One of the great pleasures of movie-going is watching favorite actors and actresses go through their paces. Likability isn’t the same thing as great acting, of course, which is why God (or Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn) made character actors as well as movie stars. The strange thing is that every single one of us thinks we can identify an exceptional performance, even if we haven’t been near a stage since the third grade. Maybe we can; if you believe the character, then the actor did his or her job. This is an excellent month to evaluate your expertise and test your taste, as an extraordinary range of acting styles graces local screens.
Red Desert
Richard Harris: I was a novice film journalist when I showed up for a round-table interview with Richard Harris at a Nob Hill hotel in 1990. The blustery British actor was weaving across the country promoting The Field, Irish director Jim Sheridan’s follow-up to My Left Foot, and he met every question with a long, entertaining and altogether irrelevant anecdote. It eventually dawned on me that the savvy vet was giving a well-rehearsed performance, and (a little piqued, I admit) I tried to derail his spiel and salvage my self-respect by asking him about his work in Red Desert (1964), which had just played the Roxie in a newly restored print. The smile evaporated from Harris’ face and he snapped, “[Michelangelo] Antonioni isn’t half the director people think he is.” The mask snapped back into place, but I had my prize: A candid moment of unguarded truth. Red Desert screens Jan. 19, 21 and 22 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room. For more information ybca.org.
King of Devil’s Island
Stellan Skarsgard: The subtle Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard (Breaking the Waves) exudes authority with a ruffian undercurrent of cruelty. In Marius Holst’s King of Devil’s Island, set in the early years of the last century, Skarsgard plays the imperious governor of a Norwegian island that’s home to a harsh reformatory. He proves weaker than he looks, unexpectedly, cinching the moral void at the center of this fact-based prison-break movie. King of Devil’s Island opens Friday, Jan. 6 at the SF Film Society Cinema. For more information visit sffs.org.