a bad guy amongst the bad guys: chris evans in the iceman

(2013. dir: Ariel Vroman) A thing few actors can do successfully is to alter their personal rhythm for the length of an entire film. Yeah, you can make a point of talking faster, jumping harder on your cues, or, like Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune, you can slow yourself down just a notch, give yourself a solider center to work from, sort of jerryrig a strength of gravitas. Most of the time quickening your natural pace comes across as caricature (not always a bad thing: think Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys). At its most effective, you get the caged explosions of Ralph Fiennes in In Bruges, or, even better, Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, this last surely one of the most terrifying performances ever. Slowing one's energy, on the other hand, results in a confined performance (which worked towards Irons' Oscar, that stoical mien allowing the creepiness of his possible guilt to blindside us at the end).

The fact is, you know you're going to get a different tempo if you cast Christopher Walken, Samuel L. Jackson, Al Pacino or Michael Caine. You can pretty much count on it, and you have to, because complementary tempos make for great exchanges. Butch is quick, Sundance is steady. You cast the rapidfire Pesci opposite the steady DeNiro, and sparks fly when Robert Downey's staccato Tony Stark kicks up a bromance with Mark Ruffalo's cautious Bruce Banner. In Bruges works because Colin Farrell is fast and furious, Brendan Gleeson is slow and steady; McDonagh's follow-up 7 Psychopaths suffers because he's cast Farrell in the steady role, playing off the unstoppered stream-of-consciousness that comprises Sam Rockwell's hit-and-miss wit, and Farrell feels hogtied. You can tell it because when he finally gets to play off the (slow and steady) Walken, he brightens up, comes to life. (And, speaking of Walken, remember the classic "Sicilian" scene in True Romance, the one where Dennis Hopper talks his ear off? It works because Hopper is quick, Walken is steady.)

Even when an actor "disguises" himself well, he's not usually doing it through tempo-change. Daniel Day-Lewis is our current shape-shifter laureate, and yet the quickest he ever gets is, what? the punk kid in My Beautiful Laundrette? (I haven't seen a lot of his work, so help me out here.) My point is that even our best actors, even our Streeps, may speak more quickly or slowly, but the natural energy-tempos tend to stay the same.

Now I want you to look at Chris Evans. As Captain America and in other roles (Cellular, Push, Street Kings) he's slow and steady, but he always has a tendency to jump right on a cue. You come away thinking you have a clue into the man himself, that this is the way he presents himself in the world. Then you watch the Losers and the Iceman, and you get a whole different guy. He's quick, he's surefire, he can go forever without a pause, and, particularly as Mr. Freezy in the Iceman, his performance still seems thoughtful and intelligent. This is a smart guy; his mind just works so fast he never has to show you he's thinking about what he's going to say. If you're not looking for Evans in this movie, you won't recognize him. He's disguised himself, yeah, with moppy hair and '70s glasses, but he's also accelerated his tempo so successfully that just don't catch a glimpse of the good Captain, not a single one, and that's no easy accomplishment for a matinee idol of his stature and fame.

As far as the rest of the movie goes, it's Michael Shannon as a mob hitman. You know what to expect, right? Sure, he'll be great, he always is, but you know his coldness by now, his scariness, you think you don't need to see it because you can guess his moves, right? But not so. He's mesmerizing to watch. And I fully guarantee that in the last few minutes, his closing soliloquy, he'll blow you away. He's that good.

chris evans when he plays a normal human

It didn't start out to be a Chris Evans thing. I actually started out watching movies with (the uncannily brilliant) Cillian Murphy, and that's how I got to Sunshine. It's the Danny Boyle sci-fi in which the sun is old and tired and mankind is trying to restart it with a nuke to its innards. It underwhelmed me the first time I saw it (not scriptwriter Alex Garland's fault, or the cast's, who are lovely; I think the blame rests entirely with Boyle), but I was fascinated, on returning to it, to find Captain America there in the crew. And not just playing any crew member, but the Shadow-Carrier: the macho flyboy who is determined to save the world even if he has to kill everyone onboard to do it. It interests me that the very quality of earnest guilelessness which he so effortlessly exudes and which makes him uniquely suited to play America's humblest superhero redoubles its strength here, in a role which any other actor would have given an inappropriately black-hatted hue. When crisis strikes, every action this pilot takes is thoughtfully aimed toward seeing the mission accomplished, the sun recharged, and the earth saved. Everyone, himself included, is expendable to reach that end. He's a good guy, a hero, and in the end he gives his life in a particularly difficult and unsung fashion to see it achieved. Somehow, miraculously, Evans never seems villainous, even when he's snarlingly alpha-maling at Murphy's physicist-protag or coldly condemning a shipmate to death by execution. It's a stunningly successful performance in a sadly unsatisfying film.

Evans' career so far is crazily skewed toward the superheroic. Besides the good Captain, he's twice been Johnny Storm, 2009's Push concerns a motley group of mutant-kids with superpowers, and Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World has its own superhero thing going on. Even when he's not superheroing, he's plain heroing, as in Snowpiercer and the Losers, a movie with roots in the comic book world and dealing with an "A-Team" band of military hero types, sort of flawed (but just barely) demi-psuedo-superheroes. (In this one, Evans gets to be funny, and he really is; like Channing Tatum kind of funny-gorgeous that doesn't somehow seem fair to the rest of mankind.)

Of course, Evans looks like a superhero, probably more than any other actor. He is, in fact, so ridiculously handsome, with a body so exactly sculpted to reflect our modern conception of extreme masculine pulchritude, I wouldn't be all that surprised to find out that he didn't really exist at all, that he is just a complex CGI image created by some genius on a computer at Marvel to populate an annoying lacuna in the casting pool. It's his ingenuousness, though, that makes him the true rara avis, and although his talents are often belittled, the frank ease with which he communicates thought and feeling without drawing extra attention to himself is positively refreshing.

