Al Pacino as Will Dormer in “Insomnia” (2002)
Speaking of “Insomnia” and unexpectedly restrained performances: Al Pacino. The actor had done some good work in the decade or so before (“The Insider,” for example), but for the most part, by the year 2002, the legendary star had descended into the period of his career that we like to call the “Shouty Al” era — the scenery-chewing, never-knowingly-subtle magnification of everything that Pacino used to be. But “Insomnia” (released the same year as Pacino nadirs “S1mOne” and “People I Know“) proved to be something of an exception, a beautifully muted and textured turn that, at least until this year’s “Manglehorn,” proved to be the actor’s last great big-screen performance. Pacino takes the role played by Stellan Skarsgard in the Norwegian original, here a big-city cop facing corruption charges at home, who’s called up to help a murder investigation in Alaska with his partner (Martin Donovan), who soon reveals that he’s agreed to testify against his pal to save his own skin. In pursuit of the suspect, he accidentally, or perhaps not, kills his partner, and as he’s blackmailed by the killer (Williams, see above), he begins to lose his mind to the sleep disorder of the title. The film is in many ways Nolan’s least interesting (it’s the only one he doesn’t have screenwriting credit on, and it’s a more familiar tale as a result), but it’s still a tense and atmospheric little thriller, and Pacino’s performance anchors the whole thing. His subdued, tortured nature as he sinks into sleepless guilt and questions his own actions is striking for a performer who’d so often been big and blaring in the years before. Plenty of actors have played guilt over the years, but few have seen it take such a physical toll on them: Pacino’s exhaustion is palpable, in the best sense. Again, Pacino hasn’t worked with the director since, but he knew he was on to a good thing: Steven Soderbergh, a producer on the film, visited the set, and recently related to the New York Times that the actor told him “at some point in the very near future I’m going to be very proud to say I was in a Christopher Nolan movie.”
Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman in “Batman Begins” (2005)
When Nolan landed the plum job of directing “Batman Begins,” he met with half of young Hollywood, with names like Jake Gyllenhaal, Joshua Jackson, Eion Bailey, Henry Cavill, Hugh Dancy, Cillian Murphy and Heath Ledger (the latter two of whom would later crop up in Bat-films) meeting or testing for the role. But it was then 30-year-old Christian Bale, who’d won acclaim in recent years for “American Psycho,” “Laurel Canyon” and “The Machinist,” who nabbed the part in the end. And boy, did Bale prove to be the right choice, melding perfectly with the director’s vision of a realistic Batman. Bale is strong in all three films (though has less to do in the middle chapter, which is also the one where his Bat-voice becomes a little silly), but it’s the first film that proved to be his finest hour in the franchise. One of the main things Nolan wanted to do, as the title might suggest, is make a film actually about Batman (all previous versions had really focused on the villains, if we’re being honest), and Bale is the very heart of the movie, giving a committed, physical, serious, but not joyless performance. Or rather, performances: the brilliance of Bale’s turn is the way he splits the character into several aspects. There’s the fierce, dedicated private Bruce Wayne, the borderline animalistic, deliberately terrifying Batman, and the drunken playboy that is the public face of Wayne, as crucial a part of his secret identity as the Bat-mask. Nolan and Bale make performance a key part of the character (“You took my advice about theatricality a bit… literally,” the villain tells him), and the result was crucial in reinventing the character for a new generation. Good luck to Ben Affleck and everything, but he’ll have a very tough task in topping Bale’s performance.
Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier in “The Prestige” (2006)
Nolan’s reward for reluanching the Bat-franchise from Warner Bros was this adaptation of Christopher Priest‘s novel, a film seen at the time as a mild disappointment, at least financially (though it actually made $100 million worldwide off a $40 million budget). It’s not hugely surprising that it wasn’t a blockbuster: it’s Nolan’s most difficult, darkest film, and in large part that’s due to a top-notch turn from Hugh Jackman as one of the film’s leads. The “X-Men” star plays an American magician in London who, after the accidental death of his wife (Piper Perabo) on stage, becomes locked in a bitter rivalry with former friend Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). The latter character is dialed down, technically brilliant but prickly and uncharismatic. But Nolan cannily uses Jackman’s stage musical experience to immediately convey that Angier is the superior performer, if not the better magician. He’s the more immediately sympathetic and likable of the two, but the real brilliance of Jackman’s performance is the way that he turns the character into an outright villain, obsessive and borderline murderous in his pursuit of revenge and success, and the final reveal about his trick is one of the most shocking in modern cinema. For a star so innately likable, it was a hugely brave move to play a character so bitter and unpleasant, but Jackman seems to relish the chance, gradually giving glimpses as to the twisted husk of a man that Angier has become. (And special mention to his brief additional performance as the drunken actor used as a double in the trick, a rare moment of levity in a film that doesn’t have much of it.)
