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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); A Director's
Playground: Vincenzo Natali on the Set of Splice (Philippe H. Bergeron
2010); Evolution of the Species: Predators Reborn (Javier Soto 2010).
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 Armstrong figure into a heartless
clown and introduce a new male character to serve as the hero. 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 is 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 participation, 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. For 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
(Brody) 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.
After that disaster, as if heeding the advice
long ago given in this entry, Brody stuck to low-key comedies and dramas for a
few years, but the poor man must still feel driven to be an action hero, for he
then accepted two spectacularly inappropriate roles as a scientist spawning
horrors in Splice and a mercenary soldier fighting against implacable
alien Predators, surely making Brody the most unlikely successor to
Arnold SCHWARZENEGGER
ever observed on film. Conversely, he seemed an ideal choice to play eccentric
artist Salvador Dali in Woody
ALLEN's Midnight in Paris, but that shrewd director,
as if worried about what this actor might do if allowed to indulge himself,
limited him to a cameo appearance.
So, what lies ahead for this skilled but
consistently errant performer, whose chances of appearing in one more big hit
seem dimmer and dimmer every year? As if fearing the worst, Brody did accept a
small role as a voice in the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox, readying
himself for the standard backup career of fading stars; he has also begun to
dabble in producing and writing, so that if necessary he can earn a living away
from the set. If he is determined to primarily continue working as an actor, he
must firmly abandon his dreams of big-budget movie stardom and limit himself to
realistic dramas in lesser venues—independent film, television, theatre—so
I will not be required to revise this entry one more time with an updated list
of celluloid horrors.
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