The director of "The First Lady", Pablo Larrain, is from Chile. He was originally good at dealing with politicized themes. Critical realism was the main style of his past works. "The First Lady" is Laren’s first English-language film shot in Hollywood, but this movie does not see any of Laren’s personal style at all. The whole idea of the play is to show the first lady’s female role. Star Natalie Portman's acting. The schedule of President John F. Kennedy from his death to the funeral became Portman's performance background for showing the first lady's ups and downs in life. From the perspective of secularization, Portman’s performance represents her gradual deductive trajectory. She gradually got rid of the image of the old lady, starting with "Black Swan" and "A Story of Love and Darkness". Enter those roles that are complex at heart. In "The First Lady", Portman appeared in almost every shot. Laren, who is very good at creating the atmosphere of the times, used different visual styles of black and white, color and coarse-grained image quality to differentiate the creation of the first lady. image of. Laren continued to use various super close-up shots to closely stick Portman's body and face to show his most subtle manners and the range of speech movements. The purpose of this performance is too direct and clear. Compared with Bergman's close-up in "Mask", it is completely twofold. Laren's purpose is to show Portman's acting skills, the kind of acting with a strong actor studio-methodological color. The close-up shot of "Mask" is directly aimed at the huge conflict between the body and the soul, and has nothing to do with the actors' acting skills.
The highly utilitarian aesthetic composition of "The First Lady" has now become an example of Hollywood biopics of "Chong Ao". There are more or less similar movies every year. Some movies even directly make the actors proclaim the emperor. Eddie Redmayne won the Oscar winner with "Theory of Everything". "Theory of Everything" itself is an extremely mediocre movie. It was originally a thankless task to shoot a biopic of a living person. It is also a strange man like Hawking. What the screenwriter can do is to inspire and sensationalize. The reason why the actor picks up this subject is because of the huge drama contained in the role itself. Just a crippled body is enough for Redmayne to play well. So the film finally turned into a variety show close to an actor's draft. The audience in the theater is closer to the tourists of the amusement park and the circus: let's enjoy how Redmayne plays the disabled!
There are many similar examples. "A Week Between Me and Monroe" focused on the era icon and sexy bomber Marilyn Monroe, but this is not a complete historical biopic. Some life fragments (refer to "President Lincoln", "Jobs" and "First Lady", this approach is a routine of Hollywood biopics in recent years). The most important interest and intention of the film is to choose an actor who is quite different from Monroe's temperament and whose star temperament is not revealed, Michelle Williams, to play Monroe. The purpose is to seek and capture some anti-idol, de-enchanting, and mundane images of Monroe. But everything is nothing more. Only with this little creativity can only be a mediocre movie. "Foster Conversation with Nixon" spent a full two hours of space, just to show one of the most important and wonderful interviews in the history of American television. Nixon accepted an exclusive interview with British reporter Foster after the Watergate incident. The film uses a style similar to that of a documentary, allowing the two actors to do their best to restore the realism of historical figures. Between the gestures, the performances of the two actors are really wonderful and delicate. After two hours, the audience's performance of the actors is naturally impeccable, but after a closer look, they feel that it may be better to watch the TV series of the year to be more realistic, because the whole movie The movie has nothing else. Even some Cannes directors with extremely strong personal styles will make similar movies with the help of this Oscar mechanism. As a comrade Gus Van Sant's comrade-themed biopic "Milk", made Sean Penn win the Oscar winner for the second time. Obviously, Santer, whose original author's style was extremely strong, could only take a back seat in this film and did his best to cooperate with Sean Penn to create an image of a gay politician. In the past, Sean Penn, who used to be a masculine and straight man, lived up to expectations in this film, creating a gay image that is not simply feminine and weak. In all fairness, "Milk" is an acceptable biopic, but it's nothing more than that. The goal of the film is still too obvious to make Sean Penn a good movie addiction. This is a huge gap with the style orientation of "Elephant" and "Psychedelic Park" directed by Van Sant. In a nutshell, the actors in these films are all trying to give a great performance in this kind of mediocre film.
DiCaprio and Streep are definitely not the masters of this kind of thinking. Streep was nominated for the Oscar for the twentieth time this year. As an actor, such a record is truly amazing, but if we look at some of her works in recent years, the quality of the film itself is mostly lackluster. "Iron Lady: Sturdy Tenderness", which allowed Streep to win the Oscar for Best Actress for the second time, is basically a movie of the same quality as "Theory of Everything". Every shot of Streep seems to be in Show the audience how difficult it is to control the role of Iron Lady. Streep completely turned the movie performance into a cosplay game. DiCaprio's career trajectory changed because of the frustration of the "Titanic" actor award. Since then, the main purpose of all the movies he has played is for the Oscar statuette. Even some big-name directors, such as Scorsese, will deliberately design some unnecessary scenes to show the so-called acting skills in the movies he directed, such as the embarrassing crawling passages in "The Wolf of Wall Street." "Wild Hunter" is the culmination of DiCaprio's mentality, and Alessandro Gonzalez Inarito has completely reduced to the theater director of a gorgeous, thrilling and thrilling wild survival reality show. Sadly, the Oscars and the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences really bought it. So it's no surprise that a movie like "The First Lady" appears again this year.
