Sometimes — more often than we think — the best movie acting of any year goes unrewarded by the Motion Picture Academy.
There are lots of reasons for this, the most important being that the Academy Awards remain primarily a celebration of the American film industry. The voters try to put the best possible face on Hollywood and they also tend to ignore foreign films — especially foreign-language ones. Instead, they concentrate on pictures and performances that have already won prizes, that are being pushed by expensive studio advertising campaigns — or that their friends are talking about.
That’s why, before we all start trying to outguess that mammoth yearly popularity contest, the Oscars, I want to make my own list of the year’s best actors and actresses. My list includes performances that the Academy will consider, and some they won’t — including a few that belatedly premiered this year in Chicago (such as Alain Resnais’ “Smoking, No Smoking”).
By that criteria, my top male and female performances of 2000 came from unlikely sources: a middle-aged Japanese comedian-writer-painter-actor-filmmaker whose nickname is “Beat” and a bouncy French stage and screen actress who lip-synched songs in two of her three movies.
Their names: “Beat” Takeshi (a k a Takeshi Kitano) and Sabine Azema. Foreign-film buffs know them well — Kitano for his deadpan Japanese crime noirs and the piquant Azema for movies such as “A Sunday in the Country.” But not mass audiences — and I guarantee you neither of these acting geniuses has even an outside Oscar chance.
Inevitably, the year’s best performances come from movies big and little, but they all contain those precious instants actor Jimmy Stewart called “little pieces of time.” And I don’t want to give the impression of having hopelessly arcane tastes, or of ignoring actual movie stars. Not so — as you’ll see.
Following are my personal picks of the best performers last year in each of four major acting categories: all memorable, all preserving those “little pieces of time.” (Since critics’ groups consider all an actor’s or filmmaker’s yearly credits, I’ve followed the same procedure):
Best actors
1. “Beat” Takeshi (a k a Takeshi Kitano) as Kikujiro in “Kikujiro”: Kitano’s Kikujiro — the absurdly irascible guardian of a small boy searching for his mother in star/director Kitano’s Japanese road comedy — is a sublime meld of roughhouse slapstick comedy and buried real emotion; it’s a character based on Kitano’s own father, pulled from deep inside.
2. Om Puri as George Khan in “East is East”: Indian native Puri, one of the world’s great movie actors, plays the emotional opposite of his assimilated dad of “My Son, the Fanatic.” He gives a vitriolic portrayal of prejudice and paternalistic rage as a London fast-food owner trying to marry off his kids.
3. Morgan Freeman as Charlie in “Nurse Betty”: Freeman’s Charlie is a scary, moving portrait of an assassin who falls hard for the woman he has to kill. Freeman is so wise, sad and grave — and so strangely true, despite the script’s smarty-pants artifice — that he turns a playful farce into real tragicomedy.
4. Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland in “Cast Away”: Hanks’ dedication here is awesome: starving himself into shape for his role as a FedEx manager turned modern Robinson Crusoe. But he also catches something hard and moving about survival, loss, and coming home.
5. Billy Crudup as FH in “Jesus’ Son” and Russell Hammond in “Almost Famous”: Crudup rises to the occasion in two great roles: a shabby drug addict trying to get straight and the narcissistic lead guitarist in Cameron Crowe’s splendid ’70s rock memoir.
Others (in order of preference): Robert De Niro as gruff master diver Billy Sunday in “Men of Honor” and as scary dad Jack Byrnes in “Meet the Parents”; Jim Carrey as split personality cop Charlie/Hank Baileygates in “Me, Myself and Irene” and green grouchy madcap The Grinch in “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas”; Ralph Fiennes as three generations of a beleaguered Hungarian Jewish family in “Sunshine” and as lovelorn aristocrat Eugene Onegin in “Onegin”; Ian Holm as real-life Greenwich Village homeless legend Joe Gould in “Joe Gould’s Secret”; and Michael Douglas as failed novelist Grady Tripp in “Wonder Boys,” and as failed U.S. drug czar Robert Wakefield in “Traffic.”
Best actresses
1. Sabine Azema as Celia Teasdale, Sylvie Bell, Irene Pridworth, Rowena Coombes and Josephine Hamilton in “Smoking, No Smoking”; as Odile Lalande in “Same Old Song” and as Louba in “La Buche”: Azema has a joie de vivre and theatricality that are entrancing. She has a field day in her five-role tour de force in Resnais’ adaptation of the Alan Ayckbourn’s “alternate possibilities” series, dazzles in Resnais’ pop musical “Same Old Song,” and steals our hearts again as gypsy chanteuse of “La Buche.”
2. Ellen Burstyn as Sara Goldfarb in “Requiem for a Dream”: From Hubert Selby Jr.’s bleak, bitter novel, Burstyn plays a role of wrenching anguish and hideous comedy: a Jewish mother coping with her heroin-addict son and the vain seductions of TV game shows. Only a really superb movie actress could walk this grisly tightrope.
