Despite all the hoopla around the Slap and the snub, Best Actor still has a reputation as one of the snoozier Oscar categories. Not this year! Based on what I saw out of the Toronto International Film Festival this month, we need to brace ourselves for the 2023 Best Actor race to get messy as hell. Not because I fear any of the contenders are about to break out in fisticuffs — though if they do, my money’s on Bill Nighy — but for the unfortunate fact that TIFF’s two most Oscar-friendly performances happened to come from movies that a sizable chunk of the critical community absolutely loathed.
Ask any pundit, and they’ll tell you that the early Best Actor front-runner is The Whale’s Brendan Fraser, whom GoldDerby currently pegs at 7/2 odds to take home the trophy. The logic is sound: Fraser is a former A-lister making a comeback in an art-house film (check) in which he undergoes a radical physical transformation (double-check) to play a 600-pound man trying to reconnect with his daughter (triple-check) during what may be the last week of his life (quadruple-check). The Oscar bid kicked off mere seconds after The Whale finished screening at Venice, where a clip of Fraser being moved to tears by the film’s lengthy standing ovation went viral. The lovefest continued at TIFF, where the actor received the festival’s Tribute Award and charmed the room with a humble, good-humored acceptance speech in which he revealed the last time he’d won a trophy was in an eighth-grade peewee-hockey league.
The Fraser bandwagon is rolling so fast it appears on the verge of leaving The Whale itself behind. From where I’m sitting, that could be a good thing, because people who don’t like this movie really don’t like it. The film is based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter, who channeled his own struggles with his weight into the tale. But while a play is contained enough to work as an expression of one man’s self-disgust, when you fill it with movie stars, put Darren Aronofsky behind the camera, and make it the centerpiece of a gold-plated awards campaign, that “self†tends to slip away and you’re left with simply … disgust. After The Whale’s TIFF premiere, my colleague Alison Willmore slammed Aronofsky for “filming the main character’s body and depression-fueled binging like it’s the stuff of a monster movie.†Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair called it “a kind of leering horror, a portrait of a man gone to catastrophic ruin so that we, in the audience, may tap into our nobler, higher minds and see the worthy human being beneath the frightful exterior.†Polygon’s Katie Rife saw only “pity, buried under a thick, smothering layer of contempt.â€
The question for A24, which is releasing The Whale, is whether any of this dissension will matter. A frequent refrain in the TIFF press lounge was “Didn’t love the film, loved the performance.†(The film does have plenty of supporters, including my other esteemed colleague Bilge Ebiri, who called its finale “shattering and beautiful and honest.â€) While it’s easy to be cynical about everything The Whale represents vis-à -vis the Oscars, it’s hard to work up that same acid for Fraser himself — there’s no guile in his eyes. At the Tribute Awards, a couple at my table wondered about the outpouring of emotion that greeted his entrance. Was this guy really regarded as a serious actor? I told them it was more like he was an old friend, someone we’d grown up watching in silly movies finally getting his moment to bask in the glow of prestige. And that was before Fraser gave his speech, full of jokes about how, while he’d never been given a trophy before, he’d had a lot of practice handing them out. “The trick is left hand hold, right hand shake.†Take it from someone who was there: It just feels good to give Brendan Fraser awards. Maybe that’ll be enough.
If the anti-Whale contingent seeks another contender to rally around, it probably won’t be Florian Zeller’s The Son, which many of them disdain nearly as much. It’s Zeller’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning breakout The Father, and like that one, this too is an English-language adaptation of a drama originally written for the Paris stage. Hugh Jackman stars as a high-flying Manhattan lawyer with a young wife (Vanessa Kirby) and an infant son, having left in Brooklyn an ex-wife (Laura Dern) and a son (Zen McGrath) whose teenage ennui is starting to look a lot like clinical depression. The solution? The kid’ll move across the river to live with Dad, and things will be peachy once more.
But as we saw in The Father, there are some things that can’t be repaired by proximity, though it’s hard for this father, an inveterate optimist, to notice. (Jackman’s performance is a case study of what people online call “toxic positivity.â€) As he did in his predecessor, Zeller is tapping into potent veins of familial emotion — denial, guilt, grief — and there were not many dry eyes in the house in my TIFF screening as Jackman’s character was finally confronted with the enormity of his failure. Unfortunately, the driest ones belonged to reviewers I spoke to. In our Critics newsletter, Alison, who loved The Father, boggled at the fact that this “emotionally fraudulent†film had come from the same person: “I was shocked by how bad it was … there’s an odd stiltedness to it that hangs over everything.†In part, this is a consequence of the material being adapted twice over: not just the literal translation, but also the sense of placelessness that comes from casting three of the four leads with Commonwealth actors putting on American accents. But it also stems from what THR’s David Rooney calls the “elegant austerity of Zeller’s direction,†which turns the film “into a punishing slog.â€
Much of the scorn heaped upon The Son centers on its final act, which I won’t spoil except to note that Indiewire’s David Ehrlich pegged it as “the single most sadistic ending to any movie this side of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.†That kind of advance warning creates its own sense of dread — Oh God, they’re really doing this — and my own experience of watching the film was mirrored by journalist Daniel Joyaux, who recalled “a moment toward the end when I thought to myself, If this is as shamelessly manipulative as people are saying, Thing X would randomly happen right about now. And within seconds of that thought, Thing X happened.â€
But like Fraser, Jackman’s performance is getting a slight pass as the pans focus their ire on the script and direction. “Infusing the part with just enough clueless vanity … Jackman mines real tragedy from [his character’s] myopia,†says Ehrlich. Considering The Son’s pedigree, and how open the Best Actor field is, he seems a solid bet for a nomination. (GoldDerby has him ranked fourth.) If anything else, voters may simply feel so bad for him at the end of the movie that they’ll do anything to cheer him up.
Which leaves us with a Lead Actor race that’s primed for drama, one where the highest-profile contenders come from movies that have become critical punching bags, and even fans of each actor are slightly sheepish about the fact their long-awaited nominations are coming from these particular films. But that’s par for the course on the other side of the ballot. Have we finally got a Best Actor race that’s as messy as Best Actress?
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