Edition: U.S. / Global

The Performances in Close-Up: Best Actor

Published: February 15, 2004


Johnny Depp's performance as Capt. Jack Sparrow in "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" accomplishes a rare feat. It's a vivacious, garrulous character turn that manages not to wear on the audience and not to inhibit the movie's momentum.

Not only does Mr. Depp, as the star, keep the picture together; he also demonstrates the grace and graciousness that are ordinarily the province of the able supporting player. Woozy and contemplative — there actually appears to be a stray thought rattling around in the back of Sparrow's dreadlocked head — he finds a generous groove and stays knee-deep in it. At no point does he upstage the other actors in the film; he may be the Ernie Isley of movie actors.

Even when he's at the center of the picture — which is often, what with all that mascara and braiding, all those gargled consonants — Mr. Depp's patience and concentration lend him the aura of an ensemble member. As a result, his cheeky attentiveness takes on the color of devilish authority. He's so rooted in the liquor-soaked Sparrow that he locates the reality in a character audiences might otherwise dismiss as a flight of fancy. He steals a movie that's a treasure-trove of commotion.



When a performer becomes a star by seeming hipper than everyone else, it can put a damper on his future as a dramatic actor. Imagine Groucho Marx being tearily sincere or that lordly drunk W. C. Fields owning up to his alcoholism: no, it wouldn't feel right to watch these champions of one-upmanship stripped of their comic masks.

But in "Lost in Translation," Bill Murray has found a role that lets him be the rumpled, mock-suave, slightly lewd hipster that made him a pop-culture icon, and also an achingly vulnerable late-middle-aged man contemplating the wreckage of his life. The performance is a dual triumph — for the actor, who is marvelous, and for the director, Sofia Coppola, who conceived it with his persona in mind. Under Ms. Coppola's direction, Mr. Murray's humor and sadness can now be seen as coming from the same place, his irony rooted in an unshakable sense of isolation.

As the fading movie star Bob Harris, Mr. Murray sits in the sky bar of his Tokyo hotel, so removed from the city that it could be a spaceship. His patter with the film's protagonist, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), is determinedly breezy: almost every line is rounded with a quip. Still, his anguish is palpable. His jokes about his Japanese hosts are not expressions of superiority but of resignation. He will never connect with them. His satire is something to cling to in this alien universe.

Mr. Murray's Bob may not have the vocabulary to express his emotions without sardonic curlicues, but on two occasions he is suddenly "straight." The first is in a karaoke bar, when he croons Bryan Ferry's "More Than This": his "Saturday Night Live" lounge lizard melts away, and we realize with a start that his yearning is sincere. Then, at the end of the film, he whispers into Charlotte's ear — something Ms. Coppola allows to remain private. She gives Mr. Murray his most heartbreaking moment on screen, yet protects his integrity as one of the cinema's great modern clowns.



Ben Kingsley is an actor of immense, often ominous interiority. A slight, wiry man, he plays outsize characters whose power derives from a sense of volumes left unspoken, emotions roiling beneath the surface, threatening to burst their restraints. That surface is as eloquent as the fin of a shark: it's what you don't see that matters most.

But what if a part called for Mr. Kingsley to let passion rip? In "House of Sand and Fog," it does, and the outcome is some of his best work. Mr. Kingsley plays Col. Massoud Behrani, an exiled, financially pressed Iranian military officer caught up in an escalating dispute over a modest Northern California bungalow. Behrani is an authoritarian paterfamilias capable of violence and proud of his former association with the Shah; yet he's also deeply principled, and his devotion to his family is the force that drives his life. With typical precision, Mr. Kingsley peels back the layers of this complicated man, but late in the story he exposes the character's raw core.

In a scene that sets in motion the movie's horrific denouement, Behrani witnesses the shooting of someone dear to him. With a wail of anguish, he clasps the victim to his chest, blood blooming on his shirtfront as if from his own shattered heart. After being questioned by the police, he races to the hospital where the victim has been taken; directed to a waiting room, he throws himself to the floor in the Muslim prayer position and frantically bargains with God. This kind of prolonged, full-bore emotion can reduce good actors to melodrama. Not Mr. Kingsley, who, even in extremis, inflects his grief with a sense of things not just unspoken but unspeakable. His still face and desperate eyes convey a dreadful truth: No scream is sufficient to express such loss.