If there are “no movie stars,” just Jacob Elordi, there must be a sea of character actors, right? Unwashed and broken, ready to play sans rug and open to evil men. Where’s Stacey Keach, Joe Don Baker, Burt Young? Bruce Dern is still alive, but who’s his analogue among Millennials and Zoomers? Lucas Hedges? Perhaps, but he’s too acclaimed already, even if he hasn’t been around in a while; most of Dern’s presence in his 1970s films comes from his desperation and insecurity. There’s one Burt Young on the horizon, if he ever makes it in movies: Stavros Halkias, a comedian in his thirties who would’ve been fantastic as one of Robert Aldrich’s Choirboys in 1977.
Where’s Gene Hackman? Alive, maybe well, somewhere in Arizona. He moved out of the theaters and out of our lives 20 years ago. Did anyone see Welcome to Mooseport since then? Does it have a “redeeming facet”? Where’s Gene Hackman? Already here: Jesse Plemons. Of course Hackman would’ve been better in the role had Killers of the Flower Moon been made 50 years ago, but then again Robert De Niro in 1976’s Taxi Driver is the most precise cinematic match for Kurt Cobain, but they were born slippy. Tina Fey and Sarah Palin, Josh Brolin and George W. Bush, Val Kilmer and Jim Morrison—lucky and unlucky. Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein: transformation over performance (results may vary).
If there are “no character actors,” either, what does Hollywood and American cinema at large have exactly? A lot of actors from Europe and Australia, and a few conspicuous sore points. Timothée Chalamet is standing on the wrong side of the camera, if he should ever be around one at all; his gift is anti-charisma, mine a dislike nurtured over time after a pair of fine performances in 2017—Ladybird and Call Me By Your Name—followed by a series of minimum-effort barely indie movies so clearly leading into a sweet spot headlining studio films. Chalamet said last year that, “One of my heroes told me, ‘no superhero movies and no hard drugs.’” Some advice. Like those born and raised in the house of mouse, Chalamet knows how to “turn it on” to promote something as stupid as Wonka, even if he believes in it, even if it means he’ll never be taken seriously again.
Was he ever? James Mangold? A Complete Unknown? Bob Dylan? Bob Dylan? Bob Dylan?
Whoever wins, we lose.
Actresses as always are everywhere. Men: some room for improvement. Will the cast of Euphoria take over Hollywood as they did HBO, and thus, the Zeitgeist? Elordi, along with Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, and Hunter Schafer understand the traditional path: jump up as soon possible. Where’s up? Movies mean more to them than television. Jenna Ortega and Addison Rae, younger, get this, too.
You could cynically say they appeared in Scream VI and Thanksgiving, respectively, to boost themselves more than their movie careers, but after a decade of old masters and dilettantes alike repeating ad nauseam “cinema is dead,” parents take their kids to the theater to see The Color Purple remake on a rainy night in December, and the deed’s done: a lifetime alliance with the experience of moviegoing, no matter how often they go, they will know, in their bones and in their soul, that this was something more than watching a movie at home, always an approximation of what they once were, what they were when they were alive, in initial release.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith