Word: closeups
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...many references to his off-screen philandering and drug use, the movie bears comparison to Mickey Rourke's turn in The Wrestler, also at Toronto. Except that this one is sharper, crueler, way funnier - part parody, part exposé, especially in an eight-minute take of the star in closeup, where Van Damme makes a confession of his personal and career sins, and the tough guy ends up crying. It is the finest, most scab-pulling performance I saw in Toronto, and it should earn JCVD a commercial showcase in the States...
...Niro has kept his physical instrument in shape all these years by husbanding his gestures. But Pacino has been a perpetual motion machine. In this movie he still is: dancing like a boxer, chewing gum, his feet banging out a nervous paradiddle. Eventually, gravity takes its revenge. In remorseless closeup, and beneath his strangely youthful hairdo, he reveals the forehead furrows, a murder of crowlines, bags like backpacks under his eyes. He and De Niro are men whose faces I've watched and studied more than my own. I'm sure I'd look a wreck under the coroner...
...script into a character with a palpable physicality and inner life. Behind the bulk of his hulk, a man's dogged decency is on display, and so, briefly, is Rourke's fallen-angel smile. In the scene that could cinch his Oscar nomination, he gets a long closeup as Randy pours out his clumsy love for his daughter. The speech is boilerplate sentiment, which the actor elevates to a passion as sweet as it is forlorn. If Rourke had to punish himself to look the part of a battered fighter so he could slip inside Randy's wounded innocence, then...
...Liam Neeson sits on a bed on the left side of the stage; on the right side is a blank wall on which his face is projected in closeup, as a woman's voice softly, insistently works its way into his head. "Anyone living love you now, Joe? Anyone living sorry for you now? That slut that comes on Saturday, you pay her, don't you? Penny a hoist, tuppence as long as you like." Once another woman did love him, and he shrugged her off, and she tried killing herself several ways, until one worked. And Neeson stares ahead...
...never lived, for the intimate connection only humans enjoy. On his home VCR (a Betamax!), he plays and replays two numbers from the 1969 movie musical Hello, Dolly!: the brassy Put on Your Sunday Clothes and the ballad It Only Takes a Moment, which moves him with a closeup of a boy's hand holding a girl...