We're 1/4 through this century(!!) so everyone's doing lists, and the latest comes via The Ringer with The 101 Best Movie Performances of the 21st Century. Two performances come by way of Charlie's films.
81 Jim Carrey as Joel Barish, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Ace Ventura has never gotten his Oscar, alas; he has settled instead for being Two-Time Golden Globe Winner Jim Carrey. Did he deserve one for playing Andy Kaufman? Maybe. Did he deserve one for playing Truman Burbank? Probably. But Lord Jim did his best-ever work in Michel Gondry’s bleak, whimsical, chaotic, and heartrending 2004 tragi-romantic fantasia, precisely because the funniest (arguably) and hardest-working (inarguably) comedy superstar of his era doesn’t try to match either the whimsy or the bleakness.
Carrey doesn’t overact, and he doesn’t overact by underacting the way most prestige-hunting comedians do. Instead, as Joel—the soft-spoken introvert, the nice guy, the red-flag-waving “nice guy,” the heartbreaker, the heartbroken—our man plays everything masterfully straight, affable, and potentially lethal, with his most devastating (and romantic!) lines delivered as casual asides. “I remember that speech really well,” he whispers; “OK!” he concludes, with a shattering, tossed-off charm that wins over both Kate Winslet and several subsequent generations of hopeless (and devastated!) romantics. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s high concept and higher melodrama would’ve swallowed up both lesser and harder actors; Jim Carrey, here and maybe only here, delivers an absolute masterpiece of perfect balance and total control. Against your better judgment (and possibly his), you will fall for him again, every time. —Harvilla
35 Nicolas Cage as Charlie and Donald Kaufman, Adaptation (2002)
One of the weirdest, most ambitious movies of the past 25 years requires not one, but two of its weirdest, most ambitious performances. Adaptation begins, literally, with the creation of all life. It culminates in Cage playing the legendary screenwriter Charlie Kaufman—in a film written by Kaufman—and his fictional twin brother, Donald, who are less foils than the two ends of a snake eating its own tail. To call the whole thing self-reflexive doesn’t even begin to cover it. Cage observed and interviewed Kaufman extensively to play the part, after which Kaufman would watch a nervous Cage perform him. Round and round they went, until all of that layering self-consciousness rendered one of the most prolific actors of his generation unrecognizable.
Cage’s Charlie is more neurosis than man. Cage’s Donald, by contrast, is either too dumb or too smart to get in his own way. Together, the two performances uncork one of the best movies ever made about the creative process, in all its high-flying self-importance and low-hanging hackery. Watching it feels like a miracle. Adaptation shouldn’t work, and in the hands of just about any other actor, it couldn’t work. Yet Cage manages to double sell a movie about failing to write a movie, stepping over every potential pitfall to show how the truth makes it through to the other side. It’s beautiful. It’s unwieldy. It’s Cage. —Mahoney
#1 goes to Naomi Watts as Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn, Mulholland Drive (2001).
Thanks to Tim!
It's so weird to think Adaptation is 23 years old and came out a few months after I launched BCK.
