The film critic discusses his five favorite American performances of the century.
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00:00 I'm Richard Brody, I'm a film critic at The New Yorker,
00:02 and today I'm gonna talk about
00:04 the best performances of the 21st century.
00:06 I'm gonna highlight American performances today.
00:10 Maybe the chance will come up soon
00:11 to talk about international ones.
00:14 Number five is Mahershala Ali in "Moonlight."
00:18 What he does with his character
00:20 and with his bearing in embodying this character
00:24 sets the tone for the entire film.
00:28 - Right there, you're in the middle of the world.
00:33 - Ali plays the role with a wry, sarcastic,
00:36 yet involuntarily vulnerable undertone.
00:40 It's almost as if he's whispering,
00:41 murmuring the role of Juan.
00:43 - She do drugs, right?
00:47 - Yeah.
00:54 (birds chirping)
00:56 Yet at the same time,
01:07 Ali's very presence is commanding, decisive.
01:11 It's as if throughout the entire film,
01:13 not just the first sequence,
01:14 even when he's absent,
01:16 his power dominates the entire movie.
01:21 Number four is Miranda July in "The Future."
01:25 She actually plays two roles in her movie.
01:27 In one of them,
01:28 she lends her voice to the character of a talking cat.
01:31 But what I'm most enthusiastic about
01:32 is her performance as Sophie,
01:34 a 35-year-old dancer who feels that her best creative years
01:38 are on the verge of slipping away
01:40 and that she needs to seize the day,
01:42 take control of her life.
01:44 - Wow, 40 is basically 50.
01:46 And then after 50, the rest is just loose change.
01:51 - Loose change?
01:53 - Like not quite enough to get anything you really want.
01:57 - Oh God.
02:00 - As a dancer and even more as an essentially creative
02:03 and imaginative person,
02:04 Sophie has a kind of obsession with a shirt she calls shirty
02:07 and when she has an affair with a man,
02:10 she meets by a strange series of coincidences.
02:13 She creates a dance with, for, and because of shirty.
02:18 That is, for me, one of the most profound
02:21 and moving moments in the modern cinema.
02:24 Miranda July, well, she's a great writer,
02:35 but it's her balletic grace,
02:37 it's her performance as a dancer in her own movie,
02:39 playing the role of a dancer,
02:41 that for me makes this movie transcendent.
02:45 Number three is Anna Paquin in "Margaret."
02:49 Paquin stars as Lisa Cohen, an Upper West Side teenager.
02:53 Lisa inadvertently causes a bus accident
02:55 in which a woman is killed.
02:57 And soon this case takes over her life.
03:05 - The entire point of the lawsuit was to get the guy fired
03:07 so he doesn't kill somebody else.
03:09 - Lonergan writes and directs the movie as a city symphony,
03:13 filling it with the grand passions of urban life.
03:16 And Paquin handles the intricate dialogue
03:19 that Lonergan crafts for her with a deft,
03:23 almost a rope dance-like precision
03:25 that nonetheless is filled with the energy
03:27 that expands to fill the city as the images do.
03:30 - I think you're very young.
03:31 - What does that have to do with anything?
03:33 If anything, I think it means I care more
03:34 than someone who's older because this kind of thing
03:36 has never happened to me before.
03:38 - No, it means you care more easily.
03:41 There's a big difference.
03:43 - And Paquin invests this character
03:44 with a precocious authority
03:46 and a preternatural sense of command
03:48 that makes it one of the great teen performances
03:51 in the history of cinema.
03:52 Number two is Helena Howard in "Madeline's Madeline."
03:58 The character of Madeline is a theater prodigy
04:02 who has a significant role
04:04 in a major theater company in Manhattan.
04:08 Yet this very advanced young actress
04:09 is also dealing with the regular problems of a teenager.
04:13 (cars driving)
04:15 - Oh my God.
04:17 - Where are you going?
04:18 - Good night.
04:20 - Are you going home?
04:21 I mean, can I get a kiss without the hair in it?
04:25 The movie pivots on the relationship between art and life,
04:28 between creative drive and personal problems.
04:31 It's as if the continuity between Helena Howard
04:34 as a teenager off screen
04:36 and Helena Howard as a prodigious young actress on screen
04:40 is itself the essence of the dynamic
04:42 that Decker captures in the movie.
04:43 - Evangeline is gonna-
04:46 - And what Howard does as an actress
04:50 in the life of Madeline
04:52 and in the stage presence of Madeline
04:55 reminds me of the great Jenna Rollins
04:57 who in John Cassavetes' film "Opening Night"
05:00 delivers the most remarkable performance of acting
05:04 on stage in a movie that I've ever seen.
05:06 (screaming)
05:08 (crying)
05:10 - This troubling, unsettling, ambiguous dynamic
05:28 between life on stage and life off stage,
05:31 between family life and creative life
05:33 gives the movie and above all,
05:36 gives Howard's performance a terrifying power.
05:39 The best performance of the century
05:42 is by Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Wolf of Wall Street,"
05:46 which for my money is also the best film
05:48 of the century so far.
05:49 Do I look like the cat who caught the canary?
05:52 (laughing)
05:54 When Scorsese won his best directing Oscar
05:57 for "The Departed," his 2006 film,
05:59 I felt that it liberated something in him,
06:02 that some of the crazies that came out in "Shutter Island"
06:06 went on full blast in "The Wolf of Wall Street."
06:09 (footsteps)
06:11 It's one of the great outpourings of creative energy
06:19 from a director and from an actor in the history of cinema.
06:23 It's a story of greed as essentially
06:25 a form of original sin.
06:27 And Jordan Belfort has the unique skillset
06:31 to make that greed seem eminently desirable.
06:35 - Excuse me.
06:36 - Yeah.
06:38 - Is that your car on the lot?
06:40 - Yeah.
06:41 - Is it Jag? - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
06:42 - How much money you make?
06:42 - I don't know, 72,000 last month.
06:45 - You show me a pay stuff for $72,000 on it,
06:48 I quit my job right now and I work for you.
06:50 (door slams)
06:53 Hey, Paulie, what's up?
06:57 No, yeah, yeah, no, everything's fine.
06:58 Hey, listen, I quit.
06:59 What's more, the two sides of his character,
07:02 hedonism and a kind of consummate, slick professionalism,
07:06 come together in an absolute fury of destructive,
07:10 yet completely appealing energy.
07:12 And it's that very appeal that lends the movie
07:15 its heart of emotional and intellectual
07:18 and even religious authority.
07:21 (upbeat music)
07:24 (music fades)
07:26 [MUSIC]