“The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (2004)
Willem Dafoe had never been in a Wes Anderson movie before “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” Since then, he’s gone on to become one of the more significant members of the director’s repertory company, at least if his contributions to “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and the upcoming “The French Dispatch” are anything to go by. As Klaus Daimler, testy first mate of the Belafonte, Dafoe inherits a role previously held by the likes of Ben Stiller in “The Royal Tenenbaums” and Robert Musgrave in “Bottle Rocket”: that is to say, the perpetually aggrieved little brother type who’s sick and tired of playing second fiddle. Dafoe’s hypersensitive, tightly-wound comic aggression plays beautifully off the wistful stoner drowsiness of both Bill Murray and Owen Wilson, although the mournful climactic scenes that see the temperamental German sidekick softening his prickly edges are among the film’s most affecting.
“Adam Resurrected” (2008)
“Adam Resurrected,” a meditation on what it means to live with memories of murderous extermination, mostly unfolds through flashbacks and is anchored by a go-for-broke performance from Jeff Goldblum, who plays a patient at a hospital for Holocaust survivors who only survived that terrible time by humiliating himself for the twisted amusement of his oppressors. This means parading around on all fours like an obedient canine for the merriment of a fearsome S.S. commandant named Klein, played by Dafoe in yet another collaboration with Schrader. While it’s hard to deny that “Adam Resurrected” is ultimately Goldblum’s movie, Dafoe, who is only seen in disconcerting flashbacks, casts a shadow of totalitarian evil over the proceedings. His chilling phantom presence informs the film’s action in a major way, and you can tell that he’s keyed into the very singular, sometimes vexing tone that Schrader is striving for here.
“Antichrist” (2009)
Aside from Björk in “Dancer in the Dark,” it’s hard to think of two performers who have given more of themselves to polarizing Danish auteur Lars Von Trier than Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in the director’s infernal, depressive allegory, “Antichrist.” Dafoe is particularly affecting as “Antichrist’s” sullen male protagonist, who has absconded into a sinister and secluded wood with his partner in the wake of an unthinkable loss. Dafoe and Gainsbourg are put through the wringer in “Antichrist.” Still, their suffering is not without purpose: the depth of the character’s shared existential agony is, for better or worse, the entire point of the film, and Dafoe’s magnificent turn never really lets us forget that. Not for nothing, but not many actors could underplay a scene in which they witness a maggot-ridden fox carcass come writhing back to life before intoning that “chaos reigns.”
“4:44 Last Day On Earth”
What would you do if you knew that the world was coming to an end? “4:44 Last Day On Earth” is Abel Ferrara’s uncharacteristically quiet and low-key rumination on the human response to the end of days, with Dafoe showcasing his soft-spoken side in the part of a middle-aged loner who has no choice but to surrender to the apocalypse with grace. Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh play the couple at the center of Ferrara’s film, who learns that the world as they know it will cease to exist at 4:44 a.m. It’s hard to imagine anyone but Dafoe in this demanding part: he carries much of the film’s considerable existential weight on his shoulders, and the grim denouement of “4:44” suggests that the best we can hope for when faced with the prospect of our own extinction, is to die in the arms of someone we love.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014)
The villains of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” are cartoon fascists; within the fanciful context of Wes Anderson’s candy-colored, golden-age screwball soufflé, they are about as threatening as a character in one of this director’s movies can be. Perhaps no villain in Anderson’s oeuvre is as ominous as the dead-eyed J.G. Jopling, an enforcer who cracks skulls on behalf of Adrien Brody’s Dmitri, the sniveling progeny of the dowager Madame D. (Tilda Swinton). “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is a film that’s packed with stars, some of whom only appear for a scene or two, but even amidst this crowded ensemble, something about Dafoe’s fiendish, unobtrusive malice leaves a mark. In all his collaborations with Anderson, Dafoe brings severity to the director’s otherwise decorous worldview – whoever thought a cider-guzzling rodent couldn’t be an effective villain hasn’t seen “Fantastic Mr. Fox” – and his contributions to Anderson’s most stylistically ornate film end up being nothing less than invaluable.
