Best Male Performances 2012

Here are the 10 selections (plus another 10 honourable mentions) that make up what I thought were the very best male performances of 2012.

01.
 Matthias Schoenaerts
 Rust and Bone

For: the unflinching and half-hidden damage of the role, all knotted up within a man adrift from the social norm. Ali's someone who hasn't found his way in the world the way most people do. Ali ram-raids both the characters’ lives and the film itself. He’s someone who has never been a slave to society’s rules. He’s a complex bulk of muscle and mistakes, a near impenetrable hard-case but with a weak spot glimpsed every so often. Schoenaerts treads effortlessly across the divide between guarded emotion and innate brutality. It’s a performance for the ages, I reckon.

02. 
Michael Fassbender 
Prometheus 

For: the control, the suaveness, the composure and the beautifully expressed physical strictures of the performance. Fassbender let the inherent maliciousness simmer just enough below David’s sheen of courtesy. He was a charming yet ominous act of barely concealed disdain for humanity and curiosity about humankind – deftly conveyed with the politeness of poison. A blink, a head tilt, a raised eyebrow or two, a playful nod to another David, Lean. Fassbender made a fascinating automated "man".

03. 
James Gandolfini 
Killing Them Softly 

For: appropriately appearing to slouch through it in a booze-lashed fug, and for convincing with every pitiful lazy-eyed glance in Pitt’s direction, every resigned sigh (Mickey’s a man who deep down knows his lack of worth) and each bitterly slurred syllable – he growls his regrets like a sore-headed relic. Gandolfini successfully distils the very essence of sourness into one failed man’s personality and provided an unfortunate lifetime’s worth of oily perspiration in a mere two scenes.

04. 
Luis Tosar 
Even the Rain 

For: the sheer triumph of going from being one kind of man to entirely another through a series of tricky events, both political and personal. His Costa, a film producer who doesn’t do things the easy way, swerves cliché and arouses poignancy both by accident and design – particularly toward the end when his character selflessly comes into his own in innumerable crucial ways.

05. 
Denis Lavant 
Holy Motors 

For: adding an uncanny theatrical sting to the grab bag of identities he ‘tried on’. The games he plays here – and his performances are games – are ridiculous, cruel, affecting and playfully unfathomable. Oscar was an experimental vessel, best not treated with too much logic. The beauty of watching Lavant here is seeing an actor go anywhere – and never being able to for one moment assume the subsequent directions. It’s the kind of performance that attempts to make novice film-watchers of us all.

06. 
Robert Pattinson 
Cosmopolis 

For: up-ending expectations as the bored-as-fuck billionaire playboy manipulating the world around him – and fighting back against the world manipulating him – from a slow-rolling tomb. And for slyly proving a wan (yet sparkly) vampire was just a launch pad, only one lucrative strand in his gradually expanding skill set. Pattinson overcame limitations that I – and likely many others – prematurely thought were insuperable for him. I enjoyed being wrong, tested and surprised every minute he was on screen in Cosmopolis.

07. 
Matthew Macfadyen 
Anna Karenina 

For: pilfering the film right from under everyone else’s noses. Macfadyen was the best thing in it (not counting the inventive set design and eye-delighting period threads). His Oblonsky was jaunty, daft, the most alive presence in the film. He loosened the film’s collar and lubricated its starched atmosphere. His crackpot charm was entirely winning; he worked both his lines and his moustache like a seasoned Tolstoy regular. I want an Oblonsky spin-off project, post haste!

08. 
Thomas Schubert 
Breathing 

For: achieving the right level of insouciant blankness and harm befitting a young man penalised, wronged (and as a doer of wrong) and plagued by nagging questions all his life. Schubert’s Roman Kogler could almost be a lost Dardennes drifter – and the manner of his performance does recall the Belgian brothers’ work. He modifies his surly angst as the film goes on, turns it wholly into palpable expectation. It’s a small marvel of a performance.

