“The Master”
When people talk about losing yourself in a role, this is what they mean. Joaquin’s performance as drifting alcoholic war veteran Freddie Quell in Paul Thomas Andersons’s insistently haunting two-hander “The Master” is as immersive as screen acting gets. Phoenix plays Quell like a lost, wounded dog: sweetly subservient at times, but also liable to lash out if he feels he’s being threatened. Watching the actor go up against Philip Seymour Hoffman’s supercilious cult leader Lancaster Dodd is the kind of stirring work that will no doubt inspire dozens of inferior acting class imitations (the two are especially magnetic during the film’s “processing” scenes, where Quell reveals the depth of the trauma he’s endured). In a career spent playing off-the-leash zealots, Phoenix’s Freddie Quell is on another level. He’s a man who acts almost purely off of animal instinct: instead of politely disagreeing with you, he’ll just throw a piece of fruit at you, or maybe strangle you with your own necktie (as he does in the film’s squirmy, hilarious department-store scene). Underlying Freddie’s anguish is a profound sense of disillusion, and a longing to belong to something greater than himself. The brilliance of Phoenix’s turn here is how he marries that sense of startling vulnerability with the unvarnished wrath that exists on the character’s surface. It’s all there in the film’s opening scene, where Freddie constructs a female mate out of mounds of sand and mimes some crude sexual gestures to appease the jeers of his sailing buddies, all before gently lying down at his new mate’s side as the waves crash around him.
“Her”
Joaquin Phoenix often plays characters who are so frightening that we might cross the street to avoid pissing them off in real life. However, as a lovelorn urbanite inhabiting a futuristic Los Angeles in Spike Jonze’s aching techno-centric romance “Her,” Phoenix is the kind of guy you would see practically receding into himself as he rides the subway to work. His mustache is possibly the saddest movie mustache pre-dating Adam Sandler’s in “The Meyerowitz Stories.” His mess of curly hair makes him resemble an overgrown boy. Like many of the stunted man-children who have populated American movies for the last few decades, “Her’s” Theodore Twombly (his last name a knowing nod to the great American painter Cy Twombly) is a slave to his routine. Day after lonely day, Cy clocks in at his thankless day job, plays video games, and searches for love in an increasingly vast and impersonal cityscape. That all changes when Cy meets Samantha: a sentient operating system imbued with the husky and evocative vocal tones of Scarlett Johansson (much tea has been spilled over who Johansson can or cannot play, but she’s damn good at essentially playing an elevated Siri). As Cy, Phoenix never resorts to the bag of tricks he sometimes relies on when playing more unstable characters. His body language is awkward and unthreatening. He never strikes anyone – hell, he doesn’t do so much as raise his voice here. This is Phoenix at his most gentle and appealing, acting as the emotional center of an overwhelmingly sweet movie that also features terrific supporting turns from Amy Adams, Olivia Wilde, and pre-“Jurassic World” Chris Pratt. Phoenix has never opened up his heart more than he does in “Her,” and we sincerely hope he does more work like this in the future.
“The Immigrant”
James Gray’s sumptuous period tragedy “The Immigrant” only looks like an Oscar-friendly melodrama on its surface. Though the film bears all the portent and superficial signifiers of traditional awards-season bait (high-profile actors, an extravagantly realized period framework, the backing of the once-reputable Weinstein Company) “The Immigrant” is actually a postmodern rumination about American corruption disguised as a costume drama. It’s a film about the inherently rotten promise of the American dream: those who sell it, and those who buy into it and have their lives destroyed as a result of their blind faith in it. The film represents a considerable stylistic leap forward for Gray, previously known for somber crime flicks like “Little Odessa” and “We Own the Night” (Gray would go on to put his stamp on the adventure epic in “The Lost City of Z” and cerebral sci-fi in the terrific “Ad Astra”). Phoenix, ever the director’s unofficial muse, plays brilliantly against Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Renner, enjoying one of the most layered roles of his career in the process. His Bruno Weiss is both a brute and an ostensible man of leisure: a man caught between two worlds. You even see a nuanced distinction between those two self-appointed roles as Phoenix’s performance progresses throughout the film. At “The Immigrant’s” outset, Bruno is an effete, almost dandyish gentleman who speaks in mannered, unerringly precise sentences. By the film’s sorrowful climax, he is more beast than man: slurring and murmuring, his face bruised and blackened as he gestures in the unmoored style of so many of Phoenix’s other crazed loners. Bruno is a manipulative and exploitive man, but the way Phoenix plays him, you come to understand his pain. The result is a bewitching feat of actorly majesty.