3. Laura Linney as Sammy Prescott in “You Can Count On Me”: One great part no one is ignoring. Linney plays a straight-arrow, over-achieving mother coping with the return of her beloved but volatile and shiftless brother and an improbable affair with her nit-picking boss (Matthew Broderick). Rigidity and deep compassion.
4. Julia Roberts as Erin in “Erin Brockovich”: Some roles require a big personality. And if Roberts weren’t already a superstar, this would have made her one, the feisty, sexy, never-say-die legal worker who helps bring down a giant.
5. Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth”: Tragic Lily, victim of Edith Wharton’s New York society novel, is one of the great female characters in American fiction; Anderson gets her stubbornness, fragility and fall.
Others: Juliette Binoche as the beautiful, irreverent chocolate shop owner Vianne Rocher in “Chocolat”; Nathalie Baye as fortysomething beautician/pickup artist Angele in “Venus Beauty Institute”; Zhang Ziyi as high-flying swordswoman Jen Yu in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”; Bjork as doomed Czech immigrant and movie musical lover Selma Jezkova in “Dancer in the Dark”; and Michelle Rodriguez as scrappy girl boxer Diana in “Girlfight.”
Best supporting actors
1. Matthew Broderick as Brian in “You Can Count On Me”: Broderick still has a luminous boyish quality best played these days for bittersweet comedy. His role here, written by best friend Ken Lonergan, is classic: an absurdly punctilious banker who proves to be fragile, at least when he’s committing adultery. Not a false note.
2. Joaquin Phoenix as Abbe Coulmier in “Quills,” Commodus in “Gladiator” and Willie Gutierrez in “The Yards”: Three showpiece roles, admirably acquitted: the naive keeper of the Marquis De Sade in Charenton, a Caligula-like Roman emperor and a small-time Queens hood who makes a fatal blunder.
3. Walter Matthau as Lou Mozell in “Hanging Up”: I’m not being sentimental, though Matthau was ill and dying when he played the ill and dying Lou, father of three Nora Ephron-like sisters. This is a brave performance, but it’s also funny, acidly observing which, despite everything, never falls into bathos.
4. Jeffrey Wright as Peoples Hernandez in “Shaft”: The year’s best movie villain was sadistic drug dealer Peoples. Played with grisly humor and self-absorption that will make you laugh, Wright also convinces you the guy is a sociopath, unredeemable.
5. Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck in “Shadow of the Vampire”: Amazing. Dafoe convinces you that he’s Max Schreck, mysterious star of Murnau’s 1922 “Nosferatu,” then convinces you he’s a vampire with a raging blood lust.
Others: Benicio Del Toro as hipster Tijuana cop Javier Rodriguez in “Traffic” and stone-cold killer Longbaugh in “Way of the Gun”; Fred Willard as the improvised, hilariously boorish and sex-obsessed broadcaster Buck Laughlin in “Best in Show”; Tim Blake Nelson as Pete, the dumb chain-gang fugitive who sings swell in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”; John Turturro as Delmar, the mean chain-gang fugitive who may be turned into a frog in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”; and John Goodman as Big Dan Teague, the Cyclops and crooked bible salesman in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
Best supporting actresses
1. Rosemary Harris as Valerie (Sonnenschein) Sors in “Sunshine”: Harris movingly plays another member of the Sonnenschein (“Sunshine”) family: a youthful maverick turned wise old survivor who navigates the passage from Hungarian empire to Fascism to Communism — and from wealth to poverty — with singular compassion and grace.
2. Marion O’Dwyer as Marion Monks in “Agnes Browne”: A wonderful Irish actress, O’Dwyer plays Agnes’ fatally ill best friend with the right blend of rowdy humor and pathos.
3. Frances McDormand as Elaine Miller in “Almost Famous” and Sara Gaskell in “Wonder Boys”: Proving she doesn’t need husband Joel Coen to write her fine roles, McDormand does two matriarchs: the tolerant teacher mom in “Almost Famous” and the tolerant dean/lover in “Wonder Boys.”
4. Shirley Henderson as Debbie in “Wonderland”: Michael Winterbottom’s “Wonderland’ is a mine of rich performances — we could just as well have named Molly Parker or Gina McKee, who play Debbie’s sisters. As the promiscuous divorced mother who puts hubby Ian Hart through Hell, Henderson is funny, ribald, fiercely alive.
5. Judi Dench as Armande Voizin in “Chocolat”: From a supreme actress comes the portrait of a rebellious diabetic who refuses to join her town’s boycott of a chocolate shop. Dench plays her character with a ruthlessness that defuses all sentimentality.
Others: Madeleine Kahn as wistful housewife Alice Gold in “Judy Berlin”; Barbara Harris as edgy Sue Berlin in “Judy Berlin”; Elaine May as the addle-brained May in “Small Time Crooks”; Blythe Danner as nonpareil straight woman Dina Byrnes in “Meet the Parents”; and Catherine Deneuve as domineering mother Marie in “Pola X,” brave diva actress Gabrielle Develay in “East-West” and best friend Kathy in “Dancer in the Dark.”