09. 
Jack Black 
Bernie

For: sly silliness well refined with acute skill. He had one eye on the daft side – as is Black’s wont – and the other on shifting our perception, just a jolt, of him as a straightforward comedy actor. He played Bernie with delicious abandon, ditching just enough of the usual Blackisms to make it reach further, somewhere new, but keeping the knack for fine ad lib firmly intact. The absurdly funny opening embalming scene was a particular highlight.

10. 
Channing Tatum 
Magic Mike

For: the casual charm, unfazed amiability and pitch-perfect dance moves. Tatum utilised some of his most readily-drawn-upon talents – and he used them incredibly well; he flipped and rippled his body quicker than a flag in the wind. Tatum knows how to swagger for the camera and you can almost discern a knowing smirk in each scene – but he holds it in check whilst making a merry display of body and personality.  

11-20, or Honourable Mentions:

Thomas Doret The Kid with a Bike / Scoot McNairy Killing Them Softly / Paul Rudd Wanderlust / Brad Pitt Killing Them Softly / Theodór Júlíusson Volcano / Willem Dafoe The Hunter / Mark Ruffalo Avengers Assemble / Patton Oswalt Young Adult Iko Uwais The Raid / Fran Kranz The Cabin in the Woods

At the Cinema: Magic Mike

Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh/2012/110mins)

The promise that Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike is 110 chunky minutes of Channing vigorously shaking his Tatums at the screen is tempered slightly by the fact that it does actually have a story to sketch out in between the ab-flashes and slipped-out nips. Decent guy stripper/roofer/bespoke furniture-maker Mike (Tatum) reluctantly introduces The Kid (Alex Pettyfer, not credited with a proper name so I may as well call him Mike too) into the life of the Tampa Bay strip circuit: at first times are fun; then times are bad. This is the gist of it all. There’s some hazed yellow-tinged Florida scenery (courtesy of DoP Peter Andrews aka Soderbergh himself) balanced with many sweaty-chested interludes to wink-nudge us along on this nearly-rags-to-kinda-riches tale. It doesn’t quite nail the cosy sleaziness that made Boogie Nights a tragic yet game example of the boy-(eventually)-makes-good genre, nor does it have its staying power, but it does have pocketfuls of charm. Tatum’s skittish romance with The Kid Mike’s disapproving sister Cody Horn is entirely winsome and shows that these two could fill a whole film of their own, in the manner of Before Sunrise/Sunset, with just their idle flirty banter. Matthew McConaughey as the strip club’s still-fit veteran honcho plays his scenes with raffish poise. He’s such an accomplished performer that any director must breathe a sigh of relief when he signs on to their project; fuss-free professionalism comes as standard with him. The rest of the strippers played by Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Alex Rodriguez and Kevin Nash (let’s call them all Mike) don’t get much of a look-in personality wise, but they do play, respectively, a Ken doll, someone with a big dick, a fireman and Tarzan very capably.

The plot flip-flops between sunnier days (everyone drinks copious amounts of beer anytime, anywhere) and a few grim nights (everyone does copious amounts of drugs anytime, anywhere) with rapidity. We get an essence of struggle and a sliver of bleakness, but nothing substantially dramatic enough to fully invest in those straining in the dark. But Soderbergh knows that a handful of becoming characters frequently and affably delivering some decent lines with little haste means we won’t necessarily dwell on anything too sinister lurking in the background. (Was the girl played by Riley Keough dead the morning after the blow-out party? The film leaves her fate oddly unexamined.) The stresses of the current economy is touched on briefly (“The only thing distressed is you,” says Channing-Mike to a flustered female bank teller who won’t give him a loan), but Soderbergh is mostly generally happy to just get playful with his direction to show us how shabby-glam the whole scene is: low shots of the stripping stage put us in the thrill pit alongside hen-party hecklers; skewed-angle or close-up shots in flaring reds and blues make intoxicatingly abstract imagery of faces and bodies. There’s fun to be had with these people, especially Tatum’s Mike and McConaughey’s Dallas, and there’s one shot which visualises with icky daftness the very notion of the term ‘pig sick’.

Also, check out my Magic Mike-related article on 'male strippers in the movies' in the latest issue of Attitude Magazine.