Guest Essay: Christian Bale, "our American Psycho"

[notice]Anyone looking for one last sermon before tonight’s Rapture might find solace in this essay from another Awards Daily disciple, Brian Schwartz.[/notice]

In 1993, Tommy Lee Jones won best supporting actor at the Academy Awards. He paid tribute to Harrison Ford, the lead actor he ‘supported,’ by chasing his Fugitive across America, saying he was a great actor and the award would not have been possible without him. Of course that’s literally true, and gracious, but perhaps Jones should have thanked Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, and even Steven Seagal for providing him previous opportunities to show off his supporting chops and assemble holdover votes, like a baseball relief picture who has fallen short of the Hall of Fame only finally to win. His superior competition: Ralph Fiennes as the unpredictable terrorist in Schindler’s List (too new to Hollywood perhaps to get enough votes despite the best performance in the Best Picture); Leonardo DiCaprio, if not his greatest performance then at least his greatest as a supporting actor, as the developmentally disabled younger brother who knew exactly what was eating Gilbert Grape; Pete Postlethwaite, who deserved at least a few Oscars for an intensity three times his size, sharing the same fire supporting Daniel Day-Lewis caught up in the seemingly-unending IRA conflict of In the Name of the Father as he did torturing Ben Affleck with his seemingly-unending CharlesTown crimefest; and John Malkovich, putting Clint Eastwood In the Line of Fire across Montreal with the brood and eccentricity that Charlie Kaufmann and all of us have cherished and shirked at over the years.

Hopefully, this year we’ll hear another gracious tip-of-the-hat from a picture-stealing supporting actor. The clip at the end of the real life brothers, Micky Ward and Dicky Ecklund, somewhat justifies Mark Wahlberg’s understated, and perhaps flat, portrayal of The Fighter. Micky is the subdued and shell-shocked brother of his addict hero/older brother/trainer, Dicky, and in just a real-life moment we see that Micky “can’t get a word in” and why he would want to release all that pent up energy, envy, resentment, and admiration in a ring of his own. Yet unlike Jones, Christian Bale has not built up the same good will with Academy voters, despite many torrid performances.

Bale’s career is a wonder. A dashing, looks-made-for-leading-man actor, he has chosen the road less traveled by, and it has certainly been different. Often choosing to be the villain or the also-ran, Bale’s leading men have been dark and stormy. Despite a British background, he is our American Psycho. Unloading on a set cinematographer only increased his profile as a tortured, selfish presence whose enormous talent perhaps fell short due to little personal humility. We wondered if his need to control the world—or at least the set—led to such gorgeous torture on screen, but also perhaps the limits of his range beyond anger.

Maybe all those emotions that Bale has shared with and borrowed from his sundry roles—a two-way street of strenuous, critical and confusing discourse—climaxed in Dicky. Yes, his portrayed is ‘loud,’ as he labeled it in his Golden Globe acceptance speech redirecting praise on Wahlberg’s stoic Micky, the fighter-made-mediator of his own family. But the quiet moments of Dicky’s downtime, the exhaustion of addiction, slowly startle the audience. Bale manages to create a character who deserves the penalties he faces and yet elicits our sympathy. Like Micky, Dicky’s refuge from his sociochemical Lowell anxiety was the ring. With boxing in the rearview, crack seizes its opportunity in a man a little too alive. Even on the afterparty couch, which begins and ends the film, Dicky celebrates his brother by celebrating his own feelings on a seemingly unnatural high. Bale has fully disappeared by then, with Dicky’s wet eyes the only truth.

Will enough Academy voters put aside their critiques of the publicly controversial Bale to vote for an astounding performance and transformation? Or is the criticism of Bale mostly outside Hollywood, and are insiders amazed again and again by his sundae of performances, topped off by Dicky, the sweetest Marachino ever soaked?