Three great performances

Jake Gyllenhaal Rendition And the trickiest thing about Jake Gyllenhaal's work as a newly promoted CIA analyst in Rendition is that he's playing exactly that: not just an American but the American, our collective national stand-in onscreen. The movie, in which the CIA whisks Reese Witherspoon's Egyptian-born husband off to some unspecified North African country after intercepting a call to his cell phone from a known terrorist, means to explore the ethical justifiability of detainment and torture. But Gyllenhaal's character is no Jack Bauer improvising electroshock devices from desk lamps and ordering the suspect to start talking, now! He's permitted only to observe the interrogations and pose the occasional question, as a courtesy -- which means that Gyllenhaal spends much of Rendition standing in the corner of a dark room, watching as some poor soul gets beaten, doused, and fried. It's a near-silent performance, apart from some minor heroics near the end, and most actors would likely have felt the need to signal their disapproval to the audience via exaggerated winces. Gyllenhaal refrains, allowing us to project our own turbulent, conflicted emotions onto his placid expression. Knowing when to do nothing is one of the least appreciated of an actor's skills; here's one who's learned it early.

Emile Hirsch
Into the WildThe beauty of Emile Hirsch's performance in Into the Wild, Sean Penn's generally sympathetic account of Christopher McCandless's ultimately fatal two-year journey across America, is that he manages to reconcile these apparently contradictory viewpoints. Sure, he stands near majestic vistas with arms outstretched and face turned to the sky while Penn swoops the camera around him, and his puppyish enthusiasm is infectious. But every so often -- sometimes in startling glances directly at the camera -- Hirsch hints at the way that McCandless's self-righteous passion could spill over into mania. Most impressive of all are his handful of scenes with Catherine Keener's surrogate mother, in which Hirsch subtly conveys this young man's obstinate refusal to acknowledge the family he's cruelly abandoned in the name of self-reliance. He creates a vivid, unforgettable character you at once admire and pity.

Robert Downey Jr.
Zodiac
"I am not Avery" read the lapel buttons sported by nearly every San Francisco Chronicle staff member. They were responding, only partly in jest, to a threatening postcard sent by the Zodiac killer to ace Chronicle reporter Paul Avery -- but as Robert Downey Jr. plays him, who would want to be this guy? Zodiac is less a portrait of a serial killer than an exacting obituary of the madman's other victims -- not the young lovers he shot and stabbed but the professional and amateur sleuths whose obsession with the case took a life-draining toll. Downey makes Paul Avery the movie's most poignant casualty. The actor has always excelled at sarcastic and motormouthed; what's new is seeing that live wire ever so gradually short-circuit, so that it's barely even flickering the last time we see Avery, now a cynical lush living on a houseboat and filing copy by rote for The Sacramento Bee. It's one of the most persuasive portraits of burnout ever committed to the screen and doubly amazing coming from an actor who, for all his real-life troubles, has never seemed anything less than fully engaged with the world.
Source: www.esquire.com