The Oscar award mechanism is of course the root cause of this unhealthy trend. As the annual evaluation mechanism of the film industry, Oscar awards always try to index, digitize or quantify all parameters related to aesthetics. This is reflected in the extremely differentiated and refined award type design and positioning. For a product, the evaluation department must give a positive or negative conclusion to each department of the production organization in order to evaluate the standardized data. In stark contrast to this award mechanism are the three major European film festivals. Represented by the top Cannes Film Festival, Cannes, which pursues the theory of genius and authorism, always puts the director in the first consideration. The director is the only real star on the Cannes awards stage. Cannes always affirms the film first, and then considers the appropriate award for the film and the director. Even today, most of the global media still don’t understand the Grand Prize of the Jury, the Jury Prize and the Palme d’Or. What is the difference between the awards themselves? Wasn't the Palme d'Or was judged by the jury? Cannes also has an actor award. "In the Mood for Love" made Tony Leung the Cannes actor, but it was Wong Kar Wai who became popular. Except for the actor himself, no one will remember who the actor of Cannes was last year. Cannes will also appear similar to "The First Lady", the protagonist appears in every scene, from beginning to end. This is the case for most of the Darnet brothers' movies. Last year, Ken Rocky won the second time in Palme d’Or’s success. The same is true of I am Black. The performance of the actors in "My Blake" is very wonderful, and they have perfected Ken Roach's favorite working class, but after watching the movie, the audience remembers not the acting skills of the actor, but the extreme Ken Roach conveyed by the role. The hateful and critical global capitalism and neoliberalism have brought about the evil consequences. To summarize briefly, the emphasis on product attributes and artistic attributes in the composition of the film determines to a certain extent the attitude of the European Film Festival and the Oscar mechanism towards the selection of actor awards. The European Film Festival first affirms that the film as a whole is always directly linked to the director's art. The Oscar mechanism, which takes quantitative evaluation as the first consideration, will pay more attention to refined individual index assessment.
If we discuss the performance aesthetics itself, we will find that the methodological performance has also had an overwhelming influence on the appearance of "First Lady", the overwhelming performance of actors. The New York actor studio methodology system converted from the Soviet Stanislavsky’s performance system, according to the French philosopher Deleuze’s interpretation, is actually another version of the American dream practice: how to change oneself into the new In the environment. The essence of the Steinney system, in fact, Zhou Xingchi’s summary in "The King of Comedy" is basically in place, from the outside to the inside, from the inside to the outside, it is said that the external environment or events oppress the actors, and the actors must mobilize accordingly. A variety of similar emotional memories in personal life are then expressed through externalization and integrated into the environment, thus forming a SA-S'-like chain of stimulus-response patterns. If we make a horizontal comparison, the most famous European actor theory is Bresson's model theory. Bresson strongly opposes the concept of actors and acting. His famous saying is, "Say to your model:'Don't play another person, don't play yourself. Don't play anyone.'" The power of interpretation is given to the audience.
Hitchcock once expressed a strong dislike for method actors. When he collaborated with Paul Newman on "Breaking the Iron Curtain", he found that Newman would involuntarily cause his body to make subtle twitches. This is actually typical The purpose of the method of performance is to mobilize emotional memory. This is a process of internalizing the character's emotions. After this process is completed, he can successfully perform theatrical performances. To put it bluntly, this is a typified performance, because it is always a similar experience that is mobilized. What it provides is a performance mode and performance dimension that allows the audience to be relatively credible, and actors can copy and operate sustainably. Actors such as Streep have become an omnipotent performance machine for all roles in the world. And this kind of performance mode that can be replicated, can be mass-produced, and is highly likely to be affirmed by the academy, has led to ignoring the overall creation of scripts such as "The First Lady" and "The Theory of Everything" and only providing space for actors to play their skills. The movies appear frequently. The reason why we get bored with similar performances is because there are always boring moments in typified things. And once these movies emptied the script and only the actors were left with this way of acting, we might only feel that it was empty and tasteless.
Finally, let’s talk about a very extreme and weird example of an Oscar actor award. Oscar has the habit of affirming the "excellent" performances in mediocre movies, but there is also the situation of denying the "banal" performances in great movies. The most classic example of this is "The Last Emperor". Bertolucci's epic masterpiece was nominated for nine awards including best film, best director, and best screenplay that year, and these nominations eventually became substantial awards. From the nomination point of view, all aspects of the film have been affirmed, the only thing missing is the actor award. If the judges of the academy deny the performance of DiCaprio in "Titanic", it is because the role itself is relatively simple and plain, which is reasonable, but "The Last Emperor" is definitely based on the foundation of personal performance. In the historical biopics, the actors’ performances were completely ignored, which is a bit unbelievable. The specific reason is probably caused by the award mechanism, because the selection of actor awards is voted by the actor judges, and the more or less Orientalist sentiment has caused the actor judges' cognitive barriers to the performance of these oriental actors. But if you cut in from the perspective of affirming the overall value of the film, the performance of the actors in this film must not be ignored.
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