Reclining recently, cozy on my couch, I found myself contemplating two actors who seem to have their fingers on the comic zeitgeist. So the next time you’re at your local video store, or cruising Netflix for a digital vacation, keep an eye open for their films and beat the blahs while you warm your cockles.
The first is Michael Cera (pr. like Sarah), a quirky kid from Brampton with incredible comic timing who makes intelligence cool and softspoken wit accessible to a new generation. He got his first acting gig in a Tim Horton’s commercial (Wikipedia disclaimer), but I became aware of him watching Arrested Development, one of those truly brilliant television series that comes along now and then, creates a cult following and wins every possible award, but never generates the popular groundswell necessary for longevity on network TV. An Arrested Development movie is slated for 2012 release however, in case you’re interested…
You may have also seen Cera in Jason Reitman’s Juno (yes, that is the son of comedy legend Ivan Reitman), which generated big buzz in 2007, winning the Oscar for best screenplay and receiving a total of four nominations.
Diablo Cody’s script begins with a barrage of hipster language that put me off at first, but the story quickly evolves into a touching and comic tale about a very interesting teenage girl coming to terms with an unplanned pregnancy and the people it brings into her life. And Cera is perfect as Bleeker, a smart, quiet kid who might be relegated to a painful highschool nerdom if he wasn’t so sure of who he was.
Michael Cera’s become a big star in the last five years (he’s just 22), headlining a host of oddball films tailor made for his unique persona, which makes me think of Bob Newhart as a hip, skinny teenager. Titles like Superbad and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, a contemporary comic-book of a film in which the young hero must defeat his lady-love’s seven evil ex-boyfriends, have been very successful vehicles. But my absolute favourite is 2009’s Youth in Revolt.
With a remarkable screenplay based on C.D. Payne’s novel Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp, this film is up there in the intelligent-teen-movie stratosphere formerly inhabited solely by director John Hughes in the 1980’s (Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). But Youth in Revolt is distinctly more literary, with an artful style and darker edge for the new millennium.
Cera plays a precocious young man who must create a dashing, sociopathic alter ego to accomplish things his normal, mild-mannered self could never do—kind of like Fightclub except, in this case, ego and id work in tandem, side by side, in full awareness of one another.
There are so many reasons to love this movie, but for me Cera’s performance is at the top of the list. One of the only criticisms I’ve heard of this young star is that his characters are so similar, film to film, like Woody Allen without all the mania. But in Youth in Revolt, we get to see Cera really act. His portrayal of Nicholas’s Twisp’s alter ego, Francios Dillinger, is one of the most enjoyable performances I’ve seen. Ever. The transformation is subtle but total, and utterly believable. And the white pants…but I won’t say too much.
Will Ferrell is the other guy working right now who really does it for me. To take a momentary detour, Bill Murray has a cameo role in 2009’s Zombieland that sets up the way I think about Ferrell. When Emma Stone’s character recognizes Murray as himself she cries, “This guy has a direct line to my funnybone!” Will Ferrell has become that actor for me.
I remember an appearance he made on ABC’s The View a few years back. He was just sitting there in a jacket, sporting that little fluffy perm of his, and one of the hosts asked him how he’d been doing. “Fine,” he said. “Just fine.” Then there was a beat, and everyone started to laugh. Someone even commented on it. “You don’t even have to do anything and I laugh.”
Now, why is that? What is that? Was it the way he pitched his voice, the terseness of his response, the barely perceptible glimmer in his eye, or the relative stillness with which he held his body? The answer, I think, is yes: it was all of those things. But there was something else as well, an almost palpable comic energy that he generates, an X-factor that is greater than the sum of all those parts. Sometimes I just look at him and I’m done.
Ferrell became famous on Saturday Night Live and has gone on to become one of the most recognizable actors, comic or otherwise, of our time. He has reached a rare echelon. His name is pretty much a household word.
His magnum opuses, if you will forgive the term, are probably Anchorman, Talledega Nights, and Semi-Pro—three films that could be considered a kind of trilogy, if you think about it. They all feature many of the same (A-list) actors, and in each one Ferrell plays a similar character: a charismatic doofus in love with himself but largely ignorant about anything of genuine substance. They are all funny films, sometimes gut-bustingly funny. But I recently saw him opposite Mark Walberg in The Other Guys, another star-studded comedy in which the two leads play cops with unbalanced personalities. And this one is a little different.
It’s another big-budget comedy; action-comedy really. And we get to see Ferrell lying on the ground at one point, screaming non-sequiturs at the top of his voice in a style that has become one of his trademarks, going right back to SNL and his appearance in the first Austin Powers movie.
But what’s really fun about The Other Guys is the way it showcases that incredible energy Will Ferrell brings to deadpan comedy. Nobody does it quite like he does.
Ferrell has tried his hand at more serious roles, opposite the likes Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman in Stranger Than Fiction, although I never quite believed him in this film, kind of like I never believed Bill Murray in The Razor’s Edge. And while Murray, in his maturity, went on to give us his wonderful interpretation of an aging actor in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, one of the best films of 2003, he did it by using his naturally funny energy; toning it down, sublimating it, until he finally broke through into something, someone, simply sweet, and truly human. It was a subtle piece of work. Whether or not Will Ferrell, the man who gave us Mugatu, can do something like this…doesn’t really matter. Certainly he was born to be funny, and there’s nothing wrong with that. AG