Let's retire the phrase "actor's actor" before it does any more damage. Maybe it was a useful label when serious actors worked nonstop on stage and didn't have time to feed off tons of high-toned adulation. It meant that an actor of formidable range, technique and invention - such as Laurence Olivier - had become a performer even peers looked to for guidance or inspiration because of a string of undeniable accomplishments.
But these days, it's become an encomium for any star who's delivered the splashiest or most radical-chic turn of the year.
And it tends to settle on that artist like a curse.
The accolades for Daniel Day-Lewis' foaming at the mouth in There Will Be Blood, honored by every major critics' group as well as the Academy Awards, may push this latest actor's actor even further into characterizations that register as "fresh" and "one of a kind" only because they're disconnected from everything except the actor's own ambition.
Anyone with a sense of movie history must wonder why Day-Lewis mimics John Huston's awesomely amoral tycoon from Roman Polanski's Chinatown. Was it just because Huston's father, Walter, played a wily prospector in Huston's own The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), which Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson used as a template?
The brilliance of John and Walter Huston was in the way they sounded depths within, respectively, a monster and a sort of grizzled sprite. But unlike either Huston, Day-Lewis develops tunnel vision and loses himself in monomania. In There Will Be Blood, he's all envy, fear and malice. The script fails to suggest the roots for this human beast's malevolence, but you don't feel Day-Lewis is pushing the text to its limit. He simply tests how far he can make his vein jump out of his forehead.
It's dispiriting to read interviews in which the actor downplays his breakthrough role in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), in which he married intelligence, instinct and romantic imagination. It's as if he's taken leave of his sensuality - and even worse, his senses.
Kevin Spacey is another actor's actor with similar theatrical prestige and credentials - and a best actor Oscar, too. After a string of brilliant, surprising turns as off-kilter characters, he earned his award for playing a suburban husband and carrying that sour comic soap opera, American Beauty (1999), with his crack comic timing.
