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(1973– ). American actor.
Appeared in
documentaries: Inside the Village: A Movie Special (2004); The
Jacket: Project History and Deleted Scenes (video) (Mark Rance 2005); Wish
You Were Here: A Look Inside 'King Kong'" (tv) (George Sunga and John
Wheeler 2005); King Kong: Peter Jackson's Production Diaries (video)
(Michael Pellerin 2005); "King Kong" (2005), episode of HBO: First Look;
It's All Gone King Kong (tv) (Steve Kemsley 2005); Sci-Fi Inside:
King Kong (2005); MovieReal: Hollywoodland (tv) (Michael Meadows
2006); Recreating the Eighth Wonder: The Making of 'King Kong'" (Pellerin
2006).
After he was
mostly inconspicuous in films like Angels in the Outfield and The
Singing Detective, the now conspicuous, Oscar-winning Brody began to make the
bad decisions which are necessarily the focus of this entry. It is, of course,
always a bad decision to appear in any film directed by M. Night
SHYAMALAN, but
it was particularly stupid to agree to play a slobbering idiot driven to
homicide in the risible The Village, a part destined to impress no one
in a film now thankfully forgotten. Starring in Peter JACKSON's big-budget
remake of King Kong seemed a smarter move at the time, but the problem
here was that people who remake King Kong always make the same bad
decision, which both gave Brody the opportunity to participate in the film and
doomed him to become one reason for its failure. You see, the person who should
be the hero of King Kong is the flamboyant entrepreneur who tracks down the
giant ape and captures him, as appealingly portrayed by Robert ARMSTRONG in the
original film. But in our more politically correct times, directors do not want
to celebrate an aggressive exploiter who reeks of condescending colonialism, so
they turn the filmmaker into a heartless clown and introduce a new male
character to serve as the hero. Well, say what you will about John GUILLERMIN's
disastrous 1976 remake, but at least Jeff BRIDGES made a valiant effort to
carry that hopeless effort; Adrien Brody, given the same assignment, is a
failure from the very get-go, since his purported attraction to Naomi WATTS was
always overwhelmed by his obvious preoccupation with preserving his own fragile
health, both in pursuing a giant ape in character and in enduring the rigors of
filming a big-budget action movie as himself. Thinking about Jackson's film
today, you simply cannot remember much about Brody in the film; your attention
was pulled elsewhere whenever there was an alternative, and your memory has mercifully
erased those scenes in which he was central. Indeed, if Jackson had been
preternaturally perceptive while watching the dailies, he might have giddily
contemplated saving the film with a last-second rewrite in which King Kong suddenly
goes gay and seizes Brody to come with him to the top of the Empire State
Building, so that he can be pursued and rescued by Watts (who, unlike Brody, manifestly
had both the motivation and the capacity to do the job).
Still, one
cannot say that The Village and King Kong were failures simply
because of Brody's presence, since as already intimated there are plenty of
others to blame for the weaknesses of those films. This is not the case with Hollywoodland,
a film of genre interest since in involves one of the earliest and most
influential science fiction television series, and a film which is fatally
flawed only because Brody was given a major role. In actuality, Hollywoodland
is two films: a well-done and surprisingly well-acted biopic about actor George
REEVES and his years of
portraying television's Superman, which keeps being annoyingly interrupted by a
second film about some seedy, unpleasant creep who goes around asking questions
about Reeves's death and forming theories about its cause. Now, far be it from
me to disparage the acting talents of Ben AFFLECK, particularly while
discussing a film in which he was so visibly striving to do his very best as
never before in his career, but let's face it: when you're watching a film and are
desperately longing for the return of Ben Affleck, there is something
seriously, seriously wrong with the actor you are watching in his stead.
Adrien Brody is
still a young man, by Hollywood standards, and if he can resist the temptation
to seek starring roles in science fiction films, he could easily reestablish
himself as a sought-out player in edgy, low-budget, film-noirish urban dramas—where he can unproblematically be weak and unsympathetic, and where monsters
and superheroes always fear to tread. Let us hope, then, that he starts to
make such good decisions and works only in films which I am not required to
discuss.
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