That's part of a quote from David Thomson, a fellow with whom I have issues, but not on this matter: he says it is the best special effect in all of cinema, the human face. If you look hard at your favorite film moments, you'll find that most of them pull their vitality from the expression on a human face as it reacts to something. The moment when Indiana Jones pulls the gun on the guy with the swirling sword would be nothing at all if it weren't for the look he gives afterward, the look and the shake of the head. In the Sixth Sense, there's Bruce Willis when the ring rolls away from his wife's hand. Cary Grant when he sees the portrait in an Affair to Remember. Maybe even Luke Skywalker while he loses a hand but gains a father.
One of my favorite sequences in cinema (although the film is strange, with extremes of high and low) is in Jonathan Glazer's Birth, when Nicole Kidman's character is sitting at the ... what? it's either the opera, the symphony, or a ballet. I think it's the symphony. Anyway, the camera is unmoving, trained on her face as she sits in the audience watching this highfalutin' performance whilst inwardly suffering terrible emotional upheavals. And Glazer lets us watch her wonderful face during this emotional earthquake for over a minute. It's a magnificent thing.
Kidman, in fact, is one of my favorites in this respect. I can think off-hand of at least two moments in other films in which an unspoken emotion just barely grazes her face, so quickly that no other character sees it, but it communicates an emotional tonnage to us. In To Die For (a truly great film which would have lodged Gus Van Sant among the best directors of his day even if he had never followed it up with anything else), there is a scene in which her ambitious weather-girl is looking to make contacts at a conference, and a sleazy, pompous elder in the field (George Segal, perfectly cast) convinces her that sleeping with him is her best way forward. The dark disgust on her face, mingled with a sort of fierce compliance, is stunningly good. (But Kidman is stunning all the way through this movie. She really already had a firm hand on her craft, even at that early stage.) More recently, in the less successful the Paperboy she has a similar moment: she has been putting all her energy into stoking up a long-distance sexual fire with John Cusack's behind-bars sociopath. Once he's released and storms into her house and locks her roommate outside, the shadow which passes across her face as she realizes the good part, the fantasy part, is over and now there is only the devil to be paid his due, is another perfect moment.
So here are a few of my favorites, moments when a subtle emotion crossing a well-trained face inspires subterranean tremors across the breadth of a film.
Christopher Walken in Skylark: The barn is burning down and everything they own with it, this in the midst of a terrible drought. He is stoical, his wife is crying on his shoulder, there is nothing left to do but watch it burn. We see the flames reflected in his eyes and on the skin of his face. He allows himself a single moment of emotion, a slight twitch of the head and momentary glance to the side, communicating rebellion against the unfeeling gods who could allow the catastrophe, yet simultaneously a sense that he would expect such from life.
Michael Fassbender at the end of Shame: There are marvellous bookends to the film, scenes on the tube. In the first, he is flirting wordlessly with a married woman. He tries, with a strange ferocity, to follow her off the train but loses her in the crowd. The mirror-scene at the end is on the same train, he is spent and exhausted and shattered after all he has been through, and there is the same married woman, unchanged, ready to flirt some more. The look on Fassbender's face is one of the most stunning things I've ever seen on film.
Christian Bale in Flowers of War: He was fine in this, it was a fine movie, with the perhaps inevitable flaws. (It's such a dark episode in history, the treatment of women during the Japanese occupation of China, it must be nigh on impossible to avoid plunging into melodrama and sentimentalizing, and it does, it does plunge.) Bale does a creditable job during his drunken antics and with the more toned-down heroics, but his one really shining moment comes unexpectedly: the courtesans come to him to say that two of their party have escaped back to the cathouse to fetch supplies (guitar strings and earrings). Bale's character is in love with the chief courtesan, but his moments of courage are few and far between, and death is rampant outside the gates. He takes a conflicted moment before he says, "And you want me to go find them?", and in that moment his face reflects a shifting series of thought and emotion which I think is unique to him and a wonderful conveyance of truth; I think no other actor would have chosen it, and it is utterly perfect.
Bale in 3:10 to Yuma: I still haven't seen the Fighter. It's not that I doubt its worth, and it's not that I think I'll find Bale undeserving of his Oscar; it's that I dislike Oscar's tendency to be seduced by histrionics instead of subtleties. Me, I'd have given Oscar to Bale for this old Western. There's one scene in particular, when he's readying to go on a dangerous mission, arguing with his wife as he does, speaking in hushed tones so the rest of the posse in the parlor will not hear his humiliation that she no longer respects him as a man. It's heart-rending, and only one of many moments of subtlety that are, I suspect, more impressive than all the blood and thunder of Dickie Eklund.
Walken in 7 Psychopaths: You could pick any of thirty or forty movies, really, and I could probably find a superlative Walken moment. This one's got the scene at the hospital. The Walken psychopath knows that the Woody Harrelson psychopath has just brutally killed his wife, and is looking for him. He sits down opposite the killer in the hospital waiting room, and stares at him until the Harrelson psychopath starts to make awkward conversation. Watch Walken's face, through this entire exchange. The changes that happen in his eyes. He is a god walking around among men.
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