Don't Like - Supposedly Serious Overly Subtle Acting

I don’t know how long this trend has been going on but there appears to be a very strong belief right now that difficult roles should be played in an extremely subtle yet serious manner. It’s almost as if the goal of this style of acting is to give the sense that someone really is acting. That they’re reckoning with the source material in a way that affects them personally. This is especially true when the script deals with heavy topics, and the scripts that demand this style of acting almost always do. Take for instance Jonathan Glazer’s new film The Zone of Interest. It’s a movie about Rudolph Hoss, the Nazi who ran Auschwitz, and the life of him and his family in their “dream home” next to the concentration camp. The film wants to make a point about the banality of evil through austere storytelling that focuses on the outskirts of the lives of its characters and the atrocity happening next door.¹ This turn inadvertently creates an odd effect because it puts up boundaries in the storytelling. For instance, midway through the film, there’s a scene where it’s implicated that Hoss has sex with a Jewish girl from the camp. We don’t see anything transpire (thankfully) so the only way that we know is because it cuts to him washing his genitals intently. That’s it. I don’t remember what comes next, but before long his expressionless face is looking off into the distance somewhere else. That’s what happens with this kind of acting much of the time. Rigid body language and avoidant eye contact are leaned on to communicate gravitas. It was much to my surprise when I went to read more about Rudolph Hoss that I saw the main photo on his Wikipedia page features him smiling. That image is much more disturbing than any of the ones that Jonathan Glazer made. That’s a shame because Glazer was trying to say something profound and he almost did. But there’s more to the banality of evil than banal acting.²

1. This is particularly interesting in this film which also wants to rely heavily on the sound design of the story. Oddly though, despite being next door to Auschwitz one barely hears anything coming from over the wall. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve seen the film but as I recall, Glazer used very light touches in the background to communicate the horrors knowing that our imaginations could do the rest. This felt like a formal touch that again attempted to use subtly to communicate seriousness in a way that ultimately felt lacking.

2. I would also say that Killers of the Flower Moon suffered from a similar problem. Embedded in the love story between Leonard DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone’s characters, the plot gives into the romance without ever seeing how Lily Gladstone’s character truly feels about the atrocities happening around her. Many have said that Gladstone’s performance was the best thing about the movie. They might be right. But I wished she had been given more room to express a fuller range of emotions throughout the film than her fixed and unrelenting stare.