Word: oscars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...year career as a director of television and movie dramas, his signature achievement was the 1962 film version of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The picture - which won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, and earned Mulligan his only Oscar nomination - had an immediate and lasting impact. Back then it provided a Hollywood echo of the civil rights agitation that had roiled the South and seized the nation. But Peck's role as Atticus Finch, a crusading attorney who is also a gentle single dad to his two young kids...
...Mulligan, who died Saturday at 83 of heart disease, had been Finch's gentle shepherd, and deserved at least a share of Peck's Oscar both for casting him and for eliciting the actor's best work. But the director's heart, here as in so many of his films, was with the Finch children. If Mulligan had an abiding interest, it was troubled youngsters on the cusp of discovering themselves by confronting the world around them. This theme occupied him from his first feature film to his last. The 1957 Fear Strikes Out gave Anthony Perkins his first lead...
...vectors are at play in Lee's novel, which after all is cast not as a Scottsboro Boys-style docudrama of racial injustice in the '30s but as a daughter's loving evocation of her dad, seen through a child's eyes. This is the perspective that Foote's Oscar-winning script faithfully transposed to the screen, and that Mary Badham, who played Scout Finch, embodied with such unaffected clarity that, at 10, she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. As for Mulligan, no one has cited him for anything but the sensitive handling of story, actors, camera...
...face and body with the scars of war - to play a has-been fighter hoping for a last shot at the big time. It's the kind of punishment that won kudos for Lon Chaney and Paul Muni in the old days and helped Robert De Niro to an Oscar in Raging Bull playing Jake LaMotta. (He got himself into fighting shape, then he gained a ton of weight! Acting!) One more because: Rourke does strong, sensitive work here, which will cheer his old-time admirers and win him new fans. All praise to him, and to Darren Aronofsky...
...that he alchemizes the dross of the 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 close-up as Randy pours out his clumsy love for his daughter. The speech is boilerplate sentiment, which the actor - who says he reworked it to reflect his own life - elevates to a passion as sweet as it is forlorn. (The speech is up there with...