Annika Wedderkopp in “The Hunt” (2013)
As a culture, we still cherish a belief in the fundamental goodness and innocence of children. But while Thomas Vinterberg‘s “The Hunt” does not necessarily contradict that conviction and never goes so far as to make little Klara an outright villain, the film does convincingly suggest that children can be motivated by spite and selfishness (and ignorance of the real ramifications) into truly terrible actions. And the 7 year old who embodies all of that in this joltingly discomfiting drama is Annika Wedderkopp, turning in an extraordinary performance of complexity and nuance that works both when she’s showing her bordering-on-inappropriate adoration of Mads Mikkelsen‘s teacher character (Mikkelsen won Cannes Best Actor), and when she’s being calculatedly malicious in revenge for him “spurning” her. It isn’t villainy, but rather concentrated childlike self-centeredness, and Wedderkopp, so pixie-like in outward appearance, makes us realize that children are not blank slates —they are people who can know what they are doing is wrong, and do it anyway.
Douglas Silva in “City of God” (2002)
It seems wrong to single out one single performance from the sprawling tapestry of Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund’s favela masterpiece. But then again, it would feel wrong not to point to its shockingly authentic child performances as some of the very best of the century. So we’ll choose Silva, who plays the young Li’l Ze (aka Li’l Dice, aka Dadinho) as the younger representative of this incredible ensemble. Like almost all the cast a non-professional, Silva has the unenviable task of portraying the evolution of the terrifying, psychotically violent Li’l Ze, but the callous comfort with which this 13-year old handles a gun, and the big childish grin of glee after he commits his first double-homicide, makes light work of that. What so powerful in Silva’s performance is that he looks as mischievous as a kid playing bang-bang, only in his case the bangs are real bullets: it’s that childish play conflates with murder so easily that makes us understand how violent death is simply a way of life here.
Yuya Yagira in “Nobody Knows” (2004)
A different kind of captivity but in its way just as complete as that experienced in “Room,” Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s story of four siblings secreted and abandoned in a tiny apartment is definitely another film only to be watched if your mascara is waterproof. And as the eldest child, Yuya Yagira, who won the Cannes Best Actor award from this performance, is the one who will break your heart—negotiating real-life puberty too (the film was shot over 18 months so 12-year-old Yagira’s voice is actually breaking), his character is the one who most fills the vacuum of their thoughtless mother’s absence. Shot in static frames that both contribute to the claustrophobia of the interiors and present the trials, tribulations and boredoms of this makeshift family unit at an unsentimalized remove, “Nobody Knows” is perhaps Kore-eda’s most powerfully affecting, even enraging film, though it should be noted that his facility with child actors is so great that Keiti Ninomiya in “Like Father Like Son” or Koki Maeda in the gorgeous “I Wish” would be worthy additions to this list too.
Quvenzhané Wallis in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012)
Even those few of us not wholly convinced by Benh Zeitlin‘s magic realist post-Katrina fable (and we were indeed only a few: the film scored an outsider Best Picture nomination among multiple accolades) can readily acknowledge the lovely unmannered performance he got from his tiny star. As Hushpuppy, daughter of an ailing, volatile father and child of The Bathtub, an isolated dirt-poor Louisiana community cut off from the rest of the world by a levee, Wallis is magnetic, grounding the film’s floatier tendencies with the total assurance of her performance. ‘Beasts’ (a lot like this week’s similarly named ‘Beasts of No Nation’) is mediated through a child’s eyes, with often horrible events and behaviors taking on magical or awe-inspiring properties. And so it takes a pretty remarkable child performance —natural yet full of imagination and intelligence—to encompass all that, and Zeitlin got one, with Wallis going on to become the youngest-ever Best Actress Oscar nominee at the tender age of 9.
Tye Sheridan in “Mud” (2012)
Having already impressed in a small role as the middle brother in Terrence Malick‘s “The Tree of Life” the year before, Tye Sheridan broke through in a big way as Ellis in Jeff Nichols‘ 2012 “Mud.” Playing opposite an also-strong Jacob Lofland (in his debut), in a film that circles around a peri-McConnaissance Matthew McConaughy, still Sheridan manages to command the screen effortlessly, never compromising on his character’s brokenness and yet somehow giving him a core of optimism that it hurts to see disappointed. As a film it has its flaws, but even through some of its harder-to-swallow turns, Sheridan remains completely committed and endlessly watchable, and his quick, sly intelligence is one of the many things that sets this superior coming-of-age story well apart from the herd.
