Word: lennix
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Whedon has set a challenging goal. Whereas his past series had ready-made good-vs.-evil setups, Dollhouse is morally nebulous. Sometimes we're rooting for Ballard to bust the Dollhouse, sometimes we're rooting for Echo's handlers and protectors in the organization that pimps her out. (Harry Lennix is sympathetic as her conflicted bodyguard, and Fran Kranz amusingly skeevy as the in-house tech geek.) Pulling this off means getting the audience to connect with a lead who is not, in the usual sense, a person, which may be more than Echo--or Dushku--can manage...
...writer Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) and a local louche woman named Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman)--The Human Stain warms to its characters' decency and neediness. It blooms in poignancy with flashback scenes of Coleman's '40s family--the wise mother (beautiful Anna Deavere Smith) and upright father (Harry Lennix) he disowns--and finds anchor in his affair with Faunia. "Granted, she is not my great love," Coleman says. "But she sure as hell is my last love. And that deserves some respect." So does Hopkins, whose acting here is a slow, painful flowering, and Kidman, who late in the film...
...central motivations of most of the other characters, with the notable exception of Aaron the Moor (Harry Lennix), are more obvious. Tamora is (and is repeatedly represented as) a lioness, bestial in her pursuit of pleasure and fiercely protective of her young. Saturnius, the young emperor foppishly and petulantly embodied by the fine stage actor Alan Cumming, simply seeks to protect his authority and to be loved. Tamora's two younger sons (Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Matthew Rhys) are simply bored and callous, devoted to violence and provocation out of sheer idiocy and for want of a better option...
...Rather than acting as a sort of human pawn within the formidable visual conception of the film, each actor delivers a powerfully invested performance, energetically pursuing both the most visceral and the most subtle of his or her character's particular motivations. Harry Lennix's performance as Aaron delivers a jolt of quiet intensity to what is generally considered the first great black role in English drama. His character, which could easily be seen as a simply embodiment of evil, is motivated first by his status as an outsider, and then by pride and paternal love. The racial issues...