. And then there are the wretched films that are guilty of everything above — which brings us back to Woody Allen’s Café Society. As I watched you in the theater during that hot summer afternoon, the sheer dissonance between Mr. Allen’s self-assured love song to Hollywood and your apprehensive, prosaic gaze was violent enough to qualify the movie as a snuff film. No opulent art-deco interiors, seersucker suits, or toe-tapping jazz tunes could survive your relentless earnestness. Nothing was spared; it was a massacre. Yet no matter how many witty one-liners fired from your mouth, it was clear that part of you was dead, too: a crucial element to your onscreen brilliance — i.e., the wonderful tension between your vacant facade and your swarming interior — had been brutally scooped out and stomped on by the heel of Mr. Allen’s orthopedic shoe.
Woody Allen isn’t the only culprit. Take your cash-grab roles in Now You See Me and Now You See Me 2, where you display all of the smarmy arrogance without any of the gratifying substance. Or your turn as Lex Luthor in Batman versus Superman, where your high-strung twitchiness is too vaudevillian and self-consciously performed to be taken seriously. The problem, I think, is that now that you’re in your thirties, it’s assumed that you’re too mature to be suffering from this kind of neurotic blankness, that the strained identities you played so well in The Squid and the Whale and The Social Network only apply to insecure teenagers. But this assumption is woefully misguided: the quintessential face of our entire emotionally atrophied, hyper-technological generation is nothing if not a blank-faced scream. A more recent film that got it right? 2015’s The End of the Tour, with your performance as David Foster Wallace’s envious and subtly machiavellian co-traveling journalist easily making it one of your most fitting roles in years.
In the general absence of age-appropriate roles that bring out your best qualities, let me invent some for you. Here’s one: an arrogant yet insecure writing professor, pressured by his publisher to submit the initial chapters of his new novel, plagiarizes the work of his prized student — at the end of the semester, he gives her a C. Here’s another: a man deeply terrified of marriage refuses to acknowledge his fiancée’s suggestions that they cancel or delay their wedding; on the day of the ceremony, he politely knocks on his bride’s dressing room door and notifies her that he’s against marriage, but on purely philosophical grounds — also, he thinks they need a break. And here’s a literary classic I truly hope you do one day: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a not-so-young ex-law student, brutally kills a woman with an axe; he then marches back to his apartment and proceeds to argue with anyone and everyone that he’s doing just fine, that of course nothing is bothering him, that it’s perfectly natural to projectile sweat and have a resting body temperature of a 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Feel free to share these ideas with your agent.
My point is that you are able to communicate a form of neurosis that I don’t often see in movies, and I don’t want you to lose it. I know you’re making your own stuff now, from short story collections to off-Broadway plays, but the problem with literature and the stage is that they’re either too distant or too verbal. I miss your face in closeup, when I can see your outer blankness struggle with your inner confusion, when I can watch you quietly contemplate if you’re the prison guard or the prisoner. All of this may be getting too intimate; I can imagine you’re grinding your back molars at this very moment. So, let me take a step back. I will wait patiently for your next movie, and when it arrives, I look forward to seeing you once again stare out of the screen and out of your skull, looking at all of us in the darkened theater, blankly.
Sincerely,
Kyler Ernst
