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September 07, 2004
Hero and Related Observations
While in NYC this past weekend, I went to see Hero with Jeanne.
First, let me state the obvious. This is a great film. It's particularly a great film for fans of Feng Shui, as it has some of the best named character versus massive numbers of mooks fights I've ever seen. Add to that a great director and quite possibly the finest cinematographer working today and there's a film that's just a joy to look at. The story is both deceptively simple and, in the end, deceptively complex, which is a nice trick by the writers. The acting is top-notch, but it was that aspect of the film that triggered an unusual reaction.
At the most intensely dramatic moments of the film, the audience laughed. Not just a few of them (there's always a few odd reactions with NY crowds, particularly in well sold showings like this one was), but a fairly significant number. Jeanne and I talked about this after the film, and I came up with a theory.
I think this one can be blamed, if that's the right word, on The Method.
This "naturalistic" style has dominated most of English-language stage, TV, and movie acting for decades. But in much of the rest of the world, theater is still full of ritual and artifice, explicit techniques and repeated affectations. And so, at the height of the film's melodramatic scenes, much of the audience, familiar with naturalistic, often minimalist, acting, found the performances comical for their extremes of emotional display. But I have to think they lost something there. I'm not coming out against natural-style "method acting", I'm just saying there are some situations that are better served by the "classical" approach, in particular romantic melodrama like much of Hero revels in. And too much exposure to natural-style acting (or perhaps its just a lack of exposure to "classical" acting) can damage audience's ability to recognize and respond to the more stylized form with anything but laughter.
And that's too bad.
Posted by ghoul at September 7, 2004 09:02 AM
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