“Inherent Vice”
“Her” and “Inherent Vice” are a case study in Lighter Joaquin, where the normally inchoate and dispossessed actor trades in his signature darkness for something more insouciant. “Inherent Vice” might even be Phoenix’s funniest and most blissfully weird performance to date: the physicality of his turn as foggy-brained P.I. Doc Sportello occasionally recalls Buster Keaton, while his slurring insistence that everybody just, like, mellow out, man, is sometimes reminiscent of the one and only Jeffery “The Dude” Lebowski. Paul Thomas Anderson’s tender, tangled adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s beachside neo-noir offers a vision of the actor we’ve never quite seen before: you haven’t truly seen Phoenix until you’ve seen him sucking on a roach with curlers in his hair, or getting thrown across the hood of a car by a flat-topped, civil-rights-violating cop brilliantly played by Josh Brolin. This is a part where Phoenix turns innocent, mush-mouthed stoner gibberish into heartfelt Southland poetry. Word is that Robert Downey Jr. was once linked to the lead in Anderson’s film and while Downey undoubtedly plays derisive gumshoe types better than just about anyone (see Shane Black’s “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” for evidence of this claim), it’s now tough to imagine anyone but Phoenix in the role. He brings a wounded, childlike naiveté to a character who might have come across as simply slothful or indolent in anyone else’s hands. He’s also a terrific scene partner here, relinquishing the spotlight to co-stars like Brolin, Katherine Waterston, and Benicio Del Toro in scene after loopy scene. Whoever said this guy was a showboat clearly hasn’t seen this movie.
“You Were Never Really Here”
To be fair, Joaquin Phoenix isn’t the first actor you’d think of to play the hulking, mostly wordless bruiser who acts as the nucleus of Lynne Ramsay’s hypnotic and unnerving visual poem “You Were Never Really Here.” The character, Joe, is a former military man and FBI agent who makes a living rescuing underage girls from the clutches of devious pedophiles before pulverizing the attackers in the most pitiless way fathomable. Joe’s childhood – which we see in terrifying, lightning-quick flashbacks – was one marred by abuse and struggle. One might think to cast a more physically intimidating actor in the part, although Phoenix did bulk up rather impressively to play a man who prefers to communicate through the blunt use of department-store hammers rather than, y’know, words. And yet, Phoenix, as he so often does, plays this role in a way that makes it practically impossible to imagine anyone else doing so. He imbues Joe with both an alarming volatility, and also a humanity that’s disarming in it’s nakedness. It’s there in the scene where Joe slaps a man with his own tie to extract information from him, and also in a later sequence where he brings a man into the gentle embraces of death by crooning Charlene’s “I’ve Been to Paradise” as he bleeds out on a kitchen floor. While the book is written by Brooklyn scribe Jonathan Ames – known for more comparatively lighthearted works such as “The Extra Man” and the HBO comedy “Bored to Death” – “You Were Never Really Here” is a feature-length cinematic panic attack, with Phoenix as the wounded, still-beating heart that brings it down to earth.
