This is not about how badly EPL sucked. It sucked pretty bad.I don’t feel the need to expand on that since I suspected with regret that it would be lame after seeing the trailer the first few times. All the signs were there. I’m a pretty avid moviegoer. The signs are rarely ever wrong.Especially when it comes to movies based on amazing books like this one by Liz Gilbert was, which is probably why I went to see it anyway with a friend of mine who made me read the book in the first place. Man, they fucked up everything! Jeez! Although I have to say that the one thing they got right was the character of “Richard from Texas” played by Richard Jenkins.
When you se a horrible movie with one elevated scene, you can learn a lot about what a good actor does. And after years of movie going and obsessive home movie watching, I have learned what veteran actors know that these young, Zac (ECCHHH!!$%$&@!) Efron types don’t and probably never will. It’s why the actors I trust on the screen to deliver often end up being the older ones. Actors from the old school, often with a substantial amount of theater background (and I know this from reading so many old school actors bios) understand that in order to carry off a moment, to make a story real to the viewer, it has to be real for them. They have to draw from a real moment for them. And it takes craft and discipline to give that moment to a camera and yet not give so much that you’re falling apart in your personal life because you cannot close that up again when the director yells cut. You also have to know how to protect yourself.
I was so relieved to see Richard Jenkins’ face in my favorite part of Liz’s journey, the “Pray” part. I saw him for the first in “Six Feet Under”one of my favorite televisions shows of all time. Talk about a cast of actors being vulnerable! That whole show was a big open wound. I was heart broken at the finale and vowed only to watch it one more time with my fiancée who had never seen it before.
The other thing I understand now and which, I have read over and over in actor’s bios is that the best actors know how to listen, and to react. It sounds overly simple but seeing an actor’s face express a reaction is like seeing an invisible collision made manifest in their face and it makes things “real.” When an actor is listening, they’re not sitting around waiting to say their next line. They are working. They are invisibly building an interior world that will hopefully make the viewer believe that yes, this person is suffering, happy, vulnerable, troubled, complicated, mysterious, confused, smart, smug, helpless, guilty, dangerous, layered…
And silences. Silences, pauses, they can be filled with tension, filled with anxiety, with choked regret, with beauty. They can put you on the edge. An actor who can allow those silences to come through in a scene, candidly but with intent, those are masters. One of my favorite lines from “I’m Not There” Todd Haynes’ pseudo Dylan biopic is “Silence, experience shows, is what terrifies people the most.”In pauses between conversations, in silences with oneself, often that’s where real things are happening or where the building blocks are created for the next word, which will complete a fragmented picture and the silence that remains to await action is what brings the scene home. That’s what happened for me in the scene where Richard tells Liz to forgive herself by sharing his story with her. I was open because he was clearly open. It might have been about three or four minutes. It felt like time stopped and opened up a wormhole. That’s what a good actor can do.
That being said, I would never recommend seeing this movie just for those three minutes. Go rent season one of “Six Feet Under” instead, where bad adaptation, bad directing and shitty unimaginative cinematography don’t sabotage a good story and where each actor is used to their fullest potential.
