2011 Calvin Awards: Best Character
February 15, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
In its place is Best Character, which honors those creations in film that don't neatly fit into our categories for acting, but still made movies in 2010 special and memorable. In many cases this represents the melding of acting and theme, with characters lifting up the main ideas of the film into clearer focus. In some others, they're characters who are so central to their films that you can't imagine the movie succeeding without them. When all the parts of a film are working together in congress, you get characters like the ones listed below that should stand the test of time.
The obvious choice for our winner is Thierry Guetta, who also goes by another name (maybe), from Banksy's documentary (?) Exit Through the Gift Shop. A Los Angeles-by-way-of-France videographer of, well, everything, Guetta stumbles upon the vibrant street art scene of the late '90s and '00s and sets about recording the ephemeral projects for safe-keeping after being introduced to Banksy and being commissioned to make a documentary about the scene. The steady reveal of Guetta's quirks – Hoarders should get a hold of this guy, for a start – turns the film into an exercise of “can this guy be for real?”
It's easy to see why – with what seems like an exaggerated French accent, a set of puppy dog eyes and bizarre facial hair, he seems like a perfect creation of parody. And yet, the feeling of authenticity somehow sticks. You couldn't create a character like this, but you could find one. Later in the film, when Guetta adopts his new point of view and decides that he's going to make some art, that's when things really reach grand heights of lunacy. Is Banksy having a laugh on us? Maybe, but I don't think so, and it doesn't really matter anyway as far as the point of his film. And boy, does Guetta's odd behavior ever make that point for him.
Placing a close second is Olive from Easy A as portrayed by Emma Stone. Carrying the load of the entire film and appearing in nearly every scene, Olive is by turns witty, vulnerable and conniving. Her presence anchors the film and creates a way for the film to elevate above what could have been sitcom-worthy material. More than any other scripted film this year, Easy A needed a solid character at its core to make it work, and creating the precocious yet still believable teen is one of the hardest things to do. Time will tell, but Olive Penderghast could become this generation's Ferris Bueller.
Third place goes to one of the (some might say only) few bright spots from the thoroughly repellent Kick-Ass, in Hit-Girl. As played by Chloe Moretz, she's the amazingly profane, hyper-violent pre-teen assassin trained by her father to take down an underground criminal organization. As gimmick comic book heroes brought to life go, she's a pretty good one.
Fourth spot falls to another comic book character, but of an entirely different stripe. Wallace Wells is the conscience of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, serving as the big, older, sexually voracious gay angel on Scott's shoulder. Kieran Culkin lifts him off the page to be an even greater and more important presence in the film than in the comic, and provides a solid portion of the film's humor with razor-sharp sarcasm, but also flips the switch when necessary to cut through other characters' cynicism and direct them on their right path.
Fifth and sixth place nearly tie, appropriately enough, seeing as they're the two main characters from True Grit, Maddie Ross and Rooster Cogburn. We give a slight edge to the tough-as-nails teenager determined to catch her father's killer over the alcoholic U.S. Marshall she hires to do it, but both are remarkable creations. That they came with an added difficulty is even more impressive, considering that the Coens, along with actors Hailee Steinfeld and Jeff Bridges, faced existing iconic portrayals from the 1969 film version. The problem was solved in an unexpected way – humor. These are two of the funniest characters in a western (although they might not think so) since Blazing Saddles, but the humor never undercuts the seriousness of the proceedings around them. Time will tell if either of these portrayals supplants their original counterparts (my guess is not, but you never know), but they can certainly look their predecessors square in the eye.
One of the more original literary creations of the past decade survived the trip to the big screen in seventh place for us. In bringing Lisbeth Salander, the tattooed, pierced and shockingly violent central character from the Millennium Series novels, to real life, there were huge obstacles in overcoming expectations of fans of the series. It's hard not to be thrilled with the result, with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo's version of Salander feeling just as alien but protecting a damaged center as we felt she should be. David Fincher gets a second take on the character this year, but it's hard to imagine it being topped.
Eighth spot goes to Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network. Bringing a real-life person to the screen is always a challenge, since you have to deal with the feeling that accuracy is the most important thing (don't fool yourself – no one has ever, ever been portrayed with perfect accuracy on screen), especially with a figure as contemporary as Zuckerberg. Whatever changes had to be made to Zuckerberg for the character to work on screen, they're well worth it, as he become almost a stand-in for our times, a tragic figure isolated by his own actions, a failure in his own success.
In a banner year for animation, surprisingly only one animated character makes our list. Toothless, Hiccup's “steed” from How To Train Your Dragon makes our list as the second of our three-way tie for eighth, and perhaps unsurprisingly so considering how many pet lovers there are among us. Toothless perfectly captured the experience of having a companion and despite having no lines, helped the film to have an emotional center as an E.T. for our times.
Lastly, we have another “true”-to-life character, in Dicky Eklund from The Fighter. As a crack-addled manic force of nature, he creates the central conflict at the heart of the film, about how family obligations can be an anchor on dreams. And boy, what an anchor Eklund is. Echoing some of the great sad sack boxing characters in cinema, Eklund brings the tragedy of wasted potential into sharp focus.
In this highly competitive category, some of the notable characters from 2010 who just missed the cut are Nina Sayers, Natalie Portman's emotionally stunted ballerina from Black Swan, Steven Russell, Jim Carrey's homosexual con artist from I Love You Phillip Morris and Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio's tragically afflicted dream thief from Inception. (Reagen Sulewski/BOP)
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