“The Sisters Brothers”
It’s hard to pick a favorite performance in Jacques Audiard’s wandering, unusually soulful Western “The Sisters Brothers.” John C. Reilly lends palpable feebleness to the part of a conflicted killer who barely knows how to use a toothbrush. Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance is worth watching for his elocution alone. Riz Ahmed, playing the reluctant idealist unaware that he has a moving target on his head, proves once again that he’s one of today’s most undervalued character actors. And yet, we’d be lying if we were to say that Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t steal most of the scenes he’s in as Charlie Sisters: one of two fraternal assassins who gives Audiard’s unusual frontier morality play its title. Phoenix plays the meaner, more unpredictable of the two brothers, the other being Reilly’s Eli, who is in touch with feelings that don’t exclusively relate to anger or disdain. To no one’s surprise, he’s a hoot to watch. Charlie is also crude, uncivilized, and quick to reach for his pistol – although, as Audiard persistently underlines, he’s merely a product of the time in which he exists. Phoenix’s raillery with Reilly is a thing of beauty: the kind of teasing that only siblings can get away with, at least until one slugs the other. What’s more is that we come to really like Charlie, even if he’s a violent bastard who seems just a little too comfortable in the unsavory company of prostitutes and outlaws. In a film teeming with brave, untethered performances, Phoenix stands out as perhaps the best of the bunch.
Honorable Mentions:
Long before he was a leading man, Phoenix was still very much capable of making an impression in a supporting capacity. We’d be remiss not to mention his darkly humorous and convincing turn as adult video store clerk Max California in Joel Schumacher’s slick snuff-movie thriller “8mm,” where he guides a hardened detective played by Nicolas Cage into a frightening netherworld of hardcore, off-the-books pornography. Oliver Stone’s divisive “U-Turn” offered viewers an early glimpse at Phoenix’s more untamed tendencies. In that film, Phoenix plays Toby N. Tucker aka T.N.T.: a small-town scumball who eventually kicks the living shit out of Sean Penn’s hard-luck drifter.
Phoenix tones down his temperament in a bit in Philip Kaufman’s steamy costume drama “Quills,” where he plays French Catholic Priest Abbé de Coulmier against Geoffrey Rush’s Marquis De Sade. He also enjoyed a brief stint as a regular in the films of M. Night Shyamalan: first as Mel Gibson’s skeptical younger brother in the heartland sci-fi “Signs,” then as a fearful 19th-century settler in the director’s much-maligned “The Village.”
In the same year of “The Village’s” release, Phoenix turned in a pair of solid performances in otherwise unremarkable melodramas: “Ladder 49” and “Hotel Rwanda.” His work in these aforementioned films offered proof that Phoenix is still capable of flourishing in movies that don’t rise to the quality of his acting skill. This is particularly true in Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man,” an abysmal and ethically dubious “comedy” in which Phoenix still manages to give a largely compelling performance as a narcissistic, philandering college professor. Any actor who can make Allen’s stiff, overwritten late-career dialogue sound naturalistic has to be doing something right. Phoenix is especially terrific in Gus Van Sant’s recent “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot,” where he does exemplary work alongside the likes of Jack Black, Jonah Hill, and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth.
Phoenix’s latest and arguably most talked-about turn will be in Todd Phillips’ “Joker.” The film looks to be a startling, stylized reinterpretation of the Caped Crusader’s most infamous foe, inexplicably directed by the guy who gave us the “Hangover” saga. The film has been trailed by notes of undeniable controversy in the months leading up to its release: the LAPD has even gone so far as to say that they will “increase their visibility” during the movie’s opening weekend. Early responses to “Joker” have been somewhat divided, if still largely positive: some critics are calling it a masterpiece, while others are worried that Phillips’ latest glorifies a toxic character whose fictional ascent may unwittingly act as a rallying cry for the murderous incels of America (our own critic, Jessica Kiang, was mostly a fan). Nonetheless, “Joker” has become a festival season dark horse, and there’s even talk about the film picking up some golden statues at next year’s Academy Awards. I guess we’ll know what all the fuss is about when the film hits theaters nationwide on October 4.