And every now and then he plays a normal human.

Cellular: (2004. dir: David R. Ellis) The worst parts of Cellular, an unabashed action B-film from late director/stuntman Ellis, are all in the first two minutes, when Jessica (Kim Basinger) walks her adorable little boy to the school bus. This is the treacly schmaltz setting up the impossibly edenic life (Jessica is a high school science teacher married to a realtor, yet they live in a house the size of Balmoral Castle, complete with swimming pool and serving staff) which is shattered in the third minute by the intrusion of brutal kidnappers. Basinger is terrible in this segment, but she makes up for it in the following couple of hours, excelling at the "terrified-but-strong" mode which propels her through the rest of the film.

The movie is sprung up from a clever notion: trapped in an attic, she manages to repair a broken phone and call a random number, reaching a self-involved but lovable surf-boy (Evans) whom she convinces to run all over town trying to save her family, the trick being that if the call is cut off, it cannot be repeated and he will never find her. Without perfect casting and decent storytelling, it might easily have been too clever for its own good, but the casting really is that perfect, including William H. Macy as the sad-sack cop who ultimately saves the day.

Evans is the pretty-boy loafing around after his ex-girlfriend (Jessica Biel, a small role, and not her best work) on Santa Monica Pier, and he plays it without a stumble, his charm constant without ever tumbling over the edge into the cloying or obnoxious. Complications follow, one upon another, with an easy sweep, carrying us along over the rough patches without too much turbulence. We believe him as the low-key party-boy who is trying to trick his ex into taking him back by faking a social conscience, and we don't mind it because he's obviously doing it out of genuine regard for her. Then we watch him grow up, discover that he does have a conscience, a strong sense of empathy, and a stubborn willingness to make sacrifices for the good of another, even a stranger, and we believe that, too. In short, the story is contrived, but it's well pulled off, and that's all we care about in the end.

One of my favorite things about it is Jason Statham as the chief heavy. Watching this man fight is an unexpected pleasure. His movements are graceful and clean, and evoke that peaceful, exalted feeling you get when you're watching a great dancer, or any true master of his craft at work.

robert patrick double feature: a texas funeral and jayne mansfield's car

a Texas Funeral: (1999. dir: W. Blake Herron) These two movies are extraordinarily well-suited to viewing as a double-feature. They're both family gatherings instigated by the death of a figure of near-legendary proportions, and they're both character-studies leavened, with varying levels of success, with a strong dose of whimsy.

Martin Sheen is Sparta Whit, a larger-than-life, camel-raising, land-rich Texan whose death affects all the life-sized people comprising the next generations of his family. Joanne Whalley is his institutionalized, nymphomaniac daughter, Chris Noth his inscrutable nephew, Olivia D'Abo his frightened niece-in-law. Grace Zabriskie is fantastic as his white-haired, sensuous wife, driven near-mad with lust for what is cagily referred to throughout as "the power of the male Whit ear."

No one has ever been better than Robert Patrick at playing the problematic "man's-man" father who doesn't understand his sensitive son. I've watched him create at least three different versions, and they're none of them carbon copies, all distinctly three-dimensional humans. Compare this one, Zach Whit, a good-hearted, straightforward man who is genuinely bemused by a son who begs for the life of an earthworm about to be used as bait, takes a vow of silence after being told to shut up, and runs away, terrified, when the hunting rifles come out, to the more stoical and wiser Jack Aarons in Bridge to Terabithia, and both of those to his brilliantly courageous turn as the hard-edged Ray Cash in Walk the Line.

Jayne Mansfield's Car: (2012. dir: Billy Bob Thornton) The vibrant, life-loving matriarch of two families, one in Alabama, the other in England, has died and asked to be transported back to the States for burial, bringing the two disparate clans together for the first time. This is about fathers and sons and their ridiculously difficult relations. It's also about war, and how it affects men's opinions of themselves, of one another, and of the world they live in.

Thornton's two best virtues as a director are a fearlessness in taking his own time telling a story and a wonderful regard for those small strangenesses that make us all, even the most "normal" of us, eccentric and individual. His films are more interested in character than story. He takes the time to linger, for example, on a boy at the Jayne Mansfield exhibit, a boy with one line who will not figure again into the story, lets us watch him look at a crude sketch of Mansfield on the wall, then impulsively reach forward and give the picture a peck on the cheek.

This movie is filled with great moments. Here's one of my favorites: Patrick plays the stodgiest of the yank brothers, the only one who didn't see action in war-time. Embittered and driven by his exclusion from the enclave of war heroes around him, he has over-compensated with success in the peace-time world, while his damaged and disillusioned brothers can barely manage to live in it. As the tensions of the family gathering mount and that awful "Thanksgiving" brand of claustrophobia takes its hold, the one that comes of being trapped in a house with too many family members, your secrets and flaws known to all, the alcohol flows in attempt to allay the hideousness and pass the time. After a particularly vulnerable, difficult scene in which the British son (Ray Stevenson, wonderful) at last publicly confronts his father about denigrating his war service because he spent the bulk of it in a prison-camp, Patrick's suburban, middle-class wife breaks into a fit of giggles and suddenly kisses her husband passionately. Surprised, he responds, and they start making out drunkenly on the couch in front of the two older patriarchs. It is a wonderful, human moment, the like of which I've never seen anywhere else, and it may well have been the fuclrum upon which my Robert Patrick film festival